Magnitude

The elephant sways in a dance of magnitude.

The card I picked this morning was the morning Prayer card, The prayer itself. So, I picked another one. It was Magnitude. The picture on it was the elephant and it said: Elephant sways in a dance. Ganesha removes the stumbling blocks in our paths. Our path is what we follow in coming home to ourselves. One might ask, why do have to follow anything if we are coming home to ourselves? Aren’t we already there? The answer is yes. We are having an experience. We call that a journey. It seems that we are going somewhere. Maybe because we are always moving. So, we must be going somewhere. That’s what we tell ourselves. We could just run in place. I think that’s what we call being.

So, Magnitude. Elephant kicks the obstacles out of way on a journey that doesn’t really go anywhere so that we can take a path to the place where we are already standing. Good Grief! That’s exhausting.

Life is reflected to us in a dance of magnitude. Magnitude is beyond size. It is a quality and not a quantity. It is not how big the elephant is, but how he moves in the dance. The dance goes from a tiny dot to infinity and back without any recognition of time or space. Perhaps there is an acknowledgement. But there is no stepping into. Just a dance back and forth. Magnitude does not become matter in time or space. We dance back and forth with all the polarities in our lives. Male and female, good and bad, right and wrong. Judgments that always have two sides. This is the Dance of yin and yang.

Magnitude is a quality and not a quantity. It is the quality that we can perceive in this dance and not the materiality of size. In our hearts we perceive that quality. In our minds we perceive the quantity. Like and large piece of chocolate cake.

The following are a few excerpts  on magnitude from Beyond Joy: a journey into freedom, wisdom power and wellbeing.

Meditation: Yin and Yang

I am falling into the earth. I fall and fall and fall and fall. At some point, I seem to stop falling. I right myself, but I am still surrounded by the earth. I stop and wait. Now there is nothing. I wait and now, here is everything. Nothing and everything are the same. I am sitting cross-legged on the spokes of my wheel, which is lying on the ground. The wheel is my symbol for all that is. Nothing, everything, nothing, everything. No difference. The spokes are pathways that lead to the center where there is a great hole.

Now I see Yin and deep in its center is a black hole out of which comes everything. And I see Yang. Here is the black chaos of everything. But at its center there is a white hole in which there is nothing. There are two perspectives. One is yin and the other is yang. Everything with nothing at its center and nothing with everything at its center. Two perspectives. Both are true at the same time. The two energies swirl and dance with each other.

We fall in to find the quiet in our chaotic world. We sit in silence at the center of ourselves and discover a world of infinite possibility. This is coherence. A kind of unity or harmony between us and the world

It’s like my dream last night in which I created fear. Instead of trying to let it go, perhaps I should have just realized that my dance with fear is only returning myself home. It is a fear dance. Play the music, and let’s dance. Or, dance with the elephants. When I get stuck, I ask the elephant, “What do you know about magnitude”? He smiles and says, “It takes a lot of peanuts.”

The past and future are being now in simultaneity.

Going In to Go Out

I drop inside myself to see the billions of cells that I am. I now drop in even further to see the billions of particles that are in each cell. They are spinning around each other, like a tiny solar system. And now I see the earth inside my belly and all the particles are still moving and spinning. Each particle is moving around its own sun. Now the solar system is inside me. Swirling. And the milky way is threading itself through me. The whole Universe is inside my belly and suddenly I am very big.

Isn’t it interesting that the deeper you go inside of yourself, the bigger you become? When you find the space inside of you where there is nothing, just space, then you become everything.

Techniques for Experiencing Magnitude

• Be in the present moment. Ask yourself Am I here now? Do this several times a day.         
• Try falling into the earth to fall into yourself.
• Say the morning prayer