Exploring the Stillness
January 27, 2002
(to hear a song by Erik Balkey on this vision, click here)
In November, I saw a new place in consciousness while I was meditating. It was the deepest place of silence, stillness and blackness I had ever seen. As I looked at in from the outside of it, it felt like the richest place there ever was, the place of pure and total potential. I recognized it as the God Stuff from which all things are realized. I was enthralled by the mystery of it, the fullness, the love that I felt within there.
I was reminded of the phrase, “In the Beginning, God.” And when I looked up Genesis in the Bible, I saw that from the darkness the light was created. As I contemplated this vision in meditation over next few weeks, I discovered that I had a sense of this place of darkness as being the original space of all creation. I became inspired anew with the mystery of what is beyond what I know of God so far, after daily contemplating what God is for the last 15 years or so. I was awestruck again with the infinite nature of God, of the ultimate unknowing that we have from our finite perspective. Yet, I was also inspired by the understanding that it is always possible to know more of God.
I remembered the words of the Yella Werder song, Home in My Heart for Christmas, “Can you see that knowing God is all we live for?” I was inspired anew by this vision to explore an entirely different aspect of Spirit than any I have touched until now.
On January 27th, I was standing, in my space of vision in meditation, again contemplating the black wall of Stillness. On this day, it looked like a curtain made of luscious black velvet fabric. For some reason, I was inspired to back up to it, to feel its velvety softness wrap around me.
As I did, it felt wonderful. In that moment, I remembered the vision called The Monolith, from my book, A Gift of Vision, where I fell into the light filled space of perfect peace and tranquility. Falling into that quality of God felt wonderful. So I wondered, “What would it be like to fall into this space of blackness?”
With the thought, I did fall. The curtain disappeared, and I was falling backward in space, doing a fully stretched back flip, over and over. There was a twirling, almost star shaped quality to the fall. My guess is that I was seeing it in stop action, so I was seeing not just the rotation, but many regular points in the spiral as well. It seemed I was rotating from a balance point at the center of my body, and the spinning was orderly, like a planet in a stable orbit that rotates as well as circles. Falling felt neutral from an experiential point of view, even slightly pleasant.
Suddenly it occurred to me that I might fall in that way forever, since there was no resistance in the space where I was falling. I said to myself, “I wonder what would happen if I wanted to be oriented on one plane?” Instantly, I was oriented, facing down. Then I said, “I wonder what would happen if I had a place to stand?” Instantly, there was something solid underfoot, and I had a place to stand comfortably. I wondered what would happen if I asked for light. An old fashioned, table-style Tiffany lamp, with a pull chain, suddenly had its chain pulled and there was light in the middle of the darkness. I realized it might be necessary to be more specific.
I wondered what it would be like to be in a room. Walls appeared around me. About that time, I started to get slightly unnerved. I began to see that if I was going to be that instantly creative, there was a lot that I didn’t know about what to create. There were many things I did not want to think about. I even saw a couple of them.
When I wondered what God looked like in that space, I heard an eager voice, sounding like a playful 9 year old boy who said, "What do you want me to be????"
All that we see is God saying "what do you want me to be?" resulting from the focus of our thoughts. We focused in nonphysical and created the Universe. We focus in physical and create our experience in the world.
I quickly realized that the world I live in has had a lot of thought go into it already. There are so many incredibly good ideas at work in the world. Order, seasons, love, light, grace, peace, joy, trees, clouds, water, animals, plants and flowers… All of that was created from this space of all potential. I don’t need to have the individual consciousness to think up all those things in a timely way. It’s all been co-created. I was overwhelmed with appreciation for how perfect things already are in the world.
I started to see creating more simply. Within the perspective of my life as Connee Chandler, there are many things I can imagine being fun, lovely or joyful to experience myself or to see happen to others in my physical world. This is the place to begin, a big enough opportunity for creating. I don’t have to start from scratch, thank God! I can simply reach back into the space of God Stuff, and throw a handful of something new into an already fabulous world of form, and call it good.
Expansion is unlimited. There is enough God Stuff available to create Universes. For now, I just want to see more clearly, to express more joy, to share more love, to amplify more harmony. I want to gather with a community of beings where we assist each other to know the magnificence of who we all are.
I already have everything I need to do my work. The perfect tools for the job are at hand. A few good ideas, and the faith that creation is underway, is all that is required.
That everything throughout the world, everywhere, end to end,
Is but a reflection of a ray cast from the face of The Friend.
Ni'matullah Wali (1331-1431?)
Copyright 2000 Connee Chandler
All Rights Reserved