Where I Come From

 Everyone is a masterpiece, because God never gives birth to anything less than that. Everyone carries that masterpiece hidden for many lives, not knowing who they are and just trying on the surface to become someone. Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it. God himself has created you; you cannot be improved.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

            We start our physical lives keenly aware of only that – our physical bodies and what we need to simply survive. We scream when we’re wet or hungry.  Perhaps we scream when we simply want companionship or to be seen. The only language that an infant has initially is a cry, or at least the most obvious and easily noticed.  I suppose that an infant’s quiet contentment and the in-and-out steady flow of breath are other forms of communication.  I don’t know of anyone who has true memories of infancy and whether we are born with any level of awareness or our state of being pre-birth. Do we recall where we came from?

            I heard a story once of a four year old asking if he could spend a few minutes alone with his newborn baby sister. The parents were a little puzzled and even a little concerned but told their son that he could and that his sister was in her crib in the nursery – while they listened intently at the child monitor.  They heard their son enter the nursery and, after a moment, they heard him say to his sister, “Hi. I know that you must still remember and I’m starting to forget. I don’t want to forget. Can you please remind me what it was like?”

            I like to think that we do remember. That our infant eyes look out into the world while still holding an awareness of the wisdom of the ages. I like to think that we are so connected to the infinity of love and light from whence we came that we can forgive our parents and our families the limited human love and care that we receive.  In comparison, it must be limited. But from the vastness of unconditionality, connection and a knowing Unity, there can be no sense of disappointment. Maybe we love hearing the power of our own screaming infant cries. Maybe the first few pangs of physical hunger are welcomed. “Yes! This is what I came here for!” To feel the contrast. To feel what empty feels like when we know only fullness.

            Then we forget.  Hunger and longing and pain are very difficult without the contrast of fullness and Unity.  In our humanity, we become driven by needs fulfillment. This seems to quickly become an endless drive and not terribly satisfying. There is always, it seems, another need to be fulfilled and the conditioning is so powerful and pervasive that we even begin to create new needs faster than we can satisfy the needs that are already unmet. Life becomes a constant pursuit.

            But. . .

            Under all of the effort, the trying, the pursuing, the waiting, the “if only”s, there seems to be something. A sense of having forgotten something, something of incredible importance. Maybe it’s that something that we see when we hold a tiny infant and he or she holds our gaze for an instant. Maybe it’s the same something that we feel when a little one asks if we want to play and smiles with such trust and hope. Maybe for a moment we are sharing our common memory.