It was a silent symphony of opening petals. Of songs of silence, dawning daylight. A presence, which expanded around everything, while remaining in the same place, and enveloped time in eternity. A majestic, essential and primordial singularity. My ever-present future and unknown love of love, radiance of all light. The most intimate of intimacy, impossible to capture or describe. Beyond everything, while being everything. Hug me. Hold me.

It was just any other day. I woke up early, identified myself, recognizing my name, character and the present moment of my life, my ailments of 80-odd years, and the agenda of the day. Another day. Let's see what I forget today. I had finished my morning routine and sat down to drink my coffee while I read the latest news summaries on my cell phone.

My wife was in Mexico, visiting one of our daughters, and between the standardized alarmism and repetitiveness of the news, and the absence of conversation and presence, my mind went in search of memories. Framing these in the present, mixing them with the spilling news and their associated fuss, oozing out of the phone screen. All of course interpreted, from the point of view of this personality, that I think I am.

I remembered... Eight years ago, I left a Hospital Center, where I spent almost a month, after a delicate open-heart operation. I was in a car with my wife and son going to a rehabilitation center, located in the city where I live, to spend the next two or three weeks, to regain my ability to fend for myself.

Heading out onto the highway that would take us there, I enjoyed being out of an ambulance, a bed, and a hospital room for the first time in almost a month. I was amazed by the surrounding landscapes and struck above all, by a resplendence in the sky. It was a partly cloudy afternoon, and the sun was hidden behind a formation of clouds. Its beams of light percolated through the haze and produced a spectacular glow, like a sunrise in the middle of the afternoon. I felt this evening’s radiance like a supernatural apparition that moved me. I was like in a trance. My family may have thought I was half asleep, but I was somehow enraptured in reverence, witnessing an extraordinary beauty that I felt was just a reflection, an echo, of the light of Light.

Somehow the memory of that resplendence came back to my memory, while I was drinking my coffee. All the moments lived in this long life began to parade, like a procession of film reruns. The echo of that light illuminated my memories, and the moments I lived were seen as part of it, forming apparitions on the framing cloud formations.

I witnessed an amazing theatrical production, presenting the journey of every drop, in a repertoire of infinite drops, returning to a shoreless Sea from which they emerged. All reflecting their past actions, their loves, mistakes, their sublime and selfishness. Scenes that, when remembered, were remote and insubstantial, but still awakened the feelings and emotions that accompanied them at the time of their occurrence.

Life was seen as a revelation of images flowing through time, associated with our actions and reactions, to contexts and circumstances that surround each of our points of consciousness. They impress our minds and define what each one of us thinks we are. Our contexts and circumstances can be very similar, in terms of family or cultural plots, etc., but they are always unique, because they are interpreted by our individuality, the self of each one, which is a singular point of view, from where we build our mind, our world, and define our characters.

But we are all made of the same components, we are all born and die, feel pain and joy, and a plethora of varied emotions, which accompany us in life. We are aware that we are individuals. Each one with their own frame of reference, their personality, points of view, fears, attractions, likes, and dislikes.

Today, we live in a totally interconnected world, a planet floating in a vast universe. Science confirms the intimate interdependence of everything in the universe. It corroborates the oneness of everything, which mystics such as St. Francis of Assisi had discovered through love.

However, we maintain a tribal consciousness. And we continue increasingly to pursue a mentality of every man for himself, instead of understanding that our destinies and survival are linked.

Someone, observing the planet from another solar system, would say, "How advanced those earthlings are." Yes, we have built a planet-home, but our minds continue to live in tribes, nationalisms, political parties, interests, with ‘every man for himself’ and ‘step aside I am coming on’ mentality.

While thinking about this, I went out to the garden to fill the bird feeders.

That's how we all are, I said to myself. We forget the magic of love and oneness, the radiance that sustains us, and we live entangled in our entanglements, each one starring in his or her own play, ignoring the purpose and the close relationship with which all other actors contribute to our well-being. As I thought about this and filled the feeders, birds sang and looked at me sideways, trees opened their arms to receive the sunlight, and squirrels did their acrobatics and races, and all without me, or anyone that I know, having designed it.

And this is happening everywhere at once!

And I felt the glow again.

Millions of images of memories and stories paraded in my mind. Scenes from this play in which I have been participating either as a principal character or observing things from afar. Things met in real life and stories heard from others and historic times – history, daily news, fuss. The stories, all the stories. Of things that happen or were imagined and legendized. So evident that everything passes. That one passes, but to where, and what is this passing for?

Meanwhile, the birds sang their own songs, as we did. Above, the sun shone from so far away and fed us as always. I smiled, thinking, well, but now at least we know how it warms us – because it's made of energy – and what the process is, and we also know it's happening 93 million miles away.

My thoughts ran away, chasing after the data, making me believe that I knew something. Yes, what I had learned with scientific education and the fascination of an intellectualized world, that conceptualizes the universe as an artifact, with overlapping circuits, which is governed by time and distance, theories, chemical composition, quantum physics, chemistry, etc. A machinery of mind-things that assumes knowledge of the origin and reason for the being of everything.

Then one memory from my youth came to mind. One night, the solemnity of the Milky Way, shining on the night sky of the Caribbean Sea, humbled my pretensions that I understood the magic of the universe, with information and intellect, and confused me.

Now back to my present moment in the garden. I felt the morning enfolding me in its rising light, and the echo of the resplendence surrounded everything. Again, I was inside that toy of my childhood, the View-Master stereoscopic viewfinder. And everything had a magical aura of light around it; everything was an enchanted world.

I knew, without thinking, that data and intellect cannot explain the magic of realizing what one is. That the sense of being is neither sensory nor mental. Even in trying to relate this, I cannot do it, because the experience is beyond understanding, and therefore beyond any explanation. The thoughts that arise to try to understand what one is feeling then fall short. It's like trying to explain music with words.

I remember then, the chirping of the crickets within my ears, and the horizons seen behind the eyelids, that one perceives in those moments, when you feel the magical light enveloping everything. They are part of an awareness, an open window to another dimension, which always surrounds us, but which we do not see, because our senses of Being are turned off and we are using physical senses and intellect as the sole instruments to perceive reality.

Yet sometimes, the sense of being spontaneously turns on, and one becomes aware of what is always around you. And although one is not ready to surrender to reality, those instants are an invitation for one to become inspired and look deeper, to see the oneness of life, and be able to feel love, as the primordial energy and substance of the universe.

I remembered moments in childhood, when I would suddenly be ecstatic, not knowing why, and I would close my eyes, and I would feel the chirping of crickets in my ears, and I would see distant horizons framed by a blue light behind my closed eyelids. I don't know what led me to feel that, and I don't know what that sound of life in my ears was; the closest thing is the intense song of crickets in a forest, and the horizons behind the eyelids were like sunsets with eyes closed in an absolute silence of thought.

As an adult, I have sometimes felt moments like this. At the tomb of Meher Baba, in the Barn where he received people, when he was at the Center in Myrtle Beach, and a couple of times, on the way to or from Ahmednagar, India, in the surrounding fields of the Deccan Plateau.

But I cannot really describe what I felt, outside of the above-mentioned attempts, but I know that I felt something indescribable and beautiful, a spilled fragrance, an inexplicable love.

My life oscillates between the continuous clinging to this personality that I think I am, this self-definition of myself, with all its baggage of memories, while still trying to understand that which is never understood. Yet sometimes, I feel a hint of that indescribable sensation that enveloped me in the glow of that afternoon, and I feel the echoes of the crickets’ songs, raining down on my mind, under horizons inside bordered by a faint glow. And sometimes I see the world with a stereoscopic view, like from View Master.

I have no way of making that feeling prevail over the "normal" one that comes with the attachment to my identity. There is no method or formula to make it emerge; there are no hidden controls to operate, no prayers or mantras, which, when repeated, make it happen. It arises spontaneously, like the glow of that afternoon. Claiming credit for those experiences would be like taking credit for the rain that falls on dry land when you happen to be there.

These cricket songs, the horizons within, that resplendence, somehow open something within you, allowing love and the magic of life to be experienced. I feel that these doors are continually opening in everyone when we are less stubbornly attached to our egos. The extraordinary does not come when we seek it, but by an unexpected gift of grace. Love is like that.

To penetrate into the essence of all being and significance, and to release the fragrance of that inner attainment for the guidance and benefit of others, by expressing, in the world of forms, truth, love, purity and beauty — this is the sole game which has intrinsic and absolute worth. All other happenings, incidents and attainments can, in themselves, have no lasting importance.

(Meher Baba)