Seed Interlude

Consider the seed.  Nature’s full potential resting in perfect form: a self-contained miracle of creation.  A seed contains all of the genetic programming necessary to direct its development towards an exact reproduction of its parent plant.  Its astonishing potential lies hidden; sometimes for years, waiting for the right conditions when it can fulfill its purpose.  The seed is the most perfect creation of the universe; a package of potential for life and immortality.  However, in order to become a mighty tree, it must first relinquish its completeness and identity as a seed.  Like the seed, our perceived reality as humans seems to be static.  And yet, by giving ourselves up to a higher power, we can be transformed, thus fulfilling our true potential.

How does a seed know when to begin its metamorphosis?  How does it know what to do?  What force has the power to bring it to the pinnacle of its evolution?  It’s a star.  The sun is the primary source of all energy in our solar system.  Similarly, by what means are we all encouraged to raise ourselves from the dark earth, throw off our husks, and face the warmth of the sun?  This miracle of creation can be nothing else but the omnipotence of the Supreme Being, or God.  The choice is ours: whether to remain a seed, with all our incredible undeveloped energy, or to begin a cycle of germination and growth that will take us to the ends of the universe.

Everything that happens in nature is a cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth.  We can see this in the four seasons, in the plant kingdom, and in our own existence as well.  Cycles can span incredible lengths of time – as we know it – like the life span of a star, or a galaxy, or even an entire universe.  Cycles can also arrange themselves in patterns that are much too fast to be perceived by ordinary sensory awareness; like waves of light, the dance of electrons around a nucleus, or the higher frequencies of sound.  The important thing to recognize is that the same elemental laws that control the huge cycles of a galaxy’s life and death also rule the tiniest phases, like the sequential life and death of a subatomic particle.  Our physical body is entirely composed of nutritional elements taken from earth’s planetary body, and will live and die by the same universal laws that guarantee our organic components will be returned to the One Body to nourish ever more life.  We are composed of borrowed star stuff: the hand-me-down molecules and compounds of the heavens.

It is somehow comforting to learn that all matter is comprised of light waves.  Due to the fact that our eyes are also made of light waves, which are vibrating at the same frequency, we perceive the material world around us as being composed of solid objects.  Likewise, the cells of our bodies are vibrating at this corporeal frequency, so when we come into contact with “real” objects we feel them as if they are solid.  Science has shown us that physical matter is composed of tiny particles called molecules, which in turn are made of even smaller particles called atoms.  These microscopic atoms are still much larger than the electrons that they contain, and even these have smaller components – some of which have only recently been discovered by physicists.  It is logical to deduce that the elusive “building blocks of matter” just keep getting smaller and smaller, disappearing into a submicroscopic infinity.  From the discoveries of a science called Quantum Mechanics, physicists have been led to the same conclusions that we have heard from the Eastern mystics for millennia: All Creation Is One.

Put another way, when you take a physical object and break it down to its smallest components, you will find a common denominator that links all of creation.  Everything is made of the same stuff!  Furthermore, in science’s quest to discover the physical properties of these infinitesimal, cosmic puzzle pieces, it has been repeatedly observed that these particles are behaving as if someone was telling them what to do.  Gary Zukav is a physics author, who wrote the following observations in 1979, in his book The Dancing Wu Li Masters:  “The astounding discovery awaiting newcomers to physics is that the evidence gathered in the development of Quantum Mechanics indicates that subatomic particles constantly appear to be making decisions.  More than that, the decisions they seem to make are based on decisions made elsewhere – subatomic particles seem to know instantaneously what decisions are made elsewhere – and elsewhere can be as far away as another galaxy.  The philosophical ramifications of Quantum Mechanics are that all of the things in our universe – including us –appear to exist independently, but are actually parts of one all-encompassing organic pattern, and that no parts of that pattern are ever really separate from it, or from each other.” (1)  Your own body is composed of these same patterns of vibration; as are your thoughts, which appear graphically as waves on an electroencephalogram.

Would it be too much to speculate that these smallest vibrations of our material world are simply patterns of matter-energy that are orchestrated by a Supreme Being?  Everything is built from something else.  We all exist solely to complete our highest purpose, which is to merge back into the wholeness of an energy field that we have (hopefully) improved with our existence.  As individual waves on the ocean crest and surge with individuality, but are never separate from the ocean, of which they are but a small part, we careen and sputter through our prideful lives with a foolish surplus of self-importance, only to be recycled back into organic material like so much compost.  Is that all there is?  The vanity of matter deludes us into believing it is so.  However, our higher purpose calls us not only to merge physically with the dirt, which is indeed inevitable, but with the ephemeral and fertile fields of potential in the spaces between the dancing particles of matter of which the dirt is composed.  “From dust we are born, and to dust we return.”  We can do this naturally, as our unfulfilled potential is redeemed from its prison of matter when we die, or we can do this consciously while still alive and self-aware, and become a joyful participant in the grand unfolding of the universe.

Just as a seed must die and give up its identity as a seed in order to reach its higher destiny as a tree, we must “die” from our fixed, unfulfilled potential and grow into our higher intention, which is to become aware of our true Selves while still in physical form.  By manifesting the creative potential of the Supreme Being, or God, into our living, breathing physical existence, we objectify the universal love that binds all matter together in an eternal dance of creation.  This is not an easy thing to do, which is why we have struggles and pain that guide us away from the unsatisfying distractions and remind us that we always have the choice to be fulfilled.  All religions are a path to the same universal goal.  How we walk those paths will determine whether we arrive at our intended destination.  

We are God’s dream, whirling in somnambulant cycles of timeless creation: birth, death, and rebirth.  As God dreams in omniscient radiance, we sleep in the darkness of ignorance.  Will we wake up in time to make His dream come true?