Islands

by The Monk Dude
Dada Nabhanilananda

 

Our bodies and minds are separate but like the Earth from which all islands spring, consciousness is one. My mind and your mind reflect awareness, but none of us owns it, any more than we own the sunlight.

 

Los Altos Hills — The poet John Donne said that no one is an island, but I wonder. The funny thing about islands is that there is more to them than meets the eye. If we look at them jutting up out of the ocean, it is easy to think that they are all separate from one another. But if we look beneath the surface, we find that each island is the tip of a great mountain. And if we look deeper still, we see that they are all connected – all islands are a part of One Earth.

If someone looks at you, and sees only your physical body, barely remembering your name, they might easily make the same mistake, and assume that there’s not much more to know. But you know that your body harbors a unique being, you, with mountains of memories, and dreams and talents and layers of thoughts and feelings. And that deep within you lies the intuitive knowledge of your own existence; your inner “I” feeling.

This sense of existence awoke in you within your mother’s womb, and has remained with you ever since as an awareness that stitches each instant of your life to the next like a golden thread running through time.

Just as consciousness lends our lives coherence, connecting one moment to the next, so too it links us to one another. Our bodies and minds are separate but like the Earth from which all islands spring, consciousness is one. My mind and your mind reflect awareness, but none of us owns it, any more than we own the sunlight. Awareness arises from a common source.

I suppose it must be a kind of Socialist Awareness; what Carl Jung (no, not Karl Marx) called the Collective Unconscious. In the great spiritual traditions, this universal awareness has many names such as God, Allah, Jehovah, The Tao and Brahma. And the reflection of this consciousness in our minds is sometimes called spirit, soul or Atman.

Spiritual meditation helps us to identify with this pure consciousness at the core of our being. As our minds evolve, we come to feel in our hearts that we are all connected, like rivers and stars and trees. As we begin to truly know ourselves we sense a cosmic oneness and universal love awakens.

 

(About the Writer: Dada Nabhanilananda, also known as the Monk Dude, is a yoga monk and an award winning songwriter, a meditation instructor and author. He lives in Los Altos Hills in California. For more of his music and works, visit his website on www.themonkdude.com.)