What is bigness?

Occasionally, when you are meditating there is a sense that takes over you that there is something bigger than yourself, especially when you meditate on loving kindness, being loved and loving. It is found in the moments when you are not thinking of yourself. You can find it in the experience of flow where self, space and time ceases to be meaningful. It emerges when you are not think of anything in particular and sometimes when you are just staring at the clouds on a sunny day.

It is a feeling, an experience as such it is difficult to describe in words, the word, bigness, just puts a label on the experience, as an annoying monk would point out it is like describing blue to a blind woman or the taste of strawberries to an alien. Somethings have to be experienced rather than be known or learnt about, and as a growing being of consciousness, it is having new experiences that bring us joy, purpose and meaning to our lives, so we should be glad there are experiences that are difficult to have.

The sense of bigness is one of those rarer experience that has to be sought out and worked for, it is not as simple as ordering something from the menu and having it served up for your pleasure. You do not book up a weekend to bigness, you can not pay for it, except with time and deliberate practice.

You have to cultivate an awareness of what is happening at the moment it is happening. You have to learn to concentrate (the best practice is putting your thumb and first finger tips together and concentrating on that touch sensation) and then you have to sit allowing your whole being to relax into a state of being, which is when concentration turns into relaxed awareness.

Then if you are lucky you get to have the sense of bigness, you might have to go fishing a lot of times before you catch a fish. However when you do hook it, you will find, it is something bigger than yourself that you are connected to, and not just connected but an integral and vital part of, the sense of separateness disappears. The Buddhists call it a glimpse of enlightenment or oneness, the religious call it prayer and god, and others just call it the neutral name of source. Whichever it is, there is one thing I know for sure and that is that it is unknowable, it can not be put in to words. You can feel and sense it, but knowing it, is another matter entirely. That is why I never quite trust anyone who says they know what source wants from you or what it means.

We have an arrogance that everything is explainable that it can be understood, if only we had the right knowledge, the right words and point of view. That we only have to wait and all will be known. In this attitude and refusal of scientist to go beyond what is measurable or grant credibility to anything that can not be pointed at under a microscope. They leave a gap where people can fill in their own answers, nature abhors a vacuum, and when they ignore it, something that is obvious to the senses and has been experienced by so many people, they make themselves look foolish and ignorant, which in turn makes their mocking and dismissal of other points of view look silly, maybe even arrogant.

However they are ignoring the first principle of science. You never ignore the evidence of the senses or experiences, and to do so requires extraordinary proof. When the scientist says to the spiritual and religious show me the proof, they are ignoring that rule as they failed to acknowledge the sense of bigness that is shared by so many people.

I would say to the organized religions the same, show me the proof that you know the unknowable and what it means. When I feel that sense of bigness, I only know that it is unknowable, I feel that sense of oneness, I feel that sense is shared with everyone and at every time but knowing it, calling it by a name and taming like a dog for your own purposes and desires, to impose your own fears and to use it to force to me agree with you, telling me what to do based on your interpretation of a wordless experience. That is worse than the scientist, they merely fail to understand.

The only truly bad or poor acts are those carried out by people who wish to use force for their own greed, to limit others control over their lives, and that is not the sense of bigness I have. For me that sense of bigness contains everything that is possible, every person is connected together and when I have felt that, the idea of being in competition with everyone else disappears, seems ridiculous, I want a world where everybody wins, I want to help because I am helping part of myself, I want people to succeed as it is my success and I want the world to be better. There is no sense of something wanting power over you, to give you rules because of it's existence, it seems to just want to experience what it is not through us. It is love that wants to know itself through the human experience, but that was just my little glimpse of the experience put into inadequate words, yours I hope will be different, better and equally unknowable.

I do hope that you get to experience bigness without any preconceived notions of what it is, without anyone trying to use that sense to justify their point of view, just because you do not know what something is, does not mean you have to accept any explanation of it that happens to fill the gap. It is fine to have a limit to our knowledge, I have found it kind of comforting to know that there are unknowable things especially when you are in the company of bigness, I imagine it is the same as children feel in the presence of their parents and to be reminded of that sense, to experience it again, to relearn that lesson as an adult is magical, and that kind of humility is a priceless gift that should be treasured, not explained away.