When I was a boy of about seven, I had a recurring dream which, at the time, was quite perplexing. It is difficult to describe, the words do not do it justice, but I seemed to be floating, and I remember there being some kind of ‘wire’. It was the sensations which were most odd; there seemed to be a sensation of ‘tingling’ and weightlessness. A sense of ‘being ‘ without any volition or thought. All that there seemed to be was an awareness of space without beginning or end. I could recall it in my awakened state but, over time, the dream faded.
Later in life, in my mid thirties to forties, I went through a phase of writing poetry. It was a period of my life when I found this form a way of exorcising powerful emotions both positive and negative, a way to release physical, emotional and spiritual, joy and trauma. I remembered the dream and believed it to be a memory of being in the womb, the ‘wire’ being the umbilical cord. My description of it at that time was ‘The place of pins and needles’; because of the remembered tingling sensation. As with so many experiences and ideas, ‘life’ seems to overtake and bury some of one’s deepest sensitivities.
I now find myself reconnected to the dream. Often when I sit to meditate the memory surfaces and I have come to believe that what I was experiencing was my earliest contemplative experience. I simply knew myself ‘to be’, in the most primal way. This state required no conscious knowing or understanding, no words or description.
Now, as I think of it, there are significant parallels with being a manifestation of the divine essence. It makes sense of the way in which I feel ‘held’, almost a feeling of being cocooned, safe, at one with both ‘God’ and the universe. This seems to be the underlying feeling of peace which Jesus described as ‘beyond understanding’: a sort of divine umbilical cord, the sustaining source of my being, my life. All this whilst experiencing and witnessing the best and worst of human endeavour, including my own.
Just as, in the womb, I was fully alive but yet to experience consciousness and self, whilst the universe was unfolding about me, So now I find myself able to access this sacred encapsulation, this inner sanctum which, in which God, in the words of James Finley, ‘protects us from nothing and yet sustains us through everything’.
What I draw from this is that nothing was required from me, either at the moment of conception or during the gestation period. Everything required, not just to sustain me but to set up every conceivable possibility for the unfolding of my life in the world, was there from the beginning. I, and the divine source of my being, are one. And, this oneness is as true today as it was then.
That stage of being which all of us experienced in the womb, whether remembered or not, I believe has parallels in our relationship with who and how we conceive God to be. To meditate on, or contemplate the fact that all we ever need is, and always has been provided, by our source, for our being, to bring us to our destination. We, in essence, float in the endless abundance of the Divine life which is the source of all that we will ever need, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Just as in the womb everything required was supplied to us, no conscious request, no words, hopes or desires were necessary, so in this moment we can rest in being; certain that all we need for the fulfilment of our life’s unfolding is constantly ours. Such is the power of letting go into stillness and silence. The silence is, as it were, the womb, the perfect encapsulation of our being. As we originally emerged from the womb to become who we are, so we emerge from the silence restored and renewed; in order to manifest the one Divine life: to live the silence, to carry the stillness and bring the Divine essence into the world and those around us.
Text and Photo © K. Marsh Bexhill Julian Meeting
Photo taken at Scotney Castle UK. A National Trust property just off the A21, it is listed as in Tunbridge Wells but is close to the border of East Sussex.