God Is Coming

image credit: A. Rector and B.A. Wolpa (NRAO / AUI / AURA / NSF)

“Mamsa, wake up! God is coming.” Even after having seen the movie such a long time ago, these lines from the movie, Out Of Africa, continues to intrigue me.  What do these words mean?  These words can be interpreted in many ways. To those who  are religious there may be a literal coming of a messiah, those who are more spiritual may envision their meaning as personal transformation, a transcendental experience.

In the movie, Baroness Blixen has come to a cross-roads in her life. After many setbacks, the failing coffee farm had to be mortgaged. One night, a fire broke out, burning down the barn that housed the precious crop harvest, and destroyed all her hopes for a viable future on the land that she so loved. Her house-helper woke her up saying, “God is coming.”

Perhaps in the culture of the Kikuyu tribe of Kenya where the movie is based, “God is coming” may refer to a time in a person’s life where a window of opportunity is open to us to make a choice to go beyond our limitations. Something happens which we have no control over, and we are asked to choose to respond in a manner that allows the greater aspects of who we are to manifest, or to succumb to discouragement and despair. There are many such visitations in the life of a seeker. Each incident morphing us into a greater aspect of ourselves.  There is no turning back,  and even in those times when we are in resistance to change, stretched beyond our limitations, the thought of going back to who we were is unlikely. It is like an adult trying to fit into clothes she wore as a child. They just don’t fit anymore. At these times, we are asked to keep moving forward, to face the greater aspects of who we are, to transform and step into another phase of our learning. We keep doing this until we are done with our journey on this earth. We know we are done when death comes knocking. That is the ultimate transformation. God has come to call you home.

“God is coming.” I  came across these words again recently in Turning towards the Mystery: A Seeker’s Journey by Stephen Levine:

A sharp pain flashes across the right side of the head. It says God is coming, sit up straight!
The tectonic plates in the skull are shifting. Lightning in the temporal lobes. Angels, to say the least, and the simple clarity that reveals the floating worlds.
It is like awaking in a dream to find you are not dreaming. Discovering that all along the dreamer was the dream and only this wakefulness is real.
And the body melts from consciousness to consciousness as it dissolves luminous and beyond description.
There are earthquakes in the skull that rattle our silverware and knock all our trophies off their shelves.
They break the roof beam and scatter our belongings, leaving us naked and unidentifiable in the brilliant light.

These words poetically describe the experience of transformation, the divine alchemy in which our separate sense of small self, the limited ego is offered into the sacrificial fire.

Stephen Levine continues:

Most have gone mad looking for a solid center, but there is none.
We think of centering as a continual narrowing of focus
until we touch the pearl…
but in practice centering is a continual expansion of focus
until we become the ocean.
The deeper we go, the less definable we become, but the more real we feel.
The deeper we go, the more the luminosity of mind illuminates our birthright.
Our center is vast space, boundless awareness.

This emptiness, this vast egoless space at the center, is not nothing, it is simply no thing, no boundary, no opposite, no exclusion, no inclusion, no birth, no death, no life, no absence of life. Undifferentiated presence, pure awareness indistinguishable from pure love.