“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness.

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us … It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely … I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”

The ultimate is not an idea. It cannot be known, in the usual way. It can, sometimes, be felt. There is a physical sensation that corresponds to boundary-less-ness. A kind of glowy, floatiness, a feeling of permeability and connectedness. Presence. It’s not conceptual, and it’s not an understanding that can be attained through any kind of effort. It is easiest to experience when effort and ideas are relinquished. If we want to see God, we must stop. Notice what we are really doing, and stop. We put an incredible amount of thought and energy and effort into building belief systems that obscure the truth. Every religion and ideology in the world is an example of this, but I’m not just talking about formal belief systems, it’s all the idiosyncratic beliefs we might not even realize we’ve bought into… we spend our lives cultivating complex sets of ideas about who we are, what the world is like, what is and is not possible for us, etc. These are the basic concepts that need to be doubted. Don’t buy it anymore! Allow for that most radical of possibilities: that you are not your self-concept! We do not reach infinity by addition, but by subtraction. Making space for grace…

The secret is: there is no separation between the ordinary and the profound. And it’s no secret.