Sometimes, being in a certain place, makes you feel very, very different. It is a beautifully unique and significant feeling. It happens to me from time to time. I love this life experience.
It is different for everyone. At least, I am supposing it is different for everyone.
And now that I sit here, and write this, I am guessing it happens to other people, the way it does me.
Most recently, while we were in Europe, I had several experiences like this. It seems like the usual suspects were very large Cathedrals, or old structures, like castles. It also happened in the old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, and again in a courtyard of a Catholic church in the same city.
There is typically a very still silence. And the air takes on a life of its own. It feels both heavy and light, at the same exact moment.
In college, time and time again, I would experience this overwhelming feeling when I went in Hinkle Field House at Butler University. As a college athlete, I spent a lot of time training in that huge facility. And many times when I was there, it would be nearly empty. You could hear a pin drop.
On many occasions, I would just go off in some corner of that expansive place, and pull up a spot on the floor, and sit. Just sit. And listen. Sometimes, it felt like I could hear a thousand voices from times long ago. Realistically, it was probably just someone flushing a toilet in another wing of the building.
Nonetheless, I used to love sitting there and thinking about nothing. I guess it was an early form of meditation for me. Before I knew what such a thing was. Premeditation.
It is probably not as much about the place, as it is about our spirit. I’m guessing the physical part of the location might help nudge our spirit-self along.
Some people believe we are simply humans, and when our human body dies, we completely stop existing. We drop where we had been standing…. and eventually turn back into worm food.
But I argue this. We are spiritual beings in every sense of the word. Spiritual beings, in human bodies. I believe this is true, because…. if our humanoid form ended with the physicality of things, we would all behave the same. There would be no variances. Because on a molecular level, we are all exactly the same. The molecules all have the same ingredients.
Yet our spirit does what it does. It makes some people very good, and joyous, and giving, and accepting. It make some people profoundly loving, and kind. Conversely, it makes other people cynical, or mean, or cruel, or narcissistic. Even evil. Like Knievel on his jumping motorcycle, evil.
But when that good part of us “connects” with the rest of the spiritual energy…. when those dots match up….. we get the willies. That feeling when the air feels heavy and light at the same time, and our mind stops its chatter. It is that place, in the huge expanse of this universe…. where we pull up a place on the floor, and find our own little corner. But it is a corner, right at the center of the great big wonder of it all.
The great spiritual beings, throughout history, were profoundly adept at connecting with this place. At will. That center. That place of stillness. Of quiet. Of nothing and everything, at the same moment.
What a world this would be… if we could all become aware of that place. IF…. our hearts, our minds, and our spirits, could find the connection in that good place.
That place of peace. Oh, what a world it would be.
We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves. — Dalai Lama