Blog Post 97: Where's My Phone

What’s your reaction when you lose something important? It used to throw me into an abject panic as I considered the potential consequences of my loss, the ramifications sometimes seeming well beyond the rational. I look back now and observe with some amusement how welded I have been to my plans for my life, how difficult it has been to consider possibilities outside of the planned.Yet I observe now that, whether I ever recovered those seeming lost items or not, life carried on regardless. If they were lost forever, I made an adjustment, however initially painful the reordering of my myopic little world, and carried on with a new plan, oblivious to the fallibility of the planning process itself.With a little more learning behind me, when I mislay something significant now, I am more inclined to smile. For I have come to understand that a major loss will commonly result in an opportunity for intervention from my angels, a learning opportunity, a chance to grow as a result of the divestment of what I no longer need but have kept out of habit, or sometimes all three.So when, on Sunday evening, shortly before bedtime I discovered that my mobile phone had been missing, the loss itself felt auspicious and I knew something would likely happen that mattered more than the loss itself.I first searched my flat, checking every possible location in which I might absent-mindedly have put down or perhaps dropped it (yes, hard to believe I know, but I do that occasionally), but the search yielded nothing. All the items that I carry with my phone – my keys, my wallet and so on, were sitting quietly where they were supposed to be. All smiled at me questioningly. They evidently knew what was afoot. None of them let me in on the secret though.So I told a few people by e-mail that the misplacement would mean no text communication until the phone, or the reason for its absence surfaced. Then I asked my angels to help me find it.The phone did not appear.Then I realised I’d made the wrong request of my angels (I generally find I have to be specific in my requests – for they are inclined to respond to the request I have made, not the one I meant to make).“Ok angels,” I said, “Please show me where my phone is.” I stopped looking and waited for the answer to surface through my unconscious into my conscious mind in the normal way. I knew it would come.Only it didn’t.No answer, no phone, no intervention.Unruffled, I smiled again. “All is well in my world,” I found myself responding to a well-meaning sympathiser, sympathy rarely being useful, of course. “All is as it should be in the moment.” And then I went to bed and slept soundly, just after Matt walked all over me for his night ime cuddle, reminding me of what really matters in my world.I rose up into consciousness the next morning, aware that some sort of action would be necessary. The semi-conscious state, that space we cross from sleep to wakefulness, is enormously useful, I find, for creative thought, for active engagement with my guides and angels; but not it seems, for locating misplaced mobile phones.I did recall the last place I thought I remembered using it though – a dog friendly café in Lyndhurst where we had stopped the previous afternoon after walking in the Forest. I decided it must be there that I had left it. But I wake early – too early for the average café to be open, and there was no point in rushing off. So, after Matt’s walk we set out to drive back to Lyndhurst where we would join the early risers of the locality in Costa – the only café I know that keeps anywhere near the same hours as I do.And as I drove I meditated on how far my role models went out of their way to divest themselves of distractions in the pursuit of their life purposes – The Christ, whom, so far as we know, never wrote so much as a single book or owned objects of perceived worth; Ghandi who eventually owned nothing and dressed in a homespun loincloth; Mother (now Saint) Teresa, who discarded all, so that she might embrace the discarded. And I thought about what a good opportunity this loss might afford to tread in some of the footsteps they left in the sand for me to follow.We arrived at Costa -I do so love their coffee (for now, anyway) - and I read the newspaper, as from habit I do all too often. It told me of a world of pain and negativity – the vast sea of souls washing into Europe from Africa and the Middle East, fleeing terrorists, hell-bent on pursing them and us and me with their particular vile brand of odious pestiferousness. I read of the manipulation of millions in the power struggle of elites that is the UK Brexit. I read of the emotional opportunism and intellectual poverty of those empowered in the United States of America. I contrasted all that with the warm-heartedness and love I perpetually encounter amongst those I engage with on social media, children of light who seek the light. And I resolved to read the news a little less, and meditate a little more, in pursuit of my own life purpose.Then it was time to go to the café where I would retrieve my misplaced phone that I was confident would be in the possession of the proprietor, whom I would thank with a sheepish smile.Only I didn’t.Because there was a hastily hand written sign on the door that said ‘Closed to day for personal emergency. Sorry for any inconvenience.’I giggled.Not at the poor proprietor who had an emergency to deal with; but at myself for my presumptuousness. And I saw again that vision that sometimes comes to me – the one of my Guide leaning nonchalantly against the wall, legs crossed, arms folded (though sometimes he has his hands in his pockets) whistling up into the air with a wry smile on his face. And I blessed him for the opportunity for not taking myself too seriously, and for the certainty that something wonderful was about to happen.But my phone did not appear.So I thought it a good idea to drive to Tesco, my airtime supplier and have the service cut off in case someone was phoning Kuala Lumpur at my expense, How protective of my money I still am. How far I still have to go in following the divestment examples of my role models. Then, quite suddenly, as we arrived in the town, driving past my own flat and on to Tesco, it came.Not in a whirlwind, not in a fire, but in a voice that was not mine, yet not, not mine. A statement of such profundity I failed initially to appreciate its significance.“I am done with experiencing my being negatively,” came the sentence. I noted it, a very particular and unusual form of words. But I did not understand it.

We drove on to Tesco, had the account switched onto a new SIM card and checked that the phone had not been operated since the last time I remember using it. Then I drove home, still oblivious to the consequence and meaning of the tsunami that had just washed over me.Arriving home, I took out a CD of Tibetan singing bowls that I had bought the previous day in a mind body spirit fayre in Lyndhurst, recorded by Ven. Chris Burrows. I had taken a chance on buying it, knowing that even if I could not hear the note of some of the bowls, I would still feel the vibrations. And as I walked into the study to put the CD case on my desk, I stopped.It was there; under my chair. I stood in the doorway and looked at it not knowing what to do, frozen in incredulity. The little black object that contains so much of my life and ability to communicate, lay on the floor directly under my chair.Now, you’ll maybe say, as I did, momentarily, “It was always there. You just didn’t see it…somehow… for some reason.”And maybe you’d be right. And maybe the astonishing significance lies in the ‘somehow… for some reason.’And maybe you’d not be right. And maybe it had not been there. Only now it was.Because whether you’re right, or whether you’re not right, it hit me just the same; with the full force of that delayed Tsunami, it hit.The koan, the gongan-nature of the event was beyond mistaking. And the energy of its intervention threw me full force against the inestimable magnitude of that life changing statement, “I am done with experiencing my being negatively.” In that moment came the awareness of the beyond-identity, cascading down, and in and up and out, blinding in its force of revelation. Confronting me with the new reality - that I am not an individual being; that the I of the me is not a sole inhabitant of my body, that our soul connection goes inestimably beyond the individuality of my perception, that all the protectiveness I have built up, the unrecognised negative on which I have built my ramparts, the false belief that others are different, separate, threatening, dangerous, other in their otherness, in their unconnect.All melted in the heat of the light. And I howled to heaven. And I wept and I laughed - a holy spirit baptism in which I spoke poured out in the tongues of men and angels in reverence to and declaration of the revelation and to the light and the grace and the love of enlightenment.Have you seen it yet? Have you seen it in this lifetime, I mean. For we all do see it when we return home from this life and before we incarnate again. When we slide back into the arms of god we know the join-edness of unified integration. The sea of souls is one sea.And we are but flying fish,breaking the surface for a moment,to bask in the reflected gloryof a transient elevation.Namaste.