God is staring you in the face, and you’re not listening. Before I go any further, let me say I’m not religious in the conventional sense. I don’t believe there is a God that talks to you; yet if you take away the paraphernalia attached to organised religion, you can often be left with that niggling feeling, that intuition that emanates from some other place in your mind that suggests there is more to you than your day to day awareness. It is usually quiet and unassuming, although it assumes you want to hear. However, usually you don’t. Caught up in the daily grind of ordinary life, the hustle and bustle of a busy schedule tends to drown out any murmurings from within.
Meditational techniques are designed to reveal this part of our personality, but from my experience, while they aid mental relaxation, and subsequent receptiveness, there is no epiphany. Paul, in the Bible, had an epiphany, if we are to believe religious teaching. He was on the way to Damascus, a critic of Jesus, and all of a sudden the ‘scales fell from his eyes’, and in a blinding flash of light, he believed.
While we can’t expect to experience such a vivid hallucination as Paul did, the epiphany can still be real for us.
I call it, ‘the penny dropped’. Simple as that. It is that moment when all is made clear, and you wonder why you didn’t realise this weeks or years before. That is the real epiphany. Why did it take so long? Maybe your subconscious was waiting till you had all the bricks in place.
Why the ‘penny dropped’? Public telephones, what else?
Back in the sixties not all families had a telephone. This was a given. Also a given was that on every street corner the GPO had phone booths. Kids naturally flocked to these. You could ring your girlfriend without the oldies listening. Trouble was you needed the right coins. It was a penny way back, then a schilling, then a ten cent piece in ’66.
To start, you dialled your girlfriend’s number, then put a coin in the slot marked Button A. As you nervously waited while the phone rang, you kept a finger poised. If she answered, you pressed Button B, and as you did, you heard the coin you had put in the slot drop down.
Therefore the penny dropped. You were connected.
That was enough of an epiphany for me.
I cannot express how much I love this post! <3 <3
Especially your first line….
Beautiful!
thank you
At the beginning of this year, after a tortured end to last year that involved MrBB and I seperating, I embarked on my own little journey of self-discovery. This was something I’d wanted to do for years, but didn’t really have the motivation. Fresh from a bad marriage, itching to find some semblence of who I was, I started meditating, went to yoga, pilates, had intense massages with a fabulous therapist who helped me dive into my soul and reach around inside. The results have been rewarding. It’s not an easy process. There are stumbling blocks; revisiting painful periods in one’s life is hard, but by doing so I feel like I’m ticking all the boxes, then closing the door on that chapter. And it goes so much deeper than learning to sit still and relax. I mentioned on another blog a few weeks ago that I felt like someone had climbed into my brain and cleaned all the cobwebs out. And that is still the best way to describe my transformation. My dreams at night are often about past experiences, and in the dream, there is a conclusion; an ending. The door is closed. When I wake up I feel as though I can truly put that incident in life behind me and move on. And lately, I feel like I’ve been moving on in leaps and bounds. I feel invigourated; revitalised; current. I’m not dwelling on things; I’m dealing with them and moving on. Meditation; relaxing my mind and dealing with life in a moment by moment way, has paid huge dividends for my general well-being. Try it sometime!
Benita you have come long way! and it give me lots of joy to read your comment, and knowing how strong you are, well done ! love ooxx
Gigdiary, what a wonderful comment, well express thank you! love ooxx