Mary-Margaret Moore:

I did want to share with you something. It would have been a bit a week ago tomorrow on a Friday afternoon about dusk, and I had been into town to take Justine to her friend's house, and I was driving home.

I was driving. I was watching, aware of the road and so on.

And all of a sudden, I looked way out to the horizon where the Rio Grande Gorge plunges down into the horizon, and it was extremely beautiful. And the way the sun was fading, and I don't know, it was a magic time, and all the lands seemed to be alive with this fading light of the sun.

And all of a sudden, I shifted into another state of awareness. And what I said, I became totally aware that I had lived endless lives, endless number of lives.

In the what? Hundred?

I didn't compute in terms of number. But I just knew that I had just lived endless number of lives.

And then before that thought could even become a thought, you know, it was a feeling. Before it could even turn itself into thought, it seemed, this awareness of a shout almost in my awareness was, who has?

Who has lived endless lives? And then, again, before thought could grab a hold of anything, awareness came of the I.

And so I guess you could say that I became totally aware of the I. The I that has always been and will always be.

The I that I have always been manifesting or unmanifesting. The I that our beloved Ramana talks about all the time.

And it was a total knowing. What was so strange about this, my dear ones, is that afterwards, everything was exactly as the Zen Buddhists have said.

Who was I? What did I do?

I drove the car. I parked the car.

I walked across the snow. I ate my dinner.

Everything was exactly the same. There was no change.

Except everything seems different to me. The things that I was afraid to lose now don't seem important.

The things that I thought I had to have in order for my life to be full, such as people to love me, are not that relevant. It's not that love is not relevant.

It's just that since I know that I am, and part of the I is love, that there is never a way to be without it. Which is another way, I guess, of saying that I will always be with the Self.

And the Self has it as a component of it the power of love. And the love that doesn't even manifest in daily life.

You know, this is something that I've often wondered about. Because how could life go on and be so ordinary?

But they are, aren't they? Just perfectly ordinary.

And they're wonderful in their ordinariness. And for me to begin to let go of the agony of the pain of that orphanage and that child, that baby, screaming his poor head off, wanting to be loved and to be kept warm and to be held.

And for the months that that was not possible, to let go of that agony and that fear and to allow the Self to manifest with its power. It just seems to me to be incredible.

And I feel the wonderful thing is I feel the ordinariness of our incredibility. We are incredible, aren't we?

But we're also ordinary. It's wonderful to be both.

I wouldn't have it any other way. And somehow I don't... I sense that I will not be afraid like I used to be.

There will not be that sense of clinging, that sense of having to have people care about me in order to make my life empowered. Because I realized, of course, that it is the Self that empowers our life.

And the Self is all of them and all of me. Anyway, I just wanted to share that with you.

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