In Remembrance…

The English word ‘remembrance’ is translated from the Greek anamnesis. We think of this as remembering an event or series of events: to go back into our individual or collective memories to recall them. The Greek ‘anamnesis’ means more than this. It’s about making present the very moment that is being awakened with all it’s visceral emotion, lived aliveness and meaning. It’s experiencing the ‘presence’ of the ‘then’ moment as a ‘now’ moment.

There’s a fullness of experience in these remembrances. You place yourself in the situation whether you were there or not. You imagine the experience with all your senses and beyond. It’s a reliving of the original events by identifying with them. The power of the moment lives on in anamnesis. Memorial Day can be this kind of moment. It can be a time of identification with the sacrifice that’s necessary to grow and evolve beyond all that wants to draw us backwards.

What is it to sacrifice? The word comes from the Latin, sacer facere meaning to make whole or holy. When we meditate on the sacrifice of people around the planet from today to ages past there’s a sense of interconnectedness with them, a sacred unity that lives in, among and flows through us. Each human being is a whole being gifted with a body of a hundred trillion cells continually renewed by  its genetic system formed in life over the course of 3.8 billion years.

We humans are also gifted with feelings, intelligence, compassion and empathy. We have the sense, deep within, that we’re connected to a benevolent Something that helps us know that which is larger than ourselves. When aware of this interconnectivity we’re willing to do what it takes for the whole of creation to continue evolving, expanding and co-creating that which will move us and those who follow into greater and greater consciousness. Thankfulness is given.

We are the ones who know that the impossible is simply a thought we keep thinking. When we change our thoughts we change the world and the impossible becomes possible. We let go of concepts that keep us stuck to let come ones that move us forward. When two and three and fifty make a billion we grow, change and rearrange in alignment with the force that draws us into greater expansion and creation. We recognize the necessity to sacrifice, to make life whole.

Transformation takes place through great love/surrender and great loss/suffering. When we live in remembrance, our hearts and souls are touched by these great gifts of life. Deep within at the soul level we become one with all those sacrifices to stand with the great cloud of witnesses who have loved and lost to elevate humanity to this space in time. We’ve come to live, to love, to learn, and to enter into the joy of being fully alive. This gift is ours to receive and give again.

As human beings we have a capacity for depth, to go beyond mere appearances, beyond what our five senses know into other dimensions. If neuroscience is correct we’re only using three to five percent of our Mind’s capacity. Imagine continuing to cultivate this extraordinary garden of possibilities. Imagine living in remembrance of what has been accomplished from the beginning and what is yet to be lived into. Imagine what the world could be if we explored this inner space.

• Sit quietly and breathe in the gifts that have been given you by those who have gone before.
• Feel the inner pull toward a greater connection with your wholeness, holiness, soulfulness.
• Reflect on your heart’s desire to become more of who you really are for yourself and others.