Indra's Net

ELIZABETH DENLEY shares some experiences of remembrance, and how it enlivens her life and her relationships with herself and others.

- ELIZABETH DENLEY

At various moments throughout any day and night, remembrances surface like bubbles rising to the top of a pond, as people and other beings appear, momentarily bursting into consciousness. The heart naturally offers an impulse of love to those being remembered, and that impulse is itself a gift of love flowing constantly from the Beloved.

Love is received from the Source and passed on to others as a blessing, via the conduit of the Beloved, who is my teacher, mentor, and spiritual Master. In this way, the universe is constantly being created, as love is constantly flowing from the Source, touching every nook and corner of existence, through connections and entanglements.

Sometimes those who receive these impulses of love are strangers, sometimes associates or friends. They may be dear ones, and often the flow is recycled back to the Beloved himself. They can appear in vivid consciousness, almost too much to bear; or as an undercurrent, subtle, almost imperceptible; or anywhere in between.

They can be here or on the other side of the Earth; an ancestor, long gone yet full of presence; or a great being woven into a past or future existence. Connections do not need physical bodies to be real. Love and remembrance transcend time and space, the physical and the non-physical dimensions. You may have heard of Indra’s Net—the mythological web of connections and interdependencies that is this universe. Well, I have observed that remembrance can surface from anywhere across the full expanse of that field, and so it taps into the collective consciousness and unconsciousness.

The mental function we know as memory, smriti, is one of the 5 functions of human thinking described by the great sage Patanjali a few thousand years back. In his treatise, the Yoga Sutra, he called them the 5 vrittis, and all have magical gifts that we have been given to aid our speedy evolution. But they are not just functions of thinking. Number 4,