Stillness 7-31: How would it feel to be tiny? What would happen if you sipped a magic potion, like Alice, and you grew smaller and smaller? Today, let’s try to shrink into someone beyond tiny.
Remember the film from the 1950s called The Incredible Shrinking Man? Our hero accidentally ingests insecticide and gradually begins to shrink. His dire situation is delightfully surreal. When he’s too small to keep track of, his distraught wife makes him live in her old doll house. Then, one day, she can’t find him, and, seeing her cat licking its lips in satisfaction, she mistakenly believes her husband has been eaten. But—never fear—in fact, he has simply fallen down the open cellar door and is now struggling with cobwebs, hunger, and even a large spider he tries to fend off with a needle he (with great difficulty) hoists above his head and brandishes as a sword.
Best of all, throughout the film, is our hero’s imposing voice-over narrating his woeful tale to us. Even as he continues to shrink, and even when he’s tinier than a bug, his voice remains strong and manly. His consciousness is that of a philosopher, musing out loud about the mysteries of existence. What will happen to him when he is no more than a speck of dust? he wonders. What will happen to his mind? Even as he duels with the scary spider, he is as consciously intelligent as he always was.
It’s actually great fun exploring the microcosm. Perhaps you remember doing this as a child? As you lay in the meadow, you got smaller and smaller so that blades of grass became vast fairy-tale lands of epic proportions and your heart became the journey into hidden, magical realms. Such fun.
Try getting small again. You can do this by going inward. Focus on your heart. Breathe through your heart, think through your heart, see with your heart. Imagine yourself growing smaller and smaller. Imagine yourself entering the diamond-like recesses of your inward heart… getting smaller and smaller—far smaller than the world appears as we usually know it. Enter the beyond and discover yourself in the realm of the All.
Play out your story in your heart rather than in real life. Become very centered and still, smaller, and still smaller … till your consciousness becomes a resounding one-ness with everything. Feel your entire essence smiling…
When you become so small that you are Awareness, you’re not the one who smiles, you are the smile itself.