The mystery of invisible worlds creates endless possibilities for learning and delight.  As these worlds impinge upon our own physical world, they bring a different understanding to us concerning the nature of reality, especially in the realm of causes.  In the physical world, we, as a collective humanity, have spent a long time trying to understand the sequence of cause and effect.  In the invisible world, the chain of causality is often quite complex, mixing derivative motives from different levels of reality and also from different levels of our own inner reality.  Therefore, in relation to spiritual experience, it is very hard to say when viewing things from the human perspective, why anything happens.  This is not because causes are unknown, but because translating them into human terms is often not possible.

We have all been at one time or another in a place of wonder, when something unexpected opened up before us that produced a vision of beauty, or grace, or unexpected blessing.  Yet, wonder is meant to be part of our everyday experience, having more to do with how we hold reality, than how reality holds us.  The issue here is our capacity to not take things for granted – to be able to be really present for what is happening so that we do not preempt the possibility for wonder by placing an event or situation in a predetermined category.

The wonder of meeting new and old soul-friends is an example of this. If we think of people in the roles that their outer-self plays in life – whether work roles, parenting roles, or physical roles – we will expect to view them in a certain light.  We will not see the light of the soul within, nor will we be able to experience wonder at the mysterious revelation of that soul when it shows itself.  To see the soul of another, we must be present without roles, and we must live in a state of anticipating wonder so that when it occurs, it will be noticed and not brushed aside as something inconsequential.

Wonder relates to seeing and sensing God's magic in the everyday moments of life.  It is an inner companion to seeing and knowing the presence of abundant life everywhere.  The more one feels alive, the more one is in a state of wonder.  The more the world feels alive, the more the world feels wondrous to us as well.

We can foreclose the possibility of seeing with eyes of wonder by taking things for granted.  When we do this, we assume that everything must be the way it is and that we are all like moving chess pieces in a play whose meaning is unknown.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Rather than being chess pieces, we are the creators, the actors, and the witnesses of the beauty and manifold expression of life, and what we create is often based on what we are able to witness and to feel.

In God's reality – the reality that opens up as purification unfolds – clouded vision is replaced by clear vision.  Thinking of things as ordinary, is replaced by perceiving things as filled with the extraordinary, even if invisible to the outer eye.  For to the inner sensibility, everything is part of the tapestry of a greater Life that is unfolding.  As this perspective opens, what was small becomes big; what was big becomes bigger; and what was the biggest of all extends into new areas of meaning.  Thus, everything becomes meaningful all of the time in such a life, and nothing need be bypassed as being beneath our noticing.

The world of wonder is the world of the child and of the child within.  But it is also the world of the ageless and the wise – the world of the one who lives within each of us who knows what is important in life and even what is important in a spiritual life.  When we give our hearts to it and allow wonder to inform our daily experience, we open our eyes and our hearts to allow God's meaning and magic to penetrate the outer forms of life so that we see with different eyes, and hear with different ears.  In the end, the source of wonder is God's Life.  It is the fact that everything exists within the unity of God and carries with it the precious seed of greater Life, no matter how inconsequential, no matter how  it may appear to the physical self.

To know this, is to know that the way to the heights of spiritual experience is the same way as the way to its depths, and that the capacity for wonder will take us there if we let it, revealing to our inner knowing, untold mysteries of Life beyond the visible that we see with perpetually new and sacred eyes.

Related Writings:

What the Birds Sing

On Not Taking Things for Granted (Audio)

An Awakening Earth

The Spiritual Nature of Trees

Article Section -  A New Consciousness