I hope you enjoy these pictures from the Arboretum in Lexington, Kentucky, my hometown. It's one of my favorite places. I go there as often as I can. Be sure to click on the pictures for some incredible resolution.
"Using the word 'enlightenment' in a wider sense than the conventionally accepted one, we could look upon flowers as the enlightenment of plants," Tolle writes in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
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"When you are alert and contemplate a flower, crystal or bird without naming it," says Tolle, "it becomes a window into the formless. There is an inner opening, however slight, into the realm of spirit. This is why these three 'en-lightened' life-forms have played such an important part in the evolution in human consciousness since ancient times."
I know I'm repeating myself here, but the idea bears it. Something arresting happens when we take a moment to stop and smell the roses, as it were. When we look at a flower without naming it, without evaluating it in any way, without straining it through the filter of ideas--only then do we experience the flower directly.
But that's only the beginning. The flower has a purpose. It's purpose is to shock us by its beauty out of the world of thought and into the direct experience of reality.
The next step is to experience all of reality directly. The stem of the flower, the grass around it, the dirt, the sky, the way your body feels.
Your body is your reality. Experience it directly also, from the inside. Your body is your antenna, picking up the wavelength of the universe. If you will allow yourself to experience reality directly, through your body (not through your mind), you will experience the universe as an almost overwhelmingly positive place; that's the frequency of its wavelength, so to speak. This is what is called the joy of being.
And it all starts when we look at a flower.
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