On one of my travels in 1978, the pilot of the airplane made an announcement that we were flying over Cyprus. It looked so small and I was struck by the thought: If the island looks so small from seven or eight miles above, what would it look like from a divine point of view?
At that moment, I felt as if I were being pulled outside the plane, traveling in space farther and farther away, until the earth looked like a distant, tiny speck. I came to a stop and heard a voice asking, “What do you see?”
The voice was of an elder person, speaking to me near my left shoulder. I turned around but could not see a face. What I saw was myself in two places. I was observing the earth like a speck of dust floating in the night sky from a great distance hearing that gentle voice. Simultaneously, I was experiencing myself going around that little speck of dust at a dizzying speed.
I saw the earth close up. I noticed people on one side of the earth starving, while people on the other side had so much food they wasted it. I was seeing that on one side we have such light, such hope, so many resources, and, on the other side, there was total darkness and children were dying. And this process was not taking place due to a lack of resources, or understanding, or good will, or know-how, or money. It was simply the result of a lack of awareness. It was as if there were two different planets and one had no knowledge or understanding of the other.
Slowly, I felt myself return to my seat on the airplane and had a moment of clarity. I had experienced a world of opposites. Light and dark, hot and cold, big and small, hope and despair, wealth and poverty. These opposites were embedded in the same speck of dust, yet light could not experience darkness and darkness could not experience light—they could not penetrate one other.
That one moment of clarity or vision was like a bolt of lightning. It seemed to have burned out all my circuits. Nothing I had done up to that point had any meaning for me.
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