Cosmic Citizen

Cosmic Citizen

"Citizen" may not be exactly the right word here, though it does contain both city and zen. "City" refers to the understanding and the lived experience that we are bound to humanity, to humanness. We are humanimals. "Zen" refers to boundless openness, that our awareness goes far beyond.

I bumped (delightfully) into the writings of Roberto Assagioli many years ago. A psychiatrist and the founder of Psychosynthesis, he had a simple exercise allowing us to unstick ourselves from three of our hardheaded identifications. Sit with each of these three statements until that statement becomes real:

I have a body and I am not my body.

I have emotions and I am not my emotions.

I have a mind and I am not my mind.

As we open to the deep understanding that we are not our body, not our emotions, not our mind, then who are we?

We do not have to rush to put descriptive words to ourselves but one answer is that we are the cosmos giving birth to itself. We are the cosmos embodying. As such, we can claim our place in the cosmos as cosmic citizens. 

We continue to have our feet on the concrete pavement of the physical and our hands in the doings of society, but we no longer identify with some constricted small self on which we ourselves and others around us may insist.

Our time is limited on this planet. We need to open to our larger selves. We are cosmic citizens.