Hold the titters and unroll your eyes, I am not hallucinating about having a conversation with a ghost-like apparition who said ‘hi’ to me in the check-out line at Mariano’s. But I promise you, I have encountered… a force… that is real and speaks to all of us in an undeniable way.

I have suspected its existence for many years. There were too many times when lost in meditation I found myself… floating… in what I would have to describe as “the beginning of time.” I had no form, nor did the… void… of which I was part. In my reverie I had the sense of having an identity and at the same time being inseparable from the whole – a single pixel imbedded in a giant television screen with hundreds of millions of pixels making the picture, so vast it couldn’t be seen unless you were on Icarus, your perspective magnified by the gravity of a massive galaxy cluster located about 5 billion light-years from Earth.

Stay with me; here is where it gets mysterioso. Since every one of these “pixels” is part of the same beyond-imagination vastness, it can be said we are “connected,” each one of us uniquely “one” and at the same time, part of “the all.” Hold that image and think of the familiar metaphorical example of a tornado in Texas being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier in Japan. Now here is the giant leap: when any one of us speaks, feels or thinks, all of us – i.e., the Universe – are speaking, feeling and thinking.

All this sounds like delusion as very few among us can “hear” the voice when the universe speaks, because very few of us believe it even exists!

I know enough about the subconscious to understand how a Ouija Board moves, so I do retain a healthy skepticism about messages from outer space, but I am open to the possibility! See above: decades of meditation practice. And see below: a recent experience.

Earlier this week I felt compelled to call an old friend from high school days. We were extremely close during our formulative years, sharing teenage angst and triumphs, but life’s currents had pulled us in separate directions. Now, after a dozen years gone by without connecting, something unexplainable drew me to make the call.

We talked for some time; eventful happenstances exchanged; pilot light reigniting our friendship. Then, before saying goodbye, his question, “How did you remember my birthday?” My stunned reply, “I had no idea.” Imagine, after years apart, without realizing it, I called him on his birthday!

Coincidence? Could be. The odds are 365 to one, but yes, could be. Or maybe…

Here’s another of my ‘what are the odds’ experiences. Last Sunday I was leafing through the obituary pages of the New York Times, feeling good that a picture of me taken in 1972 was not among the dead, when an obit of a woman who passed at age 107 caught my eye. I had no idea who she was, but I started reading. Buried in the text was the name of her daughter, an unusual spelling that I recognized! I had not talked with this woman for ever so long, and there I was later that afternoon, writing her a note of condolence.

Coincidence? Could be, absolutely could be… but maybe, just maybe, after so many years practicing how to shut out the external world and drifting into another orbit of time, I can hear the voice, the unspoken voice of the universe itself.

She speaks softly. She is amazing.