Yesterday, on our daily walk, Jay and I came upon two-year old boy whose mom was about 20 feet ahead of him. Far from being upset, he leaned forward and ran bow legged toward her the way only a toddler can, muttering audibly enough to hear, but not quite clear enough for the untrained ear to understand.

I moved closer, leaning toward him and listened more intently.

“Park, bye!” I finally realized he was saying as he turned back toward the small park behind us periodically to wave.

Intent bright eyes, spikes of black hair standing straight up on his head and flushed cheeks ablaze, he waddled furiously, and stopped now again to turn around and squeeze and release his plump fingers.

I began to wonder what pictures were flashing in his mind, what feelings and sensations were channeled into those two tiny words.

“Park. Bye.”

Was the image of the swing still mid-air present as memory, the fluttering of his tummy from rising and falling, the cool breath of wind on his face as the ground rushed toward and away? Was he saying goodbye to the feel and smell of the grass, to the thrill of so many playmates, to the insects and birds? Was there a sense of confusion, sadness, resignation or joy surrounding the concept of departure?

I realized that the conceptual sense of desire and longing, of “here” and “not here,” was so learned.

Then the toddler began to tap the top of his reddened head.

“Hot!” he repeated tapping.

I looked up into the radiating burst of sunlight then slowly from horizon to horizon into what appeared shimmering, vibrant, color saturated, and strangely unreal, and this image of an enormous funnel came.

The virtually infinite vista is the widest part of the funnel, but what the sense of “my” awareness focuses on and names is the tiny droplet, an itty, bitty, finite concept that filters down and reports to be be what is actually there.

Individual awareness — the very awareness with which we are aware — might be likened to the sense of physically looking at the “world”during a walk down the street From horizon to horizon, everything that can be absorbed from the vantage point of the eyes would be included in the funnel of What Is. However, what we see is further limited by the focus of awareness. Notice that when looking intently at a particular thing, awareness of everything else quite literally blurs, or it is not registered at all.

Human conditioning and perhaps the unavoidable nature of conceptualization reduces this infinite scene into smaller concepts held by this concept of “me”– their illusory producer, reinforcer and container – ever fragmenting, separating and dividing a pure, effortless wordless state of awareness into millions of forms. In the darkest state, the individual awareness of all is focused and condensed entirely into finite, limited, baggage riddled concepts and then only as it relates to “me.”

Hence, one can see that even for the two year old, the wordless pure awareness of the totality of the sun — the awareness of the ALL of the sun’s Infinite energy, light and warmth, etc. from which every earthly form in a mere two years of human conditioning is distilled into H-O-T (on me).

At some point, the boy will attempt to move intellectually back “up” the funnel by adding thousands of words that attempt to expand “hot,” back into the Infinity of the sun by conceptualizing its attributes, but in actuality, his experience of the so called sun will become more divided.

If instead, he will simply relax. soften eyes, cease looking at or for anything, and Be, Grace witnesses it all.