Oneness

I suspected it long ago. The oneness of all things. I saw the other children, raised in religion, with their unquestioning faith in God, in some higher being, in something that made sense and reason out of what often seemed a senseless and random world. I was so jealous of them, their faith, their belief, their reprieve from the search for meaning that haunted my every movement. I couldn’t get past my thoughts and analysis, my questioning and reasoning; I couldn’t take that “leap of faith” that took them to God’s side. John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV resonated in my heart and head – how could God grant me reason and then hold it against me if I used it? That made no sense to me, the only way to God was to give up his greatest gift to us, why would God be an Indian Giver?!, thought my hyper-active 12 year old mind. Why would he want us to find him in blindness, that blind leap of faith, rather than in service of the reason and free will he so preciously gave us.

Little did I know then it was my very devotion to thought and analysis, logic and reasoning that over the course of thirty years would lead me to just such a state of faith; an open, yet wide-eyed wonder at the miracle of it all. I had the clues even as a 12 year old know-it-all arguing in Ms. Kuykendall’s class. We were reading the bible as part of English study and discussing why bad things happen in the world. I remember my query to the others – “What would you call a sunny day if every day were sunny?” To their blank faces, or made up words, I responded, quite obnoxiously – “You wouldn’t call it anything! If there was nothing to distinguish it from other days, there would be no need to name it.”

It would be twenty-five more years before I understood the import of that precocious argument. I was reading Ken Wilbur’s “No Boundaries” on a read walk (one of my favorite past-times) when I heard that soft click in the universe – the sound the world makes when something slides into place, when we recognize someone or something that we knew before this body, before this time. In discussing paradox, Wilber analogized the Universe to a sheet of paper, vast blank whiteness (or blackness depending on the piece of paper). Now, he wrote, imagine drawing a curved line across the middle of the page. You have not changed the fundamental nature of the paper; it is still a single, contiguous sheet of paper, with the same nature, the same essence. But now, he pointed out, you can talk about its opposites. There is a left side and a right side, a convex side and concave side. You can now position things on it and discuss their position relative to the line, closer or further, above or below. Depending which side of the line you are on you can think in terms of this side and that side, here and there, us and them. The truth is though, nothing about that paper really changed. One side is not in any real way different from the other side; the only difference is now we can communicate about what was before un-distinguishable and therefore un-discussable.

The thought stopped me in mid-step, cars rushing by on the road beside me in the midst of a world standing still as all my illusions of my opposing conceptions, and the good or bad judgments generally attached to them, began to unravel. It would be more years still before that intellectual understanding would find its way from my head into my heart. Therapy, study, yoga, meditation - these would dance together as I cried uncried tears, read quantum physics and philosophy and spirituality, shaped my body, quieted my mind and found the truth of that little 12 year old’s argument.

There are no opposites, really, only words we use to talk about things, to identify and then to judge on the path to learning to release the judgment we have learned to create. The macrocosm collapses into the microcosm which is a macrocosm to another microcosm, which itself is a macrocosm, and so on until the last possible microcosm collapses in on itself to become the macrocosm that began it all, the infinite Universe. So it is in space, as they have discovered that the cosmic bodies that disappear into black holes seem to be reappearing out of white holes. So it is in quantum physics as they have discovered that reality isn’t observed, but rather observation creates reality. So it is in mathematics as they discover in chaos there is order, and in order chaos. So it is, I believe, in our own path through life.

As babies we are born into the oneness – unaware of ourselves as beings separate from the world. It is not until five or six months of age that we begin to conceptualize things like here and not here, seen and not seen (we know this because a baby will begin to cry when its mother leaves or go to search for a ball that has rolled behind a chair). Before this there is only life, within and around us, oneness and within that oneness the physical sensations of pain and joy, fear and security. And then the separating begins. Parents, teachers, authority figures, friends, each play their role in shutting us down, domesticating us, reigning us in, teaching us how to survive in society. There was a time I saw this as a cruelty but I’ve come to believe it actually serves a great purpose. We are broken, I believe, so that we can return to oneness; not with blind faith, but with conscious awareness, in the exercise of that free will and logic God deemed his greatest gifts to us.

Somewhere in all my doubting and questioning, analyzing and arguing, I stumbled into a sweet, sweet soft spot in life and a faith in this world I would never have imagined I could know. It is all one, even in the joy, even in the pain. The gift is in the very experience of living, of being a breathing, conscious, feeling, and necessary part of creation. A thread in the tapestry of All, a masterpiece of life that would crumble if our little insignificant thread had never existed. We each play a vibrant chord in this amazing symphony, this choreography of coincidence that defies all comprehension.

The pain of these months as I have let go of my love, my home, my life as I knew it, and my sweet dreams for the life we were building has been crushing; crushing and yet beautifully countered in such perfect proportion by this universe - by the love and friendship of those who have comforted me in my sorrow, empathized with me in my anger, helped me in my search for understanding; by the precious bond my mother and I have found forty-two years after we severed our first connection through the cord that once gave me life; by the affirming changes in the business in the few weeks that I have focused my efforts and wisdom, skills and love to its development; by the inconceivable encounters that have brought me to the guides who will help me as I venture down a new path (like missing an 8am yoga class because I was reading the website of a practitioner and then walking into the 10am class and seeing his name on the list directly above mine). The moment I received the devastating email that Hans was moving out and giving up our home and life, Katy was in the air above Texas. What would that weekend have been without her sweet love and support and understanding? Day after day after day, in the midst of pain and loss and grief, of betrayal and abandonment, cruelty and cowardice, there was love, friendship, support, advice, care, guidance, loyalty, unyielding and unwavering strength and love.

It is not only love that can show us the path to God. So can grief. So can anger. So can hate. So can any emotion we allow to rip through us so completely that we see what is always there to be seen – that it is the feeling that makes us alive, not what we are feeling; that our categorizing it as good or bad is where we lose the richness that it is. Our feelings create a bridge between the visible world of separation and the invisible world of oneness.

Again and again, the universe has cradled me through this pain. It has not taken it away, but it has surrounded me with love and support. And in this I rejoice for my sorrow, for the experience of such cutting pain that the Universe has had this chance to show me such soothing love. Through grief I have found a pathway to rejoicing, in sorrow a path to joy, in separation a path to wholeness, and in pain a path to healing. And suddenly the distinctions and the judgments that go with them begin to fall away and I am left with a faith that all is as it is, as it should be and a peace with my place in all that is.

Did you know at a microcosmic level we are all made of stardust? Yes, you and I and those magnificent, amazing beacons of the night are microcosmically one in the same. Their beauty is ours, as is their fire, their light, their birth, their death, their state of existence no matter how desolate or populated, untamed or blissful. Microcosmically it really is all One, the separations are only visible through a certain lens. A lens we perhaps spend too much time focusing through. The slightest shift of perspective and the separation is gone. Pain becomes joy, joy becomes pain, each gives birth to the other and yet exists within the other, the microcosm collapsing in on itself until it becomes its own macrocosm.

God. The Universe. Oneness. The world is within me as I am within this world. And how very blessed we both are….

Comments

[Sherry]

Ah, the lovely Ms. LeGuin - I have not read her words in so very long. This poem is beautiful, and perfectly captures what I was trying to say (in far less words!) Your English is just fine Roman, and your compliments and faith are deeply appreciated. Do not fear my being carried off by the clawed talons of organized religion; while I have always respected it for the guidance that it can give, I have also always feared it for its manipulation in Man's hands. I use the word God because it is the word that people can most closely relate to concepts of omni---, but I do not think of a man in long flowing robes when I use the word God as the churches would have us. I think of the incredible brilliance of the universe, the complex simplicity and simple complexity that binds everything together and yet allows everything to exist separately. I am an Ishmael believer from way back (a great read if you never have) and was rattling the bars of the God delusion decades before the new agist's picked it up as a hot topic. It is only in recent years I've been able to reconcile the faith I have found with the anti-faith platform I once held, if that makes sense, and I'm comfortable with, and actually happy for, that re-union. And yes of course you are right - the easiest (and therefore hardest) path is 'just being.' But 'just being' isn't the only way to get to 'just being'. Some people can do that and damn I envy them. But I'm a gotta-take-the-long-way-around-the-world kinda girl. I've often joked I'm looking for my own back yard, but if I just walked out the back door it wouldn't seem like what I was looking for. So I gotta go all the way around the world so I'll recognize it when I come at it from the other side. That is what I was saying in this post. You could have gotten to where I am now with just a simple leap of faith (in fact the religious folk say that's the only way here) but I had to chase my brain all the way around the world just to end up where I thought I'd never get because I was chasing my brain, in a state of pure faith. I don't mean Jesus will heal me faith, I mean just pure, simple faith, that it's "all good", no matter what it is. Because once we know 'it's all good' it gets a lot easier to 'just be'. Some people can get there through their bodies, some through their emotions, some, the lucky ones like you, through 'just being', and some, like me, got make it a trek around the world with their own mental machinations. It doesn't matter the path, it's the fact that you're on it, and somewhere along the way, you'll wake up on a yoga mat or in a crying fit or from meditation or a good debate and realize what it is to be fully alive, fully present, to BE with capital letters, and that the gift is in that BE-ing. And once you get a little taste of it you know something about how to find it again, and then again, and then you might not need the yoga mat or the extreme emotion or the mental machinations or the meditation, then you might be able to 'just be' without even trying to just be. Of course then you disappear in a flash of light and there's no more chocolate or hot showers or morning snuggles, so I think I'll keep a couple of my mental machinations going! ;-)

[Roman]

Hi Sherry,

firstofall let me tell you I am sorry for you how things developed lately! I wish you the best for your future - after all you are such an interesting, resourceful and gifted woman, I am sure your personal luck is not far!

Concerning your above posting, I think sometimes we (humanity) get to carried away, lose ourselves in trying to apply meaning to the world.
In a song of Gil Scott Heron appears the line "semantics is always a bitch", which I find quite fitting in this context.

Reflect on this, perhaps. My personal opinion is that the path to bliss leads via "just being", without looking too much for a higher meaning.

I know this is hard, but doing otherwise carries the risk of getting off track and being caught in misleading, often harmful and irrational, unsteady constructs, such as religion.

Having gone so far, I suggest you read Richard Dawkin's book, "The God Delusion", and tell me what you think of it :-)

Also, I would like to share with you my most favourite poem:

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.

-The creation of Ea (Ursula K. LeGuin, from the "Earthsea" trilogy)

In any case best regards and "be well" from Austria,

-Roman

P.S.: Please excuse any errors, English's not my first language

[Shellen Lubin]

Absolutely beautiful, Sherry. It is indeed the feeling--pain equally as much as pleasure--that makes us feel our alive-ness, and allows us to resonate and reverberate with the alive-ness of the whole universe.

You have written the closest thing to religious doctrine that will ever have meaning for me.