Enigmas, paradox & ONENESS

We cannot live for ourselves alone. 

Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, 

and along these sympathetic fibers, 

our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

- Herman Melville -

Just started the section in Finding Your Way In A Wild New World that works with ONENESS.  Oneness builds off of Wordlessness, which I talked about yesterday in a Secrets of the Home posting.  

As Martha describes it, Wordlessness are those moments - very rare to most of us, utterly unknown to the unfortunate - where we our mind drops out of the mental stories we've constructed of words & drop into our real intelligence, one unbordered, unbothered by yada yada yada.  What Jung described as the "collective unconscious" & Martha describes as "like logging on to some sort of Energy Internet, a connection that gives access not only to (our) own entire intelligence but to something much bigger."

Wordlessness is a prerequisite to achieving Oneness, a concept that took my heart, already tenderized by what came before, & broke it wide open.

Just like most of us have only rarely experienced a state of Wordlessness - when we are outside our SELF & into our genuine nonverbal being - even fewer have a clue about Oneness.  I would have assumed that experiencing Oneness was limited to mystics like Emanuel Swedenborg or a master yogi - not me, never me.  

Martha describes Oneness as the way we function in those moments we shake off our word-limited mental constructs, slipping out of language, looking around & discovering that what we once saw as separate is actually connected. That everything is connected.  Not just everyone.  Everything.

How that soared to me on my first reading, several years back.  Still soaring.  And small wonder.  That new AH HA! awareness awoke me to the existence of my natural intelligence.

Growing up, teachers slammed my class as shockingly "devoid of any intellectual curiosity" - hardly designed to engage & inspire students.  My older & only sister saw me was someone with whom her own lauded intelligent could discuss television show storylines & nothing else - what glorious irony that I kicked into my smarts due to watching a movie on television!

Mindwalk woke me up - at 41 - to the fact that I was one sharp gal.  Mind you, if I'd had the slightest clue that the film was a 90+ minute philosophical discussion, the t.v. would have remained OFF.  If anyone had told me that I'd be fascinated by a walking conversation between two brainiacs & a polician - all in varying states of disillusion - walking around Mont St. Michel, would have thought them nuts.  But I love Sam Waterson & am entranced by Liv Ulman, so we watched & I was reeled in.  


Oh. the string of lovely paradoxes!  

• That TELEVISION shook me awake to being smarter than the average bear.  

• That it took a movie - about philosophy! - to turn an inner switch to higher possibilities.  

• That it was John Heard's writer/poet - the most minor of the three actors playing a character with far & away the least lines - who delivers the quietly riveting monologue that puts the new ideas learned from Liv Ulman's phyicist into a clearer context.  

 
What does all this yada yada yada have to do with Oneness?  That was what John Heard's poet realized - that at our most basic, energy level, everything is connected.   ONENESS.  The awareness of our Oneness was what, with a swiftness that still leaves me awestruck, tenderized & filled with light & totally broke apart in wondrous ways my mind heart spirit so that I could see myself as something that would have been uncomfortably foreign to me must moments before.  Oneness.

Enigmas, paradox, Wordlessness, Oneness - although I didn't have language to put around it when I first experienced, those were the unspoken qualities & concepts that pierced through my dork view of my mind & self.  


All of this stirred up again last night, starting the section on Oneness.  Connection, relationship - my favorite words, automatically leading to thoughts of everything, the Universe, the Great Spirit, all in the Everywhen.  

I sat down to write a posting on how UNness v. Oneness, on how a life without boundaries can be either positive or negative, depending on the turn of our awareness.  Instead, I went back almost 25 years, to an afternoon watching a movie with Mom, down in the den with probably cups of hot tea & luscious shortbread.  

Which leaves me pondering an unanswerable question - could I have received the swoosh of such a radically different sense of self BEFORE that very moment in time, before being married to John, before seeing a whole self reflected in his face, before easing toward middle age?   

It's so easy, even perversely satisfying to whup ourself for not making greater strides in our lives, our relationships, our careers, to think "If it hasn't happened by now, it never will."  

What I've learned since that fabulously fateful day was to release a sense of times & all those woulda coulda shoulda memes.  Let it all unfold.  Embrace the enigmatic, the paradoxical, the unspoken & unseen.  Be. 

Enigma, paradox, Wordlessness, Oneness - gotta love 'em! 

You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with
his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent
bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on
the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean
spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?
I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its
jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the
petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

ENIGMAS, by Pablo Neruda, translated by Robert Bly 

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