One shovel full of topsoil is an alchemy of connection between millions or billions of living things. Even one, two or three of those species, if damaged, takes the magic out of that soil, so that a seed falls, and instead of growing, justs withers and dies.
We are yet, for all our knowledge and technology, incapable of creating the integrity of a single shovel full of topsoil.
If this is the coplexity in soil, imagine the level of intelligence that makes up our own organism?
Cells that are made of mitochondria that once were viruses - we are literally a connection of relationships beyond our capacity to comprehend, and as we fall into life, no longer separate from life, as we become obedient to life’s intelligence, that is forever seeking to awaken in each of us, then we come to realise that level of relationship. Then we understand what our world needs and we understand how to make the sacrifices personally to allow that.
So many of us are still living at that sugar cube stage of life (a metaphor for the walls of the ego or separate self), we feel and believe in our sense of separation and we defend it. The person who is truly authentic, is the person who is in living intercourse with everyone else and the world, the person who is less authentic is living out of concepts and ideas that define the structure of the identity and limit the freedom of behaviour. And that person feels separate and needs to defend themself from the world and from others.
Life, through the friction of relationship and the experiences we live, is dissolving our sugar cube self and we melt and merge into the greater whole.
Authentic spiritual work makes us so individual, so singular and unique - as we really are! The person reading these words now is a being who will never exist again on this planet or anywhere else and has never existed before. Regardless of the notion of reincarnation, this physical manifestation, here now, is as one of a kind as the whole miracle of the Universe is mysterious.
To be authentic, to be ourselves, is to become the Disciple of Life. To become the disciple of our body, of its sensation, the disciple of the structure of our mind and how it works, to look at our thinking, and how it integrates or fragments us. It’s to be the disciple of our feeling, and to learn to come into living intercourse with more and more of this great mystery that is our world.
There is no end to this process.
Anyone out there who promises you final salvation is not telling the truth. Even the experience of fundamental realisation or enlightenment, where suddenly subject and object collapse into each other and the perception of the world and the experience of being are the same thing, even that experience does not exempt us in the next moment, becoming unconscious again and then we live the consequences of our unconsciousness.
Every single one of us may have had an experience of oneness. It may have overtaken you in the car, it may have over taken you in the bathroom or on a walk, you’ve had that experience and yet seconds later, each of us once again lives as though we were, really separate.
There’s a paradox here, that the more we realise our oneness, the more individual and unique we become, the more we are able to live authentically and uniquely as our selves, the more we become FRIEND to everyone else, and friend to this world, we live in concert and in communion.
This is true even in our bodies. I think the secret of all work in healing is not so much whether the immune system can push something away, but maybe we should rename it, that actually the intelligence of our organism is a commune system. Learning to come into communion with the world. Something we don’t understand how to be in relationship with is destructive to us; over time as we understand how to come into communion with that bacteria or that virus, it adds to our intelligence. The very friction of relationship, the struggle, between us and it, makes us more intelligent. We are constantly growing in intelligence, constantly growing in our capacity for community.
This is the challenge facing us now, when we hear a voice that wants to divide our community, that wants to simplify us instead of acknowledging the complexity of our relationship, simplify us by taking on some dogmatic stance that cuts us off from a part of ourselves, then we have to rise up and say NO, that cannot be true - look at a shovel full of top soil. Look at hundreds of billions of galaxies, with billions and billions of stars in each one.
We have begun to glimpse the incalculable mystery of our universe. Now if we would just simply recognise that WE ARE an extension, a process continuous with that mystery. The challenge then is not to exclude but to include, not to submerge our identity in someone else, and some form of codependency, but to be absorbed by and absorb the other into ourselves.
This is the gift of relationship with a spiritual master, this is the gift of relationship with anyone who we commit into intimacy with, and it is the gift for the self aware part of us when it begins to let itself be absorbed into the intelligence of our own feeling, into the intelligence of our own organism.
This is, to me, an incarnational journey, a journey of radical aliveness, a journey within which we are walking hand in hand with mystery, hand in hand with the infinite and it is a journey that is, in truth, fundamentally and essentially gentle.
It’s something we do not need to be afraid of. It is something that brings us home to ourselves. And at last we experience the privilege of being human and the freedom that is at the heart of ourselves and being alive.