If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick all your life.
Leonard Cohen
It is said that, overall, the individual tends to be unhappy not because of what they know but because of what they don’t know. In other words, we need to remember – to reconnect.
Humanity has long been in an age of separation, of longing, and this disconnection is at the root of many of our social ills. We are in crisis – individually, collectively, and soulfully. We are in a crisis of the heart, and society reflects these fractures. This longing of return, reunion, reconnection (however we wish to name it) has been at the core of the long-standing ‘spiritual,’ or developmental, impulse. The road of deep connection, of essential communion between Self and Source, is never easy nor automatic. It must be recognized and acknowledged. A good doctor does not offer a cure without first understanding the cause of what ills the patient. A good doctor also knows that the patient carries the potential for the cure within them.
Everything in life is in process. Nothing is static and all things, all life, is in movement. Yet there are different ways in which this movement can operate. It can be gradual, or it can be accelerated. Let us take the analogy of the acorn and the caterpillar. The acorn, as we know, carries within it all the information it requires to grow into an oak tree. What it requires from the outside is time and favorable environmental conditions. With these it can gradually, over many generations, grow up from the acorn in the soil to the grand oak tree that reaches for the sky. This is a gradual process that moves along a natural rhythm. We can say that this represents the general path of natural evolution. Then there is the caterpillar.
The caterpillar also contains within it all the information it needs for its future growth. It may not be fully aware of this, yet if it follows its instinct it will come to a point in its life where it feels the need to make a change. It will enter into the cocoon state and, if internal conditions are favorable, it will eventually emerge into a butterfly. That is, it will undergo a radical transformation into something new. It will not be an extension of its old self, like the oak tree is to the acorn; but will transform into a new state of being – if internal conditions are favorable.
What this analogy tells us is that there is gradual evolutionary growth as well as rapid, evolutionary transformations. As it is with the caterpillar, so it can be with humankind. We can choose to be recipients of environmental conditions that pertain to gradual development over generations. Or we can make a conscious, concerted effort to utilize internal conditions to trigger a rapid, and radical, transformation of our being.
Buckminster Fuller once said – ‘There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.’ The outward signs are not readily distinguishable. There are no neon signs announcing the capacity for transformation within. Yet it exists. The program for transcending ourselves is written into our code. What is required to unlock this code is correct intention. There are moments, epochs in the human evolutionary journey, when significant shifts in consciousness, understanding, and knowledge are required. We are living within one of these monumental transition periods right now. And what is more, we should be mindful not to become our very own obstacle.
It is said that when people actively try to guess a card or dice, they will make so many mistakes that it becomes statistically impossible for them to be wrong so many times. And yet why is this so? What has been shown by psychologists is that people are in fact guessing right more of the time, but some ‘inner censor’ prevents them from admitting it, and actually blocks this so that they guess wrong. We have an in-built detector that instead of proving us right is actually working to prove us wrong! A part of the human personality actively seeks to protect a person’s existing ways of thought – their status quo and sense of familiarity – in order not to push the boundaries beyond their conditioning, or social programming.
I am not alone in feeling that the time is now ripe, even over-ripe, for a change to come along. Our modes of understanding, and our parameters of thinking, have begun to shift – or are being forced to shift by changing conditions. The cracks in the dominant paradigms of thought are now becoming obvious for most to see.
In the modern world, people are beginning to understand, outside of religious terminology, the concept of the absolute one Reality. Science is now confirming what mystics and sages have said for centuries. The quantum sciences have validated that there exists an underlying quantum field – sometimes referred to as the quantum vacuum, plenum, matrix, or even the akashic field. From this underlying collective field manifests all materiality. That is, all material existence is fundamentally and inextricably interconnected; and all life is connected to the same underlying field. Further, that this underlying ‘unified’ field is not only energetic but also conscious. According to the ancient Vedic understanding – All is Brahman. There is nothing that is not Brahman, for outside Brahman nothing exists – because all is Brahman – the ancient. Within a unified mind, everything is in communication – or communion – with itself. After all, why shouldn’t we humans, as the physical-soulful beings that we are, be able to communicate with the Unified Source from which we manifested forth?
It is time now to heal our splintering and polarization. We can no longer find cohesion in our separate bubbles of existence. It is as if we are trying desperately to cling to an imaginary shoreline when we are in fact the ocean – and it is making us seasick. As Leonard Cohen so aptly put it – If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick all your life. We are feeling this seasickness among ourselves and across the world. We have been collectively doing things wrongly for so long that we think hobbling is the way to walk. It is time to straighten up. And it is time to straighten ourselves out. We need to find balance and cohesion within us, and within our diverse global-wide societies. But first, within each one of us. We need to make those internal conditions favorable to us so we can accelerate our growth out of the current cocoon state.
The question for us now is – can we find our way back home? What are the implications of purpose and meaning upon human life if we acknowledge that all existence is a manifestation from an underlying unified source? What are our responsibilities? How will this impact our human future? How can this enrich our lives? These are the important questions of our time – and the time is now.
It is time to realize our way back home. We’ve been taking the wrong road for too long now, and we cannot afford to stray any farther. It’s time to bring it on home – to bring ourselves home.
