One

There’s a man standing on one leg, finger in the air as if about to make a point. You can see his heartbeat, hear his fervor, feel his spirit. He’s a stranger who seems like a brother.

There’s a caterpillar in the grass; a newborn, a baby. A world of shadows, a dewy silken web. She wiggles forward, knowing nothing, knowing only to keep moving. Her awareness only a few moments old, her consciousness slowly slowly growing hunger.

There’s an ancient spirit, an idea, a flow. It wears a beard, it wears a crown, it wears a homespun garment. It is known but often forgotten. It plays the guitar. It sings, it dances, it cries, it makes love, it loves, it holds hands, it meditates in silence.

There’s a drum with no hands to beat it; dry, alone, abandoned in the desert. Left behind by the sands of time. But a rhythm moves on.

There’s a crowd, a faceless mass of individuals, a sort of collective gathered for some nebulous reason.

When the man speaks, some of us listen, some only hear, and some continue pattering side conversations. “Listen,” he says. A brief hush descends. He speaks quietly, calmly, slowly. He’s not a big man, but he seems to grow in stature as his words flow. He talks about change. We sip beers. Someone carves initials in the bartop. He mentions the weather. He presses hand to heart. Someone sinks the five-ball, side pocket. The low murmur of conversation resumes.

“Do you you struggle for answers? Do you wrestle with things in this life? Listen.”

We listen. He speaks of humanity, of brotherhood. He reminds us of the fractal nature of our species. Someone rolls her eyes. Shadows dance on the brick walls, cast by old-fashioned chandeliers. He mentions light. Darkness. Molecular building blocks. Energy and what matters. Someone comes out of the restroom.

“Listen, we’re all malcontents at heart; we’re all the same. We’re all made of the same stuff. The same indefinable stuff.”

We listen. We’re drawn. We frown and shrug, but we’re listening. He explains there’s no reason to bullshit, no reason to hate. What’s the difference, he makes us think, between red and green—beyond a bit of wavelength? What’s the difference, we then wonder, between male and female—beyond a fork in development?

“What’s in a name?”

He says he’s Son, Daddy, Sweetheart. Depending on who’s asked, he’s Teacher, Sir, Taxpayer. Sometimes he’s even called Next!...but only briefly. He’s his name, but also more. Also less. He is everything. He is nothing. He is holy. He shits after eating.

Someone whispers, “Does the pope shit in the woods?” No one laughs.

“Only when he’s camping,” the ready reply.

We laugh. We listen.

“Do you hear what I’m saying? You and I, we wrestle with the same mysteries. We’re together in this enigma.”

Caught up on your string theory? We’re all just patterns of energy.

Singular plurality. All and one, sharing the same little dimension, whirling through one of eleven sets of infinity. God. Unified Theory. Energy. What’s the difference?

“Step back,” he soothes. “Don’t look TOO deep. Down there lies insanity.”

We laugh. We listen. When he pauses for breath there’s silence, echoing through hearts and ear canals. “Step back and look at your own patterns. What’s the difference?”

Words. Labels. Borders. Habits. Identities. Names. A thing has value only if value is assigned to it. Without definitions, a word is just a pattern of sound, or a pattern of shapes, or a pattern of experiences combining solely for the sake of communicating, of connecting, of fighting the loneliness of being One. Without the price tag, a diamond is a small rock.

“So what can we do?” someone pipes up after a moment.

We wonder aloud how we can change the world. We murmur amongst ourselves about whether there’s any way to fix human nature. We ask, isn’t this just The Way It Is?

“No!” he says, laughing and weeping. “It’s just a habit.”

Seriously.

We listen. We turn away. We’re skeptical. We’re derisive. We’re polite. We’re attentive.

“If you think about it,” he says, “we’re all just a mass of learned behaviors.”

If we suck on the nipple, he explains, we get a reward: our stomach stops gnawing. If we show our teeth and wrinkle our eyes, we get attention. If we move legs in a certain rhythm, we advance forward. If we make particular sounds, people understand.

We are all Pavlov’s dog.

“The same way you stop biting your nails,” he suggests, “you can stop labeling, dividing, subjugating.”

He asks us, “What does ‘mine’ mean? What IS this eye that possesses things? What’s the point of acquisition?”

Maximizing survival. Making shelter a castle, and sustenance a feast. Keeping the well close at hand, under constant surveillance lest another survivor come and take it for himself, herself, itself. Survival of the individual to ensure the strongest success of the species. Competing with ourselves. But everything has a lifespan: individual, tribe, species, planet, star—even life itself. Competition. Life feeds on life, as it has and will.

It’s just redistribution of energy. Remember elementary school? No energy is gained nor lost. Just reorganizing of patterns. The infinite puzzle.

Boom! Our heads explode. Briefly we are all a puddle of collective dissociation, a mass of freewheelin’ vibrations, a conglomerate of awareness. Photosynthesis revives us. We’re seeing the light. There is no path, no prayer, no salvation. There just is (also was and will be). Enlightenment is the discovery that there is no enlightenment.

“Dig it?” he asks with a smile.

We nod silently, stooping to scoop up pieces of ourselves and wondering how to reassemble the puzzle.

“Stop!” he insists. “Observe. Open your eyes—all three. Widen your gaze to include your nose, mouth, skin, ears, awareness. Widen your gaze to include your eyes. Take it all in. Be here now.”

We’re here. We’re listening. Also seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling, knowing.

“Who are you?” he asks.

Six billion different answers at any given time. But all the same. All ways of expressing Existence.

To be.

Four simple letters, a tetragrammaton, used so often we forget what they really mean, how powerful they really are. The story is a metaphor. Everything, really, is a metaphor. Every word an analogy for an infinitely complex experience, a multitude of meanings.

“But don’t worry!” he says. “Your life is still meaningful—it’s just that YOU create the meaning.”

Which is pretty cool, it turns out.

“I don’t ascribe to your dogma,” he says, “but I relish your dedication to it. If you try to shove it down my throat, I’ll just swallow it, digest it, take from it what I need, and enjoy the release of what I don’t.”

And then the waste itself is digested and crumbled by other beings, and those pieces are broken down, and those fragments are divided, and those elements dissolved, and those energies redistributed, and those patterns vibrated apart, and so on...until they slowly slowly, bit by bit, reassemble.

The Big Bang exists all the way up and down the scales, a perpetual pendulum hanging in the balance.

Boom! We reassign the meanings of science, religion, philosophy, quotidian—and discover that they’re all words for the same thing. It all makes so much sense...though impossible to grasp.

“Revolution!” we demand.

“Revolution means one turn on a spinning wheel.”

Oh yeah.

“‘What goes around, comes around’ doesn’t mean literal give-and-take,” he explains, “though it also does. It means we’re all on the same merry-go-round. Riders get off and on, and the rhythm is heard differently by all, but it’s always going round. Merrily.”

“So what do we do?” we beg. “What’s the answer?”

“Do? Don’t ‘do’ anything. Just be. Enjoy the dance, however you interpret that.” Turns out there is no answer. And beware anyone and anything that offers one. Especially just one.

In the doorway, one of us stands with arms crossed. Frowning. Head shaking No almost imperceptibly, disagreeing with what this man has been saying.

“But remember also, Shiva is an equal part. Creation and destruction are not one thing and another. They are the ebb and flow, the gravity that gives rise to all things (and nothings). Narrow is just as important as wide. Silence gives meaning to noise. The space between these marks makes them words. We are what we are as much as we are what we are not.”

“No, goddamnit,” barks the dissident with crossed arms. “You can’t tell me that the meaning of life is that it’s meaningless. That’s bunk, man. That’s a circular argument.”

“A circle is a bit simplistic,” Teacher says. “Unless you think of it sort of metaphysically as a description of a point traversing around infinity until falling into itself, circumscribing its own oneness. A circle is the simplest and the most complex. A point and an infinity.”

“Come on…!”

“Ok here, think of this. I’ll show you a real-world paradox.” Our eyes track him as he moves across the room. “Do you think I can make a shape, a three-dimensional object with only two faces?”

“No, of course not.” We’re all familiar with the principles of geometry. Remember playing with blocks and calling it Learning?

“Check it out.” He holds up a strip of paper. Points out its thickness—it’s an elongated flattened block. Points out each of six sides. Twists the paper once and tapes its two short edges together. “Now how many?”

Trace a finger along the flat side. A circle all the way around. Trace a finger along the edge. A circle all the way around. Every surface covered. One shape. Two sides. Three dimensions. Five senses. A sideways eight.

“Ta-da! Magic. Illusion. Immutable laws disproved. Call it what you will. Believe or disbelieve at your own peril. Cut it along its length and it’s still One.”

“You can’t tell me this is all an illusion. You can’t tell me I imagine myself. You can’t.” The dissident glances at a beer mug gripped in a trembling hand. Looks up. Frowns. Hefts the glass. Says, “Alright, if it’s all illusion; if everything’s just imagined, tell me this…” Walks over calmly. Smiles. Raises the glass. Snarls. Swings.

Blood.

“How does illusion feel?”

A hollow echo in our ears.

A collective gasp.

The clatter of a chair. The thump of a body and the creak of floorboards.

Silence.

Then someone stands. Lifts a finger in the air. Takes a deep breath. And starts to make a point...