One of my favourite ancient texts is the Tao Te Ching. In it ‘The Way’ cannot be named, because to name it is to separate it from itself, to identify a part rather than the whole.
Jesus said, “God’s kingdom is coming, but not in a way that you will be able to see with your eyes. People will not say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ because God’s kingdom is within you.”
Rumi said, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.”
The ancients understood the interconnectedness of everything.
I think the best metaphor for this is also the scientific equivalent… everything in the universe is a wave. Do you want to know something really interesting about a wave? Move deeper in, away from the turbulent shore of an ocean and watch a wave approaching you. The water doesn’t travel with the wave. The wave travels, but the water itself only ebbs and flows, rises and falls. The water molecules at the tip of a wave 30 feet away from you don’t reach you when the wave does, it essentially stays 30 feet away from you as the wave travels your way. The wave is ‘one’ with the ocean.
This interconnectedness is everywhere, and we are learning more and more about these connections. Some things we’ve known for a very long time because they are easily observable, like how women who live together will have their menstrual cycle synchronize. Some things are more recently discovered, like how trees will communicate and share food through mycelium, even across species to keep the forest strong. We are all connected. Life is all connected.
And yet humans fight over things that divide us. Things like borders, religion, politics, social status, and ideology. We choose not to see connections, but differences. We choose to ignore the messages in our ancient texts, and find reasons to ‘other’ those that are not like us.
We rather get lost in turbulence than recognize we are all part of the same ocean, all riding the ebb and flow of the same wave.
“Those who are right do not argue. Those who argue are not right.” ~Tao Te Ching
What will it take to recognize that we are all one… and that the arguing needs to stop?
