"I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together."
Once upon a time, I read the Tao Te Ching and thought it was nonsense. I was young. I thought Lao Tzu was just talking in circles trying to sound complex and that there was not any real depth to the words. When I heard the lines quoted above from The Beatles and when Marvin Gaye said "everything is everything", I thought they were just using too many drugs and experiencing intoxication wisdom.
Youth is funny that way. You think you know everything, you really think you've got quite a few things figured out. It's a pretty great feeling, the sense of having your ducks in a row, and more on the horizon ready to line up for you.
Then you grow.
Your mind gets filled with landscapes and experiences and loves and losses. You meet people with lives different than any you could have imagined. You visit places where unfamiliar customs make you question why things are done the way they are done in your culture. You evolve from certainty to the helplessness of knowing very little for certain. If you are lucky, you can find peace in that uncomfortable state of openness. You can see that it is a gift.
You may pine for the sense of stability that the absolute beliefs of youth gave you while taking refuge in the flexibility of wisdom. The beautiful peace of bewilderment.
You may feel oneness with people, plants, oceans, and animals. You may sense that there is an unseen order. The Golden Ratio in growth patterns of flowers and leaves on branches. Perfect spirals of the chambered nautilus reminding us of our own potential for growth, as it leaves behind and seals off the space that it has outgrown. As above, so below – this shape is repeated in galaxies.
Too many clues to ignore. Not enough evidence to know. This is our conundrum and the origin of our striving. We focus that drive to know outward, at best, developing cures for disease and saving forests – at worst being consumed by greed and consumerism, but truly that is because the thing we seek feels impossible to achieve. It's akin to a book written in an unknown language. It means nothing to us if we can't decipher it.
With practice, we can learn to read it. Still, buying new records seems so much more pleasing than studying all evening. We have grown lazy and it is fracturing us at the soul level, making us sick, and ruining our societies.
