The essential understanding at the heart of all the world’s religions and spiritual traditions: We are all absolutely, radically One, and we are all totally unique expressions of that One.
In our essence we are all the same ocean – consciousness itself – but each of us is a totally unique and never-to-be-repeated wave of that ocean, an original expression of this unspeakable life force.
We are individuals but indivisible, we are one but we are not the same, and to fall too deeply into either ‘side’ of that universal equation leads to suffering, either in the form of depression and neurosis (getting bogged down in our personal story with all its fears, and exhausting ourselves with our never-ending quest to improve and perfect and save ourselves in the future) or, on the other side, in the form of spiritual bypassing and premature transcendence (repressing or even denying our humanness, losing our humour and humility, pretending to be ‘above’ human concerns, floating away into blissfully painful ungrounded transcendent states and even psychosis, and losing our lifeblood, that essential love and compassion for ourselves and all humanity).
To live passionately with the paradox of the absolute and the relative, of nothing and everything, of personal and impersonal, of being the ocean and, at exactly the same time, being a unique and never-to-be-repeated wave of that ocean, to see the mystery and even the joke and the joy in this paradox, to dance with it without trying to ‘solve’ it or come to extreme mental conclusions about it, is the beating heart of this creative adventure that we call life.
The Absolute is not absolute, it relativises itself absolutely, and that is the essence of love.