I vividly remember an old moss-grown brick wall that I came across as a fifteen-year-old. The scarred beauty of crumbling brick and overgrown vines captivated me and I recall that simply viewing the wall left me frustrated. Running my hands along it added to this nebulous frustration. I wanted somehow to merge with the wall, to eat it and be eaten by it, to become one thing.
Several years later, sitting in my university coffee shop, I attempted to appreciate and visualize the cumulative points of view held by everyone else in the café. That person was staring at notes, that one was looking into the face of their friend, and so on. As I accumulated points of view and sustained my visualization, I was suddenly engulfed—and fearful of drowning—in a sea of perspectives. It was a struggle to raise my one point of view out of the mass and reassert my place, but for one tiny fleeting moment I was a small part of a shifting miasma of selves.
To observe the universe and count yourself out of it is doing a disservice to both the self and the greater world. How can I rightly observe something without including my eyes and brain in the equation? The result would be a shoddy half-picture of what’s going on. It would be missing the point, to make a pun of it. Before solids, planes and lines can be drawn or imagined, there must be the starting point, the singularity, the one that leads to two and three and so forth. Now, zero is not for the faint of heart, so I’m happy to always begin my counting at 1.
Non-duality, that golden goose egg of mystics, seems to be this place of non-separateness, a vantage point of regarding the totality of existence without omitting the observer. It’s me and my precious wall. It’s all of us in the café at the same time. It’s the whole planet as one organism and beyond. It’s vast galactic clusters leaving us in the dust.
And if we don’t finally cut out the deadly habit of separating ourselves from the rest of creation, we’ll follow that continual pageant of creatures heading toward extinction, and we’ll have missed the point.
