These are some old notes i wrote in my time when i was very much lost in depression and also drowning in the exhausting patterns of a human world of dogma and religious superstition, and wondered about the origin of the intuitive beautiful mystical experience that lies beneath. For the first time since i was taught to separate unity of the world into words, i felt the unity again, and i felt myself with it. Not through books or ritual. I didnt find it. It found me. The trees, the earth, carried me, when i broke down in cold streets of dogma. These notes i wrote to describe my experience of a time, when i could not carry myself, and nothing carried me. You see, the nothing, the dark side of the moon. The other side of the coin. The what you are not doing. These are the roots you are looking for. When flowers wither, resources return, new flowers grow. We are both individual flowers, and also as one the field that is flowering.
Religion can be divided into two main parts. Dogma and spirituality. The one is misunderstood words, the other is tangible meaning. Every religion has a beauty at its core yet over time the essential parts got covered in a huge pile of trash made out of misconceptions of simple things. The reason I choose not to define my religious views in a single term is because of the high potential of words to be misinterpreted, so i took my time to describe the things i like to make myself remember a bit more thoroughly. BEING A PART OF THE WHOLE - When i am not there is; i am being carried by the whole of happening (which i call nature, universe, cosmos, or 'the force'). My heart beats without me doing anything. Parts of happening like me may disappear and the whole will still be. There is a feeling of belonging to and disolving into unity as a whole. A feeling of empathy. - Like all parts, i am involved in a diverse dance of changes and interactions among the inseparable parts of the whole (both being influenced by and contributing to). There is a feeling of wanting to unfold, to flourish, to blossom, to be diverse and to dance, and this feeling is driving all parts, and expresses itself in me in the complex form of a reflecting and self-reflecting process that, while it can be limited from having to reflect on things like emotions, pain, illness, strong belief or habits, still strives to explore and to engage in diverse interactions, and thus to unfold and flourish and give life to diverse subprocesses (thoughts, relationships, etc). A feeling of curiosity. BEING THE WHOLE AS THE PARTS We are the whole, dancing, a unity looking at each other from manifold perspectives. We are not a separated whole, we are a folded whole. A unity manifold. A dancing serenity. Simultaneously we are both unity and diversity. Flowers need roots, roots want to flower. In this tension the web of life is spun, with raindrops that each reflect each other. You can never be separate from the whole. The whole is always there. Thus if you miss the whole, it is not because the whole is gone, it is because where you are the whole is so busy being the part that it can not see that it is the whole. A wave doesn't find back to the ocean by growing a huge tsunami, a wave finds back to the ocean by falling. Being the wave it seems like falling and disappearing, being the ocean it is like breathing in. And as the wave disappears and becomes the ocean you realize that deep down you as a wave did always have this subtle dark and warm feeling and that this feeling was really you the ocean remembering yourself while you were waving. Where there seems to be nothing, where there seems to be the other side of the coin, the shadow of the mountain, the underside of the embroidery, the dark side of the moon, the wild weeds, the pathless woods. Where you feel happening beyond your attention, you feel the remainder of the whole, that which you are missing. And to feel the remainder as something inseparable from that part of happening where you are, is when the universe remembers its unity. An ocean cant dance if the waves don't feel their hydrogen bonds. A tree can't flower if the flowers are cut off their roots. Thus this feeling of unity roots your mind, so you the unity can flower in beauty without always missing itself, the unity. SO WHO ARE WE? So cosidering these two aspects, it makes sense to think of each other as not just being a part of the whole (as that leaves out your underlying emergence from unity), but rather being the whole in the perspective of a (constantly changing) part. WHAT ABOUT GOD? How to live without god? Well, that's a matter of definition. If we use the word 'god' to refer to the most all-embracing of what there is, then it would by definition be impossible to live without it, as we would be a part of it. Now, i do appreciate the feeling often associated with this definition of 'god', but for me, god is an ill-defined word. I prefer the words 'nature', 'universe', 'cosmos', 'the force' or simply 'the whole'. To me, nature is the whole thing that we are embedded in; the soil on which existence is taking place. It is what is there regardless of whether we are aware of it. Nature is what we are, when we are not. I don't care so much about the word which i use to talk about it, however, as about the feeling i associate with it (since those feelings are the most direct signals our roots provide to not fall apart in an illusion of disconnectedness). It is invariably immediate, warmly intimate and deeply inspiring. Probably when you mean god, you mean the same, but i don't like this word, as it is often associated with bearded old men. ARE YOU A PANTHEIST? Secretly i am a pantheist (similar to what is defined here: pantheism.net), but the problem with this word is that when you talk with the wrong ones, they reply 'aah, you believe god is everything', but i want to avoid using the word god, as it has been made completely unusable over time, which is why sometimes, i still think i should better not call myself in any way... For in the end, words often make separate what is one.
