Unfolding inside out

It’s interesting that the word universe, which integrates all the diversity that exists, etymologically means to pour/transform into one. Humans, at least in the West, have chosen a word that means ‘one’ to define that which contains everything. Poetic and powerful.

Who am I? I remember asking myself this question so often. Maybe it is the wrong question. Maybe I should ask ‘what’ am I. ‘Who’ implies an individual. Maybe the mistake is trying to see what distinguishes me from everything else, what individualises me. Maybe it would more logical, or more real, to see myself as part of a whole. Not a who, but a what.

A ‘what’ that forms part of an ‘everything’. An everything that contains all the ‘who’s. If we are all connected through the collective unconscious, then absolute individuality, absolute freedom, absolute isolation is not possible. No Blue in the extreme sense, not if we are all connected, minimally at least.

My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors.… Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche.

Carl G. Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis

Can we reach our centre Self individually without doing so collectively? How do we reach our Self as a collective? Is there such a thing as a collective Self? Shall we all reach our centre on our own and then harmonise it with that of others? If we are at least minimally connected, it is difficult to imagine that we can attain such a goal individually while disregarding its implications at a collective level.

When I was young, a friend of mine told me that we either all save ourselves together or no one will be saved. I rejected the idea, of course, but I’m not so sure now. Are we not all linked together, somehow, the unity of all? All and nothing. When everything is engulfed into One, there is nothing beyond, and ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ stop making sense, as they do not define opposite states any longer. In the end it’s the words… they define and limit what we want to convey. The give it a shape. And by giving it a shape they limit it.

There is an irony in all this. A misalignment between what we expected and what it now seems to be. When we find the centre of our individual Self, we will discover that we are connected to the Selves of the other human beings. A journey to the interior to discover that it is all connected to the exterior. Or to the interior of other (external) beings. A route to ‘out’ through ‘in’. An unfolding inside out. The trip to arrive ‘here’, where we always were, to realise who we are, maybe. From here to here. A trip that changes us… No. A trip that unveils our eyes and slowly removes the fake layers we covered ourselves with, to protect ourselves, to hide ourselves, to warm ourselves with the cold blue blankets.

We collect our shadow, our past selves, our child. We accept them. We forgive them. As if it were their fault… The trip to Here. From Nowhere to Everywhere. To being.

Nothing of what I write is new. Everything has been said before. I am but a clone of someone who has existed before me. Someone who has seen a wall in front of him, who has climbed a mountain and, when reaching the summit, has felt that others had stood there before. That he was just perpetuating the myth of Sisyphus. And then… there is no ‘then’. Only now. There are no prior prerogatives. Only now.