Drops

Last week I came across a brilliant line in one of the major social networks*. Sometimes, when one of these messages resonates with me and I see so many people sharing, circling a common place in this search that is not a search, it feels that it is not an individual quest, but that it is all of us, together, searching collectively or expressing it collectively. It feels that our individuality is just a construct. It feels as though each of us is contributing a little piece to the puzzle and that the collective unconscious is just flowing through us, that the many faces and accounts we see there and here are really… one? A multifaceted expression of oneness.

Maybe ‘I’ am not seeking… Maybe there is no I. Maybe I form part of a larger ‘being’ that seeks. I move with it, I see other cells that have this common purpose. It strikes me that one cell cannot save itself alone, that it lives and perishes with its fellows. That maybe this quest, be that what it may, is not mine alone. That I am not alone. All those (these) cells are here around me, attached to me, stuck, sharing my fate. This is a collective issue of sorts. I wonder if we are not a myriad of stars gravitating collectively around a centre, balancing each other out.

Acceptance of this reality feels both as a liberation and a heavy responsibility. No ‘others’, no separation. Maybe even the individual cells are an illusion. Transient tiny drops in an immense sea. They may separate from the whole for a few seconds, give themselves an identity, suffocate in a search for purpose, and eventually go back to the whole, where their individuality dissolves. There are no drops in the sea. A drop is only a drop when it is separated from the rest of the liquid, the flow. All water flows to the same place, eventually.

Some days I can see with clarity that the ego is ‘just’ a mental construct, that individuality is an illusion. It is interesting how the path to ourselves paradoxically leads us away from what we call ‘me’ to our dissolving in others. To a plenitude that empties our egos and at the same time provides our lives with meaning.

* “We are not humans experiencing life, but life experiencing a human” (@aikeho, I think). What a line!