Our Tolle Quote for the morning’s talk: “There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life.” 

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Let there be One! is the categorical imperative of the cosmos. In religious unity is basic The Jewish prayer tells it all: “Hear, oh hear! Oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The muslim tradition is “If not Unity then no Divinity.” Plato, Plotinus, and Parmeniides, the German Idealists were all imbued with the One. Unity, forever, is a regulatory principle in art, music, drama, philosophy, and theology. (Albert Low)

And I might add Unity of the One is basic to politics. What we are going to talk about is what the One is: is the One the simplest unit possible or the Whole that includes all units? Is the One exclusive of inclusive? Do we get to the One by centrifugal force or centripetal, zooming out or zooming in? The Zen Koan is that if you choose exclusive you are wrong; if you choose inclusive you are wrong; now…which it it? You must choose because the commandant must be obeyed. Let there be One.

Okay, here’s a clue. If we go towards the One that includes everything, the mind uses intuition. If you go towards the One that is reduced to that which cannot be divided (like an atom), the mind uses analysis. Both means of awareness are valid and necessary, but they are incompatible, yet mutually dependent. You can only use one at a time, but you need both to obey the commandment and find the Holy Grail of the One.

This is not a philosophical problem, an entertaining problem, an intellectual problem, but an existential question. Who am I? How can I be one with life and be a separate Unit, of the One that cannot be divided? When we are divided, you know what that feels like. We slip into a downward spiral, a vortex of panic. Without our center (our Oneness) we have no being, no life, no stability, certainty, and meaning. And yet, if we can’t belong to a greater One, which starts with relationship to group relationships, to larger and larger wholes or ONEs, if we can’t belong to something greater that our isolated one self, we are not human.

Being human then is to belong and not belong, to be the greater One and to be the single One…and these two One’s are incompatible because you can’t do both at the same time, yet…yet to be whole is to be both. This basic ambiguity creates a tension, a dynamic intention to find the One, to create the One….BEing One with Life is a dynamic thirst, I dynamic intention to create life. So life is already whole, but unless we are active creating new whole, we fall into the duality of separation from ourselves and life. We have a lot to talk about.

In the posted picture, this myth of the Middle Ages was a metaphorical way of understand this ONE that is Two through the story of the Unicorn. The goddess is the whole that includes all, and the unicorn with its phallic horn is the Single One that cannot be reduced.

Sound is good but I don’t know why it’s out of focus. Get one thing right and another thing goes wrong….Where’s the One, where’s balance? One keeps working at it. You can never arrive at the One and hold it steady, you can never fix the One so it doesn’t change…Life is change. The One is dynamic, always changing, always arriving. So never, never be upset when you have the One and then lose it. Change is Loss: change is gain. Change and life is Loss/Gain. They dance together.

When you ride a bike, balance is dynamic, balance is staying in balance on a moving landscape. You move with a moving world, like when you surf a wave. One balances on a wave through the medium of the surf board.Lose balance and you wipe out. We are always wiping out and balancing at the same time. Balance is a moving wipe out. One wipes out and restores balance simultaneously. So where is the whole or the One that is balance? The One is upstream of the moment. The actual wave is already a wipe out, so the wave you are balancing on has not happened yet. The wave you balance on is upstream of Now, for now is already over. By the time our senses compute the data of Now, it is already over. The ONE we are seeking is upstream of Now.

We can’t find what is not Now or upstream of Now, but we can get in alignment with it, and that alignment is creative, the same creativity of the cosmos. The Cosmos is a creative Wave, and when we get in alignment with it, we are in balance with it, and we ride life because life is doing us. We do life and are being done by life at the same time. This is liberation.

Let there be One means surrender to the One, surrender to balance. If you have every tried to balance, or hit the mark, you know that you can’t balance by effort, but by surrender. So balance is something that we already always have..why…because the Cosmos is in balance. The part surrenders to the whole and finds balance and the feeling of being at home.