I connect wide dots in this talk, trying to bring the idea of Atonement down to our everyday mind. We are really shortchanged by our cultural conditioning to believe that we are just things bumping into each other and not mythic gods, each of us the Center of the Cosmos, creating the Cosmos as we go, creating worlds as we go. But we believe we are the created and victims of either God, satan, or blind chance. Whether secular or religious we are still the victims who have no say in the world we live in.

Atonement in the contest I’m using it is when two mutually dependent but separate object comes together as the One without a second. In the embrace of atonement—when you are reunited with someone you are separated from—there is no separate Ego self watching the watch to see how long the embrace with last. Atonement is death. Death in life is Atonement. Love is death, death is love….think about that.

In the embrace of love—and this embrace due to the force of the ego can only last for a few moments—we die, and then come back to our separate sense of self renewed. Everything is different. The world has flipped inside out for a moment. And this moment can turn a whole life around.

Lets look at it this way. Death is separation; life is union. The One that is Many: the life that is death. Or in religious terms: The Body of Christ (the One) and the dismembered humanity (the many). Through religious ritual we recreate the actual everyday union of life in atonement with the Other, or our separated half. Life IS One, but we break life into the many through our perception, the operating system of the mind. That’s the way it is.

The urge to Love, to create, to union and to be whole is all the urge to be the ONE that has no second. The reason we can’t find that One in life is because we have to give up our identity with the many, our separate thingness.

Drinking from the skull  is a symbolic act of making death life, life death…of restoring unity through an action. We become alive when we don’t fear death. That is a common experience. We give medals to the “heroes” who act fearlessness in the face of death. They drink from the skull.