We Share A Kinship With All

Think of a beautiful crystal sphere. Look at the shimmering facets on this crystal.

Think of how each of us came into our lives to reveal, to honor and to celebrate a particular facet of the crystal, the magnificent whole.

And whether your facet is revealed through the Christian encounter or the Hubble telescope, the crystal needs all of us to reveal itself fully. It requires a collected work. No one of us - and no one discipline or one religion - has the whole truth. And isn’t that wonderful!

For my part, I want to honor and celebrate the whole shebang. I will start with part of a poem by Hafiz (a Sufi mystic poet, like Rumi):

The saint knows that Existence

Is like a sublime chess game with God.

And the Beloved has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now tripping over Joy.

Now, what is this “fantastic move” for you? What is the fantastic move that trips you over joy?

For me, this fantastic move is indeed the whole shebang. I was 22 and sitting in a beloved wilderness above Telluride, Colo. As have many before me, I “got” the unifying nature of All That Is.

Part of the revelation that came to me was how to slip gently into the Mystery. It is this:

Strike from your vocabulary the word “universe.” No matter how vast or reverent that term may feel to you, it surely conjures up a basically visible, physical existence - atoms, stars and galaxies, like so much shrapnel ejaculated from the big bang, in cold, black, empty space.

But what I got that fateful day was not the visible, physical universe but the invisible field. A field of extraordinary creativity. A field of astonishing power, and even wisdom, and yes, love.

From my experience in the mountains, it was clear to me that this field unifies all things. I propose to call this the Unifying Field.

Will you please try to comprehend as a single field that which seems to possess the generativity to supply universe-building particles, the intelligence to issue forth 100 billion galaxies, the power to expand for trillions of years, and the organizational genius to nourish the whole show - not to mention birthing planet Earth and all of us inhabitants. Gobbledegook here.

Moreover, cosmologists don’t really even know how to talk about our beginning moments.

They talk about quantum foaming. They talk about how, in the first billionth of a second, the 10 trillion degrees of heat caused photons to burst into existence and then instantly vaporize into the void.

String theory, black holes, alternate universes, anti-matter, worm holes, strange attractors, hyperspace: The amazing thing about these concepts is that serious scientists the world over are seriously exploring them.

This is not science fiction. It is the cutting (and bleeding) edge of cosmology today. As we allow these “fantastic moves” to enter us, as we trip over joy with them, and to the degree that we explore them with open mind, we will feel a natural deepening of our spirituality.

I want to explore another fantastic move: The entire Unifying Field is expanding. When we human beings huddle by our telescopes and look at the other galaxies all around us, in whatever direction we look, we can see them all moving away from us in all directions.

What is the conclusion we are forced to - as strange as it is? That the Milky Way, nay, the Earth has to be the center of this outwardly expanding movement - the center of the Unifying Field. Now that is strange enough. What is even more confronting to our rational minds is that, in fact, all points of the Unifying Field are the center!

Astrophysicists call this omnicentricity. All points are the center. Those of a religious bent might call it omnipresence.

Here is a helpful image - that of raisin bread dough. In the oven, this dough will expand in all directions. Each raisin will move away from every other raisin.

Standing on any one raisin we would see all other raisins moving away from us in all directions. But if we were standing on any other raisin, we would see the same thing. Each raisin is the “center” of the expansion. Yet every raisin is a “center.”

Omnicentricity! This is a fantastic move!

I want to reveal omnicentricity even more deeply - as a gift. And what a gift it is.

How typically elegant of the Unifying Field that it would deign to gift you (and me and everything) with being the center of the universe. You are the center of the evolving, expanding Unifying Field! You!

This is no trick or play on words. If you let this in, this is a gift of staggering love.

The Unifying Field could not have arranged it any better, could not have been any more brilliant, in letting you know your importance. This gift is the ultimate balm for our woundedness, the penultimate confirmation of our true Nature as integral part of an unfolding Unifying Field.

But wait. …

Everyone is the center as well. Your mate. Your children. Even your enemy. But wait. So is every other species also the center. The hummingbird. The gardenia. Even the slim spore. Each is the center of the universe.

How democratic. How extraordinarily generous!

But what a confrontation to our personal narcissism. What an antidote to the poison of our cultural patriarchy.

Never again can we legitimately feel superior to anyone or anything. Radical equality. The one and the many reconciled. We all get to be special and not special at the same time. Our religious dogma can never legitimately be superior again. Our species can never again stub out another species.

The Unifying Field’s fantastic moves and omniconcentricity bestow upon us a gift: the ecstatic awareness of profound kinship to All That Is.

Behold!