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Every mystic will ultimately tell you that we’re all ‘one-thing,’ and that ‘one-thing,’ is the entire universe.
Philosophically speaking this is known as ‘Monism,’ in which a oneness can be attributed to all people, places and events because they all spring from a single unknowable source at the beginning of time.
In that sense the big bang hasn’t finished, it’s still going on. The universe is expanding as it should, it’s cooling and giving way to entropy, creating complexity as it does so. That complexity comes to life in us, and all of the other beings, sentient or otherwise that share our planet.
To put it more succinctly, you are the big bang in the place that you call ‘here and now.’ The big bang might be going on everywhere, but wherever you are, you’re it! We’re all one thing and that ‘one thing is the entire universe.’
Mind and matter are two external polarities of this ‘one thing,’ in a similar way to the north and south poles of a bar magnet. You can’t have magnetism without polarity and you cant have existence without mind and matter being present together. A universe of pure mind has nothing to experience, likewise a material realm without ‘mind,’ cannot be experienced, both depend upon the other to have any kind of existence.
The Unity of Opposites
Life is the interplay between matter and mind, the observer and the observed.
Some mystics will also tell you that the entire universe is powered by Love and that the universe is the product of a benign and loving deity, that not only created everything but continues to recreate everything anew every single minute of every single day. The core of God is loving change and all things, places people and events spring forth from it.
There is only love and the absence of love. There is only God and the absence of God. There is only good and the absence of good.
Materialists will tell you that there’s no such thing as love, there’s no evidence to suggest a deity of any kind, loving or otherwise and that the sensation of love is just the product of chemicals in the brain handed down to us as a mere fluke of evolutionary advantage.
“Love is bullshit…’
Jacque Fresco.
What is love?
Yet for all of that, no one can describe what a feeling is. Yes you can be brain-scanned and examined to the hilt and sure enough, those chemicals will be present, but no one can satisfactorily answer the question. How do those chemicals create a feeling, and what is sensing those feelings? Do the chemicals create the feeling or does the feeling create the chemicals? Which acts first, mind or matter?
For want of a less cliched term, what is love?
Everybody knows what it is yet no one can accurately describe it. Yet we all know when we’re in love, or are feeling loving. If we’re lucky we all should know what it is to be loved.
How is it that everyone can have experience and knowledge of a state of being that we can’t accurately describe, that seemingly varies from person to person?
Perhaps love is as universal as a law of physics, it’s simply there, the background hum of the universe, as constant as gravity.
Perhaps when we are loving we simply let it in from outside of ourselves throwing ourselves open to an infinite well of enchantment that’s as vast as the universe because it is the universe.
Mystic Union.
It’s often said that God is love, so perhaps we should open ourselves to the love of God, (whatever you perceive God to be) and allow yourself to be filled divine rapture.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
Saint Paul (Saul of Tarsus) 1 Corinthians 13 – New International Version.
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
1 John, Chapter 4
