Quote of the Week 149 - A Vision of Oneness

I’m here at the intersection of flesh and spirit: a six-foot-tall biped with my feet on the ground and my head in the clouds; 165 pounds of muscle and fat and memories and opinions walking upright on an oxygen-rich planet, breathing in and breathing out, which has been my habit – one of my better habits – for sixty-five years. This morning I’m feeling particularly buoyant because I dreamt that beings from an advanced civilization gave me a mind-expanding drug. Well, their civilization was certainly advanced when it came to hallucinogens. Or maybe it had just been too long since I’d had the blinders removed and glimpsed the radiant mystery at the heart of existence. I experienced oneness not as a mere abstraction but as an undeniable reality, as plain as the nose on God’s face. I knew in my bones, in my cells, in the very atoms of “me” that everyone is part of the same living intelligence, as are the trees, the rocks, the sky; that separateness is an illusion; that death is nothing to fear. One look at my benevolent companions told me that they knew it too. It was hard to say whether they’d also taken the drug or had evolved this way after innumerable virtuous lifetimes. In my dream, it didn’t matter; I’d woken up.

--From Sy Safransky’s Notebook, The Sun magazine, October 2010, Issue 418