The Sublime Uniqueness That Is You

Rediscovering who we really are

(Image from Foka Wolf)

Imagine you’re in a soft warm bed, with every need you may have being met as you drift off to sleep. Now imagine that instead of waking up with your head on your pillow, it is instead being lashed by the rain as it comes at you sideways on the wind. You find yourself at sea, on a ship that has been sailing for as long as any one can remember. 

All memory of your bed is gone and the life that came with it. Nothing but this moment on this ship has your attention. But there’s a hangover of a feeling from that other world, poking through your subconscious in the form of a single, evasive thought that you manage to pin down to something close to: how did I get here?

You’ve been aboard this ship as long as you can remember and you know that it’s been sailing for generations. You’ve heard all the stories. You venerate this ship. 

You were born on it just as your parents and grandparents were - you know this to be true with all your being. Generations have known nothing else. You take it completely for granted.

As you look around you, you see that everyone is busy with their work. Heads down, efforting and absorbed. But you're startled. You’ve momentarily snapped out of the trance of work and into a trance of bewilderment - how did I get here?

What are we all doing? Where did this ship come from and when did it leave? 

Where are we going?

Just as you’re about to ask yourself what the point of it all is, someone sees you idling and hurries you back into work. No time to dawdle, must keep going, there’s a storm coming in. You nod in acknowledgement and get to work. 

Years pass. 

You watch as your parents die, one after the other in a space of weeks. You watch as your children are born and your friends age. You still feel the exact same as you always have, even though every time you look at the water and the people here with you on this ship, they look different. You look different. But something about you is unchanging and it’s that that is making you uneasy and unsure. It’s that which is stirring these questions in you, this feeling of something not being quite right.

You watch as the food supplies dwindle, the waters empty of fish, the freshwater tanks fall to their last few inches and as winter comes you know they’ll start burning the wood of the ship for fuel. First the furniture, the fixtures and the fittings, then the lifeboats and the boards of the ship itself. Until there’s nothing left. This has all been prophesied of course but no one dares to speak of it. Sometimes the truth seems too painful to tell. The sweeter the lie, the easier to swallow. 

Something inside of you knows that this ship isn’t it. This isn’t the full story. It’s an anomaly, a blip.

And in that searching for a story, in listening to that something inside of you that longs to know from where you have come and to where you are going, you realise that something is calling you home.

This journey started for a reason, we were heading somewhere, we believed in something greater than just this ship. This ship is just a vessel, a means and not an end - it was always meant to take us somewhere, it had a purpose, it meant something.

We just got lost along the way. 

The figureheads and engravings were the first things to burn to keep from growing cold but the warmth didn't last long. Maps were long ignored and written off as nothing more than ancient scribbles of a bygone time when we were nothing more than children. The stars that once wrote the epics of creation were stripped naked of their meaning; nothing more than cold, distant light that’s elsewhere and elsewhen.

Being lost became the default so much so that it disappeared from view, just like water is to fish - ever present, yet invisible and only knowable by way of leaving it and returning.

No one alive on this ship has ever left and returned. 

Only disappeared.

It’s on the tip of your tongue but you can’t quite work it out.

It’s calling you again, that thing inside you, that memory of a dream you’re not quite sure you had.

It’s calling you without words, drawing you nearer, filling you with love. It knows who you are and why you're here. It knew you from before.

Your legs feel weak, there’s a heaviness in your belly and your throat feels as though it may close tight shut.

“Wake up!” you shout just before you fall to the floor with the uncontested heaviness of death.

You’re gone to those around you, your flesh and bone stays with them but you are very much alive as you wake to the soft warmth of your bed and the loving embrace that has been holding you all night through.

This is where you’ve always been, dreaming countless lives, one night after the other.

And so it is right now. Just as the dream character is to the dreamer, what you think of as ‘you’ is to the entire universe. To help you approach seeing things from such a view, try the following.

Imagine you are floating in space, too far from any star to see any light. Total darkness. In fact, you have no senses whatsoever. From this state, how would you know that you exist? What would remain in you that could say “I am”.

Pure awareness, pure consciousness. Indistinguishable from the universe itself. An awareness that can never be stained by experience, that can never be hurt.

And as with every other part of the universe, can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed.

This is the space that opens up and holds us in deep meditation and plant medicines. It’s the space of trance in ancient cultures. It’s the recipient of prayer and the place of our origin.

And it’s been lost from view because you can’t see it, measure it or have any objective understanding of it. It is pure subjectivity. It is beyond science. It is beyond words. It’s the ultimate, primary state of all things. And here in the West, we’ve lost our connection to it. In doing so we’ve created separation. A separation that leads to a distorted sense of self. As something made and put here. As something different and cutoff from everything else.

We’ve become blind to our entanglement, our interconnections and our interdependence. How else could we destroy anything and think we were not destroying ourselves?

Thousands of years ago this space created the religions of the world, most of which went on to forget and have become no different than the crew of the ship we just imagined. Cleared away by reason and a different kind of ‘enlightenment’.

With few exceptions (to my mind anyway: Advaita Vedanta, Theraveda Buddhism, Taoism and non-dual philosophies) these religious teachings may profess to have a map but they’ve long mistaken it for the territory and in so doing, lost sight of where they came from and where they’re meant to be going. Too busy fighting over the key on the map or the drawing of lines to remember what the point of the map was in the first place.

Having lost the space our old Gods once held, we’ve lost a part of ourselves, our depth, our rootedness and our connection. We are not in the universe, we are a part of the universe. The irony is that it is science that has killed religion but that is rediscovering God as the universe itself. It’s a odd spiral that’s got our culture in a spin as we struggle to balance head and heart in a world where we no longer have a shared understanding of who and what we are beyond our obvious material bodies.

We are to the cosmos as a leaf is to a tree. This space will never go away. It’s us. No matter how deep we sleep, it will always find a way to call us back home. Back to the loving embrace of its soft, warm bed and another day of discovery for a universe that knows itself through the sublime and wonderful uniqueness that is you.