In the sci-fi classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” our heroes discover that most of the once-familiar faces around them are, in fact, hostile aliens in cloned human costume. The story resonates precisely because it taps into that most primal of human fears: that each of us is truly alone in a hostile universe.
This is the Great Conflict of the Human Ego, the one each of us ultimately is destined to face. Our minds have convinced us that we are real; that we were born, we will die, and in between we will live lives of ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies.
To debunk that mistaken illusion is not exactly rocket science. Anyone with half a brain can look at, say, a tree and recognize that ‘it’ does not end and the rest of the universe begins. A child, of course, will point to the tip of a root or the end point of a leaf and suggest these are the demarcations. But a bit of education about photosynthesis, rain, soil, decomposition – not to mention quantum physics – puts an end to all of that.
And of course, the same can be said of you and I. There is no start or end to this thing called ‘me,’ no life separate and apart from the planet upon which it depends. Up from the sea rises this little wave of me, back down ‘I’ go, repeat.
So with just a modicum of inspection we see that everything truly does stem from everything else, no separation, no entities of any kind, and that there must indeed be a ‘singularity,’ a God from which some kind of Big Bang of imaginary existence originated, the start of the Dream.
And isn’t that kind of lonely?
Something in my consciousness must have known it was my final ayahuasca ceremony, that I’d soon be heading back to the ‘real world.’ And so rather than the usual phantasmagorical array of geometric structures and colors and sounds, there was simply a garden, stunning and calm, water and lilies, serenity itself. And then there was a gently arcing wooden bridge and on that bridge rested a beautiful white lotus flower and in that instant I became the lotus and I knew – knew beyond any doubt – that I was God, the One. And as this lotus-self opened came the universe itself and my heart felt as if it would explode from the joy of this recognition. It was beautiful and magnificent and blissful.
And then it was lonely. Terribly lonely.
I was the One, but in the immortal words of Three Dog Night, “one is the loneliest number,” and there was this terrible recognition that I created the universe so that I might know myself. This is, of course, not a new concept – the mystical types have been telling us this for years. But not discussed is the loneliness of that proposition, the idea of a cosmic Orphan forever hatching a universe of others that it might enjoy companionship.
Kind of a bummer, isn’t it?
