The Direction of Intention

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This is an image from Mark. We’d just finished eating a ton of great Mexican food and were entertaining the last of our margaritas. We were talking about E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience, an amazing thinker thinking about the unity of knowledge. Mark loaned it to me a few months ago and I’d just finished reading it.

Just as physicists are searching for a unity principle, E.O. Wilson writes about the possibility of a similar discovery or revelation that might unify the totality of knowledge, a unifying the theory of everything. That is a huge undertaking and it is a book that warrants multiple readings.

Unity is the human impulse. Every culture has their tree of knowledge, the story moment when we slip out of the garden and into duality (separation), and every culture has their return to the tree of everlasting life, the return to unity, oneness. If you have a purpose, you are separate from the whole. If you seek, you are distinct from what you seek; you are separate. The desire for unity is the desire for self-knowledge, to know your self in wholeness. Perhaps the yearning for unity is the impulse beneath all knowledge (this is one of the ideas that drive truly powerful people).

This was the image that Mark offered: he said that consilience is like the Big Bang. When we talk about the Big Bang theory the question that always arises is, “What happened in the moment BEFORE the Big Bang?” Our search for unity, for wholeness progresses to a finer and finer point, simplicity that is possible when the separation consciousness begins to drop away. And, like a moth in a flame there is one brief moment when you know yourself (you must be distinct to witness yourself enter oneness) and in that brief moment, the moment of unity, the moment of being consumed by the whole, like the Big Bang, it is too much and explodes again into a zillion pieces and the pieces will begin again the search for wholeness. It is a cycle; to reach your fulfillment is to return to the beginning.

With every inhale there is an exhale. With every birth there is a death. Like the tides, the distinction of the water being in or out, of birth being separate from death, is only a trick of language, our attempt to contain and describe energy in motion that knows no distinction. Why not imagine the moment before the Big Bang the moment that consciousness finally approaches knowing itself as unity, and the experience of unity is such a powerful force that it blows itself out of the garden? Again. Like Sisyphus, it is not the arrival that matters but the engagement, the quest for wholeness that makes life sweet.

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