Life flies past us at the speed of light. It flies so quickly that the majority of living is lost, reduced to fragments that our brains store as something we call memory. Memories are tied to emotions – the stronger the emotion, the deeper the grooves are cut, the more vivid the memory. Even without knowing the science, or comprehending neurology, this lesson is learned and remembered subconsciously – avoid pain, but when it is unavoidable, remember it. Those who spend a lifetime only learning this introduction to the larger lesson never grow beyond a life bound within walls defined by reaction and fear.
Even when we learn, and even when we open our awareness to what lies beyond those walls, we may slip back into them, driving the gates closed with ferocity, the loud slamming shut falling on ears deafened by survival’s primacy. But after the crisis, or crises, can we find that openness again? And what does it mean?
If someone has closed doors once opened, and finds themselves behind high walls, there is always a reason. If life has treated one so cruelly that walls are the only means left to survive, that person deserves compassion and respect because what they need is healing. The tendency of those outside the walls is to take this to the opposite extreme of fear, avoidance, mistrust and abandonment of the one who has retreated. As one who has had to retreat behind walls more than once in my life, I can tell you that such actions ensure healing can never occur. For it is only love and compassion that can draw the wounded from behind their walls.
But what is love? Humans have spent thousands of years trying to understand it and our modern era has perhaps failed more miserably than any other in its quest. Our scientists are fond of reducing love to biochemical responses and mating urges. How pathetic and sad, even tragic, this is. Anyone who has experienced a true heart-opening moment of connection, of flow between and with another person, understands that love is not some random biological response to visual stimuli. These are realms of lust and desire and they have their purpose, but they are no pinnacle.
Love is something wholly different. It draws our world to us and into us. It opens a gate to receive. It opens our minds to possibility and horizons we never imagined. Love of the world is what inspires us to create, to muse, to learn, to grow, to know. Love is what drives us, and what brings us back to our center. Love is what gives us the capacity to struggle when we have traveled far past hope. Love is what sends us forth into the world and brings us home. Love is what sets one foot in front of another when there is no strength left.
Biological drives are mindless and objectifying. They are the appetite without thought, lust without need, digestion without taste, consumption without enjoyment. If we are nothing but biological drives, there is no need for our type of existence. We could easily have remained nothing more than single cells that consume, reproduce and die within minutes of our birth. In such an existence, the pure replication model of DNA would have been remarkably successful and could have simply stopped there. Specialization is simply unnecessary. Life would have stopped evolving beyond such an existence were it not for the awakening of awareness and the awakening of love. There would have been no need.
In quantum mechanics, entanglement is when identical actions occur between two distant bodies. (I’m not going to venture further into the topic so please, scientist types, don’t start jumping on my head because I’m trying to make a point.) Entanglement is the outward evidence of a deeper principle that is otherwise invisible. It is the expression of something more powerful than biology, because it is what lies behind and beyond. Entanglement is a dime-store word for something so remarkable and exquisite that we truly don’t have a word to encompass the reality of it. Except perhaps for that tricky, elusive concept called Love.
I’ve had notable moments throughout my life where I occupied a state of Flow so profound, every instance within it was peppered with Shining Experiences. Every action I took flowed out of me as though I and my environment were completely undifferentiated – as though we were made of the same stuff (we are/were) and my Mind was only another synapse in a larger Mind. It was as though everything I did fell into place before I did it, no matter how mundane or ordinary or insignificant. Everything became significant, because all things, within, without, were made of Light.
What words to use? How does one encompass the ineffable in a society where the ineffable is mocked and derided by so many who achieved only the first step of this journey, scorned the rest, and demanded that we as a people cease all further exploration? I grapple with concepts and words to describe and shape those things because they lie beyond a horizon that we, as a species, only rarely visit. Most of our moderns never visit or contemplate it. Like the ancient fire bringers, the women who pioneered our transition from animal to thinking, walking being, I have spent some measure of my life trying to kindle a flame here or there, to bring light to a crevice or shape a lump of clay into a familiar shape. It is the essence of Art. It is the highest Art. It is where we not only live and breathe, but where the adventure we crave lies. Artists have always been explorers. And those of small, fearful minds have always punished, and sometimes killed, explorers, innovators and fire bringers. What better way to extinguish innovation than to ensure only a tiny percentage of the people have access to resources, while the majority decay in poverty? We measure wealth in bank numbers when true wealth lies in the creativity of Flow and Entanglement and Love.
The greatest realizations can occur in the slightest variations – a new angle for a brush, a different writing environment, a new sensory challenge, a different tensile strength on a stringed instrument. I’ve often advised someone who felt stuck to make a radical change to their immediate environment… Do something at a 90-degree angle to your routine. Climb to the top of a building and look down at your world from a new viewpoint. Run your entire day backwards. Watch the shifts in variations. Listen to yourself. Feel your gut. What would you do with your life if there were no restrictions? The answers themselves are not particularly significant to the larger picture, because the answer can almost always be boiled down to a life of expanding joy and love. The point of the question is what happens inside yourself when you peel away barriers that only exist in your mind, and watching what arises.
Some of you reading this may think that the writer has gone all soft and New Age-y. This kind of thinking defines those who learned how to exist based on cellular fear and reaction, and stopped there. Such minds aren’t particularly open nor inventive, and have fallen into a groove of routine that can only be relieved by escalating levels of hedonism. Consumption for its own sake rules this state, and be it temporary (see “walls” above) or semi-permanent, it is not living. It is existing. It is the single cell driven only to make a copy of itself, yearning only to recognize its own features in its offspring before turning all its attention back to consumption.
Stop and think for a moment about the passion of Jill Bolte or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, to name two persons who are popular among TED Talk viewers, and tell me again that innovative thought and discovery isn’t born from Love.
Entanglement is connection. Connection is what gives us purpose. Purpose is what gives those inhabiting a dark paradigm in a world whose true nature is other than what it appears a reason to be here. The truly creative, inventive, innovative people are the ones who are the most connected to the world around them. They move through the world like liquid fire, like water that cannot be diverted or stopped. Even when they retreat to walls for healing or solace, they re-emerge with bodies of ocean and spirits of fire and are more a force to be reckoned with than any man we imagine to be powerful. How telling, and sorrowful, that our society deems the ability to deny life, to do violence or perpetrate destruction as power and sees a creative mind that can envision an entirely New World as weak!
Entanglement exists on many levels and many locales and many times. It is Universal in every sense of the Word. Entanglement has no boundaries and no limitation. Entanglement occurs with or without our awareness. Entanglement does not rule because it has no use for ruling. Entanglement is the sense between two separate beings that they are needed, appreciated, indispensable, significant, loved. When we allow biological urge to be paramount, and usurp the role of love in this greater landscape, we ensure that our disconnection from the whole cannot be repaired. It’s true that some are chronically disconnected and this is tragic. The clinically sociopathic cannot find entanglement, for example the tragic absence of creativity bears this out. America’s descent into a sociopathic society and its utter lack of innovation proof the rule, along with a cultural dearth of true innovation or creativity, with a penchant for regurgitated Hollywood plots.
Love is Entanglement, and Entanglement is Love. To love is to choose to entangle ourselves, to allow Self to engage Other not in a momentary way, but a permanent bond that never wholly dissipates. It is the action of Love that sets sail on a journey from which we return changed. It is the essence of change, of growth, of an endless beginning that expands the Now into the eternal.
It is the change that we fear, but which we must embrace. It is the unknown Home that calls us, a horizon that beckons, a larger light in a dark world. It is the only reason we are here – to encompass and grow, not in deed or accomplishment or status, but in Love. The more connected we become, the larger the Self. Connection, immersion…these do not diminish us. As a hyper-empath I can assure you, unequivocally, that the more connected one becomes, and the more one participates in this collective, the larger the Self grows. Such connection does not diminish – it expands the Self beyond comprehension. This is the ultimate reality of our experience – that we can so Love our world and each other that we become Something New. It lies there, just over the horizon.
aGoldenGrove 