The Web of Life, Part 3: Seeing Beyond Our Separateness

The thing is that we have been educated to use our minds in a certain way. A way that ignores, or screens out, the fact that every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out. You see, it’s as if you had a light covered with a black ball, and in this ball were pinholes, and each pinhole is an aperture through which the light comes out. So in that way, every one of us is, actually, a pinhole through which the fundamental light—that is, the existence itself—looks out. Only, the game we’re playing is not to know this. To be only that little hole, which we call me, my ego, my specific John Jones, or whatever.

If, however—you see—we can maintain, at the same time, the sense of being this specific John Jones with his role in life, or whatever, and know also, underneath this, that we are the whole works, you get a very marvelous and agreeable arrangement. This is a most remarkable harmoniousness—I mean, it gives one’s life a great sense of joy and exuberance—if you can carry on these two things at once. If you—in other words—you know that all the serious predicaments of life are a game.

Now, I want to put it two ways. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, something to be condemned, to take your own individual life seriously, in dead earnest, and to have all the problems that go with that. Do you understand that being that way—that being a real mixed-up human being—is a manifestation of nature that is something just like the patterns on the waves out here, or like a seashell? You know, we pick up shells—I always keep one around, as sort of an example for many things—and say, “My goodness, isn’t that gorgeous!” There’s not an aesthetic fault in it anywhere. It’s absolutely perfect. Now, I wonder. I wonder if these fish look at each other’s shells and say, “Don’t you think she’s kind of fat? Oh my, those markings aren’t really very well spaced.” Because that’s what we do.

See, we don’t realize that all of us—in our various goings-on, and behavior, and so on—are more marvelous, much more complicated, much more interesting—all these gorgeous faces that I’m looking at. You know, every one of them! Some of them are supposedly pretty, some of them are supposedly not so pretty, but they’re all absolutely gorgeous. And everybody’s eyes is a piece of jewelry beyond compare. Beautiful!

But we have specialized in a certain kind of awareness that makes us neglectful of that. You see, we specialize in more or less briefly concentrated pinpoint attention. We look at this and we look at that, and we select—from all the things we might possibly be aware of—only certain things. And as a result of that we leave out of our everyday consciousness, generally speaking, two dimensions of experience: one amazing beauty of experience that we never see at all, and on the other hand—the very deep thing—the sense of our basic identity, unity with, oneness with the total process of being.

See, because we are staring, as it were, at certain features of the landscape, we don’t see the background. And because we get fascinated with—you know, I could go into details of this shell, as I said, and put myself in the mind of a conch—or whatever it is that lives in this thing—and say, “Hm, that’s not so hot; that one.” Like that, see? And so I wouldn’t see the whole thing. But when I look at it like this, when anybody looks at it like that, we say, “Oh my God, isn’t that gorgeous!”