Let Us Gather Together: Part 1

While we are here in this life, we may reach the light of wisdom; and if we reach it not, how deep is the darkness? ...Even by the mind this truth must be seen: there are not many, but only One.  Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

If wisdom is to be reached what part shall be left out of the effort? Reality is irrepressible variety. If we are to become wise, must we not begin sanctified by this?

We suggest that the One knows how to get itself to crowd & hang together. In our effort to reach the light, we see the modest unities amid the common ferment. We who submit to reason say: "Segregate like specimens & their gathering becomes a set, or class or kind. Undo the distinction & the 'sole fact' again vanishes into a uniqueness that cannot entirely suppress confusion. When no two things are alike but for the habit or desire they share, the sharing somehow gets assembled--an instance of kind & such kinds, by their esse, tend to congregate. Specimens of a vapor, belief or stiffening may than congress into useful descriptions of wind or free speech or remembrance. Communal specimens may expand their sympathies into compelling notions of weather, or just society or mindfulness."

And just so, the fermenting stuff of allegiance is taken up by “living matter” & they by cells & they by organism & thus by species. Genus gathers this as does order, family. So too the stuff of stuff, such as resistance, attraction & diffusion neatly commit to distinct & lawful forces. There persist a pregnant One which may hold together the entirety of decay & increase, but must acquire its strength & propagate its influence by the many kinds embraced.

The All-that-is-One is true in this important sense: it begins as an incipient chaos that gets itself organized. Confusion into specimen into community, & this into kinds of kinds & unities of unities as it seeks its way to a sea of Union. This increase for One is, at its watery depth, a desire to learn; at its breach of sea, a fierce Leviathan desire to know. The interior of every connection, this fuse of kind, contain the habits of Love: its heated randiness, its pedagogic interests, & its satisfactions that obligate generation with possibilities advanced by such methods as conception, speculation & exploration—all this being the preoccupations of the One’s sociable many-ness.

Experience requires us to acknowledge the many who give rise to any unity we might enjoy. The pleasure of Dog is not an ineluctable fact, but one generated from a commitment & aim that only Love can make. From conception & the earliest migration of rapidly dividing cells within the blastocyst, to the coordination of vast divisions of labor & contemplation amid the adult body negotiating a world rift with the unexpected; becoming more complicated & prone to new influences—in part, by virtue of its own burgeoning, & in part by those generated from a landscape of chance & invention—a Dog is a way that Love expands us into the living. And conversely how the living endeavor Love by the common interest of a vast gathering that ponder a thousand-thousand points of advancement. 

All this must move from any back into that of sociability—no more than this is the depth of darkness.