Those who see the light enter life eternal; those who live in darkness enter sorrow. Even by the mind this truth must be seen: there are not many, but only One. Who sees variety and not Unity wanders on from death to death. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
Like an atom in the leaf, concatenated with everything to make a tree, or the many within a molecular cloud or wandering island of stars, the One is a crowded All. A sea of its sociability churns & heaves, seething with contingencies. Take from it the spontaneous & what is left but the eternal? The null of Any & you lose the kinds & unities conspiring to an eyelash or a planet. All that are void of animation are void of putrescence. Those sealed from every influence cannot decay because they lack the know-how of liberty. Increase of the immutable fails upon each charitable effort of the dead. Decrease of an everlasting chaos succeeds upon any effort to share. Somewhere it is written: “Drive off ignorance & let flee experience & all that is left is light”.
One is not whole by being closed to pollution; or complete, by being independent of creation; nothing new to be born, nothing old to die away. The One is an open union where all come & go—the Whole made so only by the restless flow of rot & its redemption; this ceaseless movement of Adventure & its ending.
To intimate the crowded All is to guess at infinite variety. It is to see both increase & decrease, as it is to see the absolute engaged, the determined unbound, & the unchanging ravish the finite. Like the great organizations of dust storms or vast ocean floors or turbulence at the edge of a butterfly’s wing—all things that are born & die away to advance & influence the endeavor of Love---the One has no ontological stability.
Even if we are to discover the prefect, irreducible particle; the atomos that has no predecessor; the summun genus of the enormously many—this totality of one would find itself shifting & changing: one moment fixed by an elegant stasis & then the next, perturbed by a rent in what was thought to be matter free of any filament. A tear that now reveals a here-to-fore unknown fabric, that let goes some attenuation of the threads of Love, & lets in (as perhaps it must be) some energetic ply to yarn a novel textile that makes for a thought, propensity of star dust, or a new dog.
If the One could deny Life the charity of the dead, than would the One deny Love its ability to live.
Dog: To what end, this wandering?
Atman: To see unity.
How is unity seen?
By those who have become enlightened.
Luminous with what? What is insight?
Emancipation.
What is set free?
The wanderer.
To do what?
To show others the way.
Why others?
Because they live in darkness & enter sorrow.
How does one learn the way?
By living in darkness & entering sorrow.
To wander is to know All?
To wander is to know.
