My current philosophy and worldview is rooted in a faith in the ultimate unity of all things, in the pure basic reality that is too simple and too whole to have any imaginable qualities, in what Ken Wilber calls “One Taste” or the “Always-Already”. It doesn’t come out much in my general day-to-day living; it’s a backdrop to my strength and my confidence in the universe. One nice thing about basing your philosophy on Oneness is that at a deep and irrelevant level, you aren’t as limited as you feel; there is nothing you want that you cannot have; and there is nothing that threatens your most central essence. Everything – all you care about – becomes a bit lighter, a bit more fun. The drama is still there, but it’s like a movie: you can comfort yourself in a deeper reality when needed.
I used to daydream! I used to dream of faraway places, adventures with strange talents and strange people and strange lands. Sometimes I am afraid of growing up and having to leave all that magic and all the fun behind forever. But all of that magic is in this world too. It didn’t die out in the Enlightenment; the same structures of experiences is available to you in this modern world – just with different guises, different specific details. The worlds of your childhood may not show up with the same characteristics again but they’re hidden, not dead.
Look somewhere close to you. Spells and runic incantations? As a Linux geek, I love using the terminal because it feels like invoking arcane spells. Look at how Cory Doctorow converted the future into a happy-go-lucky MMORPG. We have well mapped the continents and coastlines, but not the human genome or the full topography of our interior development. Understanding it’s hard and exhausting to keep your mind open to looking at experiences with new eyes all the time… just the same, it’s comforting to me when I realize that if you let go of your insistence on the trappings and the method, life will give you what you are wishing for.
