That which we yearn for is that which we feel we’re missing. We Westernized folks feel we’re missing interconnection, never mind oneness. We’re growing out of it, many of us, but it’s a slow evolution, for we gave ourselves a god who told us that we’re special, that we have dominion over the earth, long, long ago. Seeing the earth as a pile of dirt and all nonhuman lifeforms as unfeeling, unthinking automatons is deeply engrained in us. It’s tough to break away from. In fact, it’s much easier to invent forms of domination for our dominion—weapons and elitism—than it is to see ourselves as we truly are. And when we go down the obvious, natural, broken crazy path we end up seeing even each other as things to dominate. We color code us. And then we enslave.
There’s a oneness, all right: me at the top dictating what you are to do and when. There’s interconnectivity: you are an extension of me, a tool for my desires and laziness, or else humiliation, torture, and death.This is what we’ve been. This is what we’re running from. Running with the same mind that produced it, we find ourselves jogging in place.
We’ve shown in previous essays how computers and other technology were invented to remind us of what we’re missing: interconnection (world wide web as web of life) and, ultimately, oneness identity (downloading our consciousness into the web). These inventive means to grow toward our yearnings—as opposed to understanding the entirety of the problem and in so doing, having that inventor dissolve, thereby allowing for the sought-after to manifest as us—stem from our colonialist mind jogging in place. But there are other behavioral ways we express colonialism, such as through gentrification and, more broadly, conformity. This colonialist drive to take over, subsume, enslave, and ultimately force others into our cultural identifications is what happens when the god complex owns a gun.
The modern take on our colonialist history as an atrocity speaks to why a move from brain-self to heart feels like the ultimate enlightenment to so many of us. We’ve spent our lives feeling completely disconnected from one another and from all life; to realize not just in our philosophies and theoretical physics, but in the core of our being, that we are, in fact, connected, is a burst of Love so great that it overwhelms. And so we believe realization is the source of Love. But Love is the source of us. Not just the source—Love is us. Source is us and we are Source.
We are Love when that timeless quality shines through the body and therefore the self. When Love lights the body, we feel Love, we think Love, we know ourselves as Love. This is timelessness flowing through time. True oneness cannot be known but must be lived in this way, because the point of view of oneness, of Love, is the view of timeless consciousness in which all separate selves are embedded as time.
When timeless consciousness radiates throughout the body, we no longer exist to block or control Love through the whims of thought and reactive feeling. The cutting off creates the experience of separation and false autonomy, which means either we’re in charge consciously of how much love we give and take, or we leave those decisions to a god of the unconscious. We are this doing and so no amount of wanting it otherwise changes what we do.
You and I are Source cut off and the action of cutting off. Understanding all of this, the total movement, completely and deeply, is the ending of the colonizing mind.