Our artistically creating and inventing outward works of beauty and communication mimics the big bang. The fact that all of this amazing, breathtaking design, by hand and by nature, is rooted in a mere few elements being combined in novel ways means in some sense we’re being duped. A beautiful head of fractal-shaped cauliflower is basically the same pattern as sea coral, is basically a mandala of colored sand. They each strike the same chords of beauty and wonder and joy. Physically, they are different. But are they fundamentally different or even visually that different? The beauty, the wonder, the joy—What does it mean that looking at a common cauliflower can trigger us thus?
Do they trigger us thus? Or Is there a problem in how we talk about these aspects of us and relate with them as reactions to stimuli?
When you listen to dance music your body might start to move. Song after song, you might say, “Oh, I love this song. Oh, I love this song. Oh, I love this song. Oh, I love this song.” And each song may have a different title, different lyrics, different performer, but the beat is the same. We keep treating sameness as difference and because it feels good, we want to dissect it, make it intricate, make an art of it, right? “This song is brilliant because….” Yet the beats are all the same.
So, there is something in us that is disconnected from the fact that all of these miraculous, intricate works of art—as well as the beauty in nature—are built on a handful of elements.
We are nature. We are built on a handful of elements. The same elements as everything else, in fact. This is true physically and it is true internally, which is why we can relate with one another in the first place. So, the beauty, the joy, and the wonder we keep finding out there in the same old elements masquerading as new visuals, novel sounds, different beings, are the same beauty, joy, and wonder that we are. We see ourselves and we love what we see, but we don’t know that’s what we are doing. And because we don’t know that’s what we are doing—because we attach our sense of wholeness to outside stimuli and “foreign objects”—we have to keep inventing away from ourselves to find what’s already moving in us.
We are the dancer, the dance, and the beat. “Oh, I love this song.” And we explode on the dance floor a bunch of cool (or awkward) moves. This one force exploding out, whether it takes the shape of a dancer, a cauliflower, or the big bang, is still one force.
It’s the same with technical forms of communication, too, not just artistic. No matter what we invent, technologically, there always seem to be gremlins that get in and screw with us. Or guardian spirits who communicate with us. Some ethereal intelligence connecting with us in impossible ways through technological toys, be they Ouija Board or website. We keep thinking it’s got to be aliens or demons or angels doing this to us. The synchronicity of, say, having a dream tell you something so seemingly not from you that you feel driven to Google search it and immediately find the answer to the one big question that’s been on your mind lately means someone advanced is talking to little ol’ you. But is this because we are so enamored with our advanced technologies we assume that for them to be infiltrated so quickly, purposefully, and personally, is magical, perhaps godly? Do we forget that all this advancement boils down to one very old thing: communication?
As with finding new artistic ways to express beauty, we continue to expand outwardly our modes of communication. But the one voice speaking is inside of us. The one voice we’ve split in two. We split ourselves and then hide the deepest, biggest aspect we’re treating as a part with a very shallow, extremely loud character, always obsessively thinking and often obsessively speaking.
Doing, doing, doing. Outwardly expanding. Inwardly expanding. Often seeking the depths of self, which is right there waiting for you to shut up so that reconciliation may take place. And then the stitching back together the one being you already are.
We invent. We create. What do we invent and create? Extensions of ourselves. Lengths of physicality that measure the distance between our splintered selves.
Separation is our birthright. Oneness is our existence. Bafflement is our invention that we use to keep separation and oneness apart.