Why do we nurture children and animals and show babies unconditional love? We know how steam from our core wafts to the surface to become subconscious and conscious reasons for where we direct our affection. But what is the core?
Wait. Actually, what did I just say?
Let’s go….
We appear to be individuated beings, yet beneath that surface, we also appear to be interconnected, nested beings—organisms with intrinsic ties to one another, environment, all of life, basically. This is existence. One existence. We are parts within a whole that is part of a greater whole, on and on, and all of this is wholeness, which is oneness.
If the core of us is oneness and that presents itself as interconnecting and nesting alivenesses through and through—meaning, at least, physically and psychologically—then does that connection end with adulthood, or are these binding ties unbreakable? They’re unbreakable, right? So why do we, in so many of our societies, behave as if we grow out of our intrinsic togetherness? Why do we pretend to evolve into separate entities when, in fact, we are dependent on one another in every way?
By saying one another we are not talking exclusively about humans. Every single “thing” in existence is not a static, separate thing, and these not-things cannot live lonely lives in complete isolation. We’re one consciousness expressing as innumerable aspects. Aspects of one. That core one is not lonely and isolated, “it” is a self-fulfilling aloneness. “It” is completeness. In “its” verb form, oneness is completing, which is why we have perceptions of time, movement, and direction.
No one grows out of our interweaving lives within life, but we can grow our denial of it. We can nurture our wrong turn until it grows a wondrous society perpetually at war within itself and therefore perpetually lashing out at other societies. We can wonder why we do this to ourselves. We can try to solve it, which means we will never solve it. We can do all of this, all in our little bubble, amazed at our inventions and our discoveries and in love with the exclusivity of that word “our.” But not forever. Not when the bubble is time. Not when the foaming ocean is also us. And the steam. And the heat.
Not when the singular core is we.