You are not a drop in the ocean.
You are the entire ocean in a drop.

(Rumi)

It must have been around 5:30 in the morning, it was still pitch dark. It was a clear night, the stars were shining high, through the branches of the backyard trees. Night creatures were still singing, while the early morning ones, were beginning to tune in their songs. I just had taken out the bird feeders. Somehow, when I took a step, coming back from their placement, I became strangely aware of my body and felt my life and personal history, in a flash, like when you shake a Christmas snow globe. All the singular moments of my rather long life looked like snowflakes falling, stirred up with that step.

For a timeless instant, they were suspended inside, frozen in situ, my mind paralyzed, enthralled, focusing on millions of past events. Of course, I did not have enough span of attention to focus and reminisce each, so I picked them up randomly.

I blushed at some of them, thinking it is unbelievable that I went through that, others were so weird and remote. They were beyond understanding, in terms of what they meant for my personal evolution. How had they contributed to the aggregated average of situations, reactions, joys, embarrassments, pains, lusts, fears, and selflessness, that among all other emotions and feelings, seem to be the ingredients of this person, now in his late seventies with a particular ID, now waiting for the caravan to end, not knowing when, or how.

People and places, paraded in front of my mind’s eye, some intense though ephemeral, leaving a deep mark, others like background incidents like happening to extras in a film, scenes flashing by like if seen through the window of a fast train. The so many cities and places that I stepped into, were now kaleidoscoping in points of memory, bringing so many moments of laughter, desire, surrender, inspiration, fear, anger, and the ensuing reverberations with so many other characters, some of them now gone forever, some forgotten, some not even really met.

And many stories simultaneously unfolded, each with a different trajectory, organized it seems, in chapters, with some interconnections, but containing isolated points of relationship and awareness, that were taking place as if there were taking place in other lives, in other parallel universes. But some hidden link kept it all together.

Nobody knows, and nobody can know, because even while being the active subject of this story-history, I do not comprehend the whole complexity of the weaving, that took place in that interiority, associated with this ID, this being called “me”.

Because no psychologist, mother, lover, or intimate friend, can ever come to know about you, what you yourself don’t know. I guess one creates a mythical character of oneself, an average image, a synthesis out of billions of ghost image moments and projects it to the others. But the “me” is just like an electron, which is “located” in an observation moment, but the electron really is not here or there.

When without expecting it, I took that instantaneous timeless step, in my backyard, a stream of consciousness overtook my whole. The body felt like a transparent drop of liquid, a fragile sculpture in a garden. Its contents were fluid, like the light falling through the tree branches from the stars, all became a continuum of moments. Bursts of light, flakes of information, floated endlessly around and inside a point called me, the inner and outer separated, by an impenetrable yet transparent curtain, of fragile nothing, a not-knowing.

The timeless step ended, and I came out of the trance and recovered the relativity of me, my personality, my mind, and I wondered what happened. Totally awed at the sights and insights, without understanding anything, I thought about all the others who like me, also are encased in droplets of personal ID, with their uncountable numbers of points cascading inside, with all those moments they have lived, their emotions, relationships, contacts. And it all became a vastness so vast, that it crushed my imagination.

Just like imagining, the energy wave continuum, I thought about the unified field of consciousness, the linkage of all information points, integrating all the moments of interaction, reaction, reflection, frustration, satisfaction, shame, elation. Vibrating inside all these droplets of life, like mine, while being projected as an average in the form of a personality ID. I further reflected, that this continuum of thought and feeling, this awareness, this oceanic stuff, that percolates all sentience, is mounted on a continuum of ghost forms, made up of points of energy, vibrating at different modes, an existence song. And beyond those steps, where moments of recognition happen, everything anyhow seems to be engaged in continuous silent communication, a constant chatter of action-reaction flashes, exchanging clashes inside the bubbles, and between the bubbles, as they seem to shape, adjust, or enable a resonance, wherein that endless seemingly random motion subsumes, in an oceanic whole reverberating all.

And of course, none of this ever shows up on the news on TV, or on social networks. I mean, we are so focused on each one of the flakes or points, that we ignore the irrefutable fact moments happening in simultaneity, and that they are so uncountable, unique to each one, and are so intimately connected.

It seems that to function, we must focus on each moment and its associated angst, and relegate to the background all others, even though they are all intimately connected and influence each other, like the notes of a symphony played by an orchestra to all musicians and instruments. And this focus and attachment on specific moments and their impressions are what keeps us bound and limited.

And most probably this is necessary, the focus. The problem surges when we try to explain to ourselves the totality - life, the universe, consciousness, with the same limited focus; that is analyzing, isolating, and then integrating our specific moments. It is like cutting a tapestry into little pieces and then trying to reassemble it together to appreciate its beauty, rather than somehow appreciating the totality of the tapestry without paying attention to the different trajectories threaded by the needle.

I look back at that moment when I took that step that took me, to another dimension of being, I have stood on the same spot many times now, at different times of day and night, trying to evoke the magic, the inner vision, the point of continuum, but to no avail.

I keep on wondering what happened, while I continue to project to others and to myself, this average “me”, that I play as a limited synthesis of the vastness that I am connected to. It seems that the one step revelation was a spontaneous happening, a wormhole that linked the oceanic with the droplet, and that there is no effort, method, or plan that can elicit it, it just happens, when it does.

That timeless step will never be forgotten, but I cannot reproduce it, nor totally describe it. I can only have it in the background, like a majestic sunrise, a moment of deep love, reality, and beauty, that for an instant transformed and embraced me. But one cannot make these moments happen at will. They happen when they do. Maybe one day, we will remain in that oceanic state, once we have the capacity to bear being the whole in a drop when we lose our “drop isolation” and dissolve in the ocean.

Mystics, all throughout history, have addressed this conundrum, they say that mind attached to its definition of self as a droplet, as the “average” synthesis or personality, is the illusionary membrane, that separates us from the continuum. And that only through love, compassion, and identification with the other, more and more, and still yet more, we can forget our limited self-definition and become the totality we always really are, and take the step, into that Existence, that is all there is.

As Rumi said:

Love is the bridge between you and everything.