The First One

I'd like to make this very first post about the idea of Oneness, which came to me very suddenly some 10 years ago in the middle of the day. I'm not sure how it happened, but it made me laugh out loud in a crowded square, and it forced me to reconsider my entire notion about God and spirituality. As this realization entered my mind, it made pictures of a fork (cutlery) to explain to itself what it was it had now understood. Forks can be seen as a whole, single piece of metal, but they can also be understood as two sections (handle, and points – the actual forking part), and perhaps there is also a middle section?

Anyway, I have now made an explanatory, illustrated text to try to convey what I came to recognize. I still struggle with integrating this understanding in my being, and have developed a wide variety of ways to relate to it. With the risk of making this blog look like a construction site, here we go.

These are some boards.

These are the same boards.
Boards can be attached to each other in a great variety of ways. Some are more useful than others. Some are interesting enough perhaps, to be called art.

Certain combinations of boards are so useful to us, that we give them names. This combination we call ‘bookshelf’, simply because we can place books in it. An new object is born. It is important to understand that the bookshelf exists only in the human mind. It is only a concept - an idea. We are still looking at the same boards.

Boards are made by cutting trees into shapes suitable for construction. When wood takes this form, we call it a board, or a plank. Boards exist only in the mind. What we see is wood - we just give it a different name.

Just as a bookshelf is really only boards, and boards are really only wood (trees), trees are really only Nature. Trees cannot exist without air, water,  and nutritious soil. It is just as dependent on light and carbon dioxide  as it is on its own roots and leaves. When nature takes this specific form we label it ‘trees’, but that separation - objectification, takes place in our minds only.

When the Universe takes a certain form we call it Nature. The Universe and Nature are not two different things. There is no border between them. What do you and bookshelves have in common?