It All Reduces to One.

Everything reduces to one. It doesn’t matter what it is, where it is or how it may appear. It doesn’t matter what color it is; how big or small, whether you love or hate it, whether it actually exists or does not exist at all. It all reduces to one. The silence swallows every argument.

We are all familiar with the tale of the fallen angels; those angels that, for whatever reason, were cast out from the Heaven in which they had formerly lived. They were basically cast out because of the inability to accept the fact that everything reduces to one. There is the idea in the minds of some that these angels walk among us with a power that can challenge the single purpose of the ruling throne. It’s an impossibility whose only power it that of appearance. They appear to have the power. But any power possessed by anyone or anything derives from a single source. Power can be applied in all manner of ways. An axe may be used to chop wood or to remove someone’s head. We have heard of the use of resistors in electricity. We can understand the applications but we don’t actually understand electricity. We just know that it operates according to certain laws. We don’t know all of the applications or all of the laws; just some of them.

It could be said that the chief power of the fallen angels is to give the idea that everything does not reduce to one. There is the idea that we have something called free will. Free will has only two possibilities of expression; to act in resistance, in any of a myriad of ways, or to operate in the understanding that everything reduces to one.

There have been many arguments about how life can be lived most effectively. There are dietary routines that appear each day. There are codes of conduct. There are minutiae beyond comprehension in respect of every religion, lifestyle, political mechanism and any system of cataloguing and defining every science and philosophy. They all reduce to one. They all reduce to a point beyond definition or explanation. We as individuals in the midst are not happy with the idea that nothing we attempt; fight for or against, believe in, aspire to, stand in contempt of, or wring our hands over makes any difference whatsoever and will be absorbed beyond identification into one. No sane mind can accept this. One might well ask what sanity is.

Hidden in the multiplicity of things is a power beyond reckoning. There is a freedom we cannot understand that soars and sings in a realm we can not imagine. It is in the celebration of the one, in ones capacity to be like melting snow that we achieve to the high destiny of our birthright.

Through centuries, the virtue and power of love has been exalted in the work of mystics and artists; in the thoughts and computations of our grandest minds and in the pure contemplations of the most simple and heartfelt among us. We stand at the cusp point of the passing of one age into the next. For the last two thousand years, love has been most finely expressed in the idea of sacrifice. Jesus Christ most fully exemplified this state. In the next age, Universal Brotherhood is the schematic through which Love will be most fully expressed.

As wonderful as some of the things to come will be, this is just another age. Many ages will follow and many have come before. The mountains of the past have been reduced to the sand upon the seashore. New mountains rise and will in time become sand. From a single point whose location is unknown comes the beginning of the whirlings. Out of the whirling comes all that is manifest. It expands and stretches beyond comprehension. It contains armored men on horseback and fine cities in riotous splendor. It contains Kabuki dancers and whirling dervishes mimicking the divine intent. It contains old bearded men poring over ancient texts and illumined rishi’s contemplating the whole in a place beyond words. It contains bandits and demagogues, warlords and cocktail waitresses. It contains everything and it all reduces to one.

We are dreaming. We dream in the body that wraps us in the moments through which we pass. We see everything in a dream whose continuous passage grants the appearance of reality to ourselves and our surroundings. Even those of us who think we have awakened from the dream are still dreaming. We have all had that experience when we have fought to awaken from a nightmare; thought that we had awakened and later found that we had continued to remain asleep. Many have thought that death takes us to a place of sleep but it is only at death that we awaken. Though it is a rare event, it is possible to awaken- to die in a sense, while still in the body.

Great efforts have been made here. Tremendous efforts have been made in applying the personal will against the resistance of the terrain. History is filled with individual efforts made to secure wealth and kingdoms, to disseminate ideas and to awaken the masses into a finer freedom or a deeper and more confined prison. It all reduces to one.

Love reduces everything to one. Love is the fluid being of unity that melts the whole construct back into the totality of one. Love reduces the individual into the cosmic. In the minds of many who have contemplated this truth is the idea that one loses themselves entirely in the process. But what is the point of that? It may well be, after a curious fashion, that we do not disappear at all but rather become the celebratory focus of the thing in a new identity of perpetual realization; the self when it knows itself to be God.

It is a curious thing to me to have the teaching of Jesus Christ and all of the rest of the masques of God interpreted according to the endlessly dissected minutiae of leaden dogma as if God, rather than the devil, were in the details. It all reduces to one and there is no guide and no salvation that can resolve our dilemma except Love. Love too has been splintered into a variety of segments; compassion, charity, sacrifice- and lesser states that are poor relations in poor circumstance. Love at the point of origin is a light without qualification. Once it passes through the prism into the manifest it takes upon itself a variety of colors and qualities. Love, being profoundly real, can be followed back to the source.

It stands to reason that the reason wise men and women can know one another, without a common surface language is that they all recognize the reductive truth that inter-permeates all phenomena while existing outside and beyond as well. There is no truth that has been told that does not apply in every time and place. We can see the commonality in the teachings of them all should we care to look with the understanding that it all reduces to one.

It is only in dreams that we must contend with dragons and monsters. It is only in dreams that we need armor and weapons. It is only in dreams that our separate self is propelled toward passionate union with another- in the hope of a Love expressed in the shadow of a Love already complete. One love is celebrated here and condemned there. It is defined according to the customary rules of a place and a time for the purpose of control within the parameters of a confining space. It is called upon and driven like a beast of burden toward fields of enterprise and for the good of a nation and the exaltation of a creed. It is forever misunderstood so long as it is interpreted for the benefit of a point or an end. It is no surprise that our hope is less than it might be and we has yet to be able to command a mountain to toss itself into the sea.

Our biggest obstacle and our primary source of confusion is that we do not realize that Love is conscious. Love is a living thing, it’s not some serendipitous force that comes and goes, on the one hand filling us with light and on the other, with its depature- leaving us poorer than we were. Love is conscious. It knows what it is about. This is why it has been noted that one must become as a little child. Think of yourself as a plate of ice cream sitting in the sun. You don’t have to be concerned with what may be expected of you. That part of the process is automatic.