by Roger Mock
Remember that scene from City Slickers? No, not the one where Mitch (played by Billy Crystal) helps the cow give birth, though that’s a good one, too. I mean this conversation with ancient cattle wrangler Curly (played by Jack Palance):
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is? [holds up one finger] This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing.
You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.
Mitch: But, what is the “one thing?”
Curly: [smiles] That’s what you have to find out.
Curly suggests that the one thing is different for everybody and in the short run that’s certainly true. But in the long run I think the one thing is really just one thing. It’s the return to the One, no matter which path gets you there. Yeah, I know, we keep talking about the Oneness of everything, yadda yadda, and that’s nice. Yoda would approve. But does that really mean anything? Is that benign philosophical idea somehow going to make a difference in my life?
The thing is, Ultimate Oneness is not something your thinking mind is ever really going to grasp. It’s an experience, a revelation. I know, because I’ve had very occasional small glimpses of it myself. I’ll bet you have, too. Times when something big just hits you between the eyes and leaves you a little breathless and a lot blissful. It’s like being let in on a big secret that you already somehow knew. That has only happened to me in times of openness and surrender and curiosity, never through the effort of my own thinking, reasoning mind.
According to St. Teresa of Avila the thing about the mystical state is that although you can prepare for it, you can’t actually get there through your own efforts. It arrives on the wings of grace. She used the image of a garden saying that you may extend effort to draw water from a well to water that garden, but the watering also happened because of rain – the grace from above. In fact, that rain is what filled the well to begin with.
That mystical state is the foundation of all religious traditions. Each set up its camp around such a well. When I have tired of beliefs—as must happen to anyone who is honest with themselves—I try to remember that having faith is not about holding particular beliefs. Don’t mistake the encampment for the well. For me faith is about trusting in that inner knowing I have experienced in those grace-filled moments of my life. It is a returning to the well of oneness, waiting quietly, ladle in hand.
All of our roads lead there. All of our “one things” are streams and rivers leading us back to that One Ocean. Yemaya Assessu, Assessu Yemaya is a chant we sing that comes from Yoruba and is a celebration of the moment when the river meets the sea.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell, who famously entreated us to follow our bliss, put it this way:
“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe,
to match your nature with Nature.”
I think that’s what Curly was saying, too.
love and light,
Roger