The One Idea I Can’t Live Without

Werner Herzog is 82 today, born the year before I.  I’m not familiar with the vast scope of his worldly expression, but what I am familiar with leads me to bow at his commitment to self-discovery, the bringing forth of stories in service of humankind’s awakening, and the willingness to meet life with a passion for expansion that includes an acceptance of the risks and vulnerabilities that accompany that passion.  

Thinking of him in this way clarifies what has been a key part of me for as long as I can recall: a consuming drive for simplicity of purpose.  It’s as though I’ve said to the universe don’t give me a lot to consider; give me just one idea, the one idea the pursuit of which will in time reveal everything.  Don’t bother laying out a bunch of rules and principles and whatnot.  Just give me the one idea I can’t live without.  

It took me a long time to realize that that was my request of existence.  I can handle teachings with lots of permutations but only if I consider them as countless expressions of one idea.  And for me that one idea isn’t finding God; that’s not quite rich enough.  The only idea that satisfies my longing is that everything is God.  There is fundamentally no difference between any manifestation of existence: a mouse fart and Jesus.  This is what makes every drop of circumstance alive with every conceivable manifestation of ever-new Bliss that is the essence of everything, including of course the most excruciating of experiences known to our ego nature, the source of the Big Lie that difference is real, that Big Lie being the sacred schoolhouse in which—eventually, inevitably—we meet our True Self and realize the Oneness of Life.

This is why, to me, the universe is infinitely playful, loving and deep.  Might I be full of baloney?  You bet.  And won’t it be a grand loving adventure to discover how?  As Yogananda says, every path is a path to God, for ultimately there is no other place for the soul to go.