7

Experiencing Totality: First Experience?

Where does it come from, this intuition we have that there could be identity between us and the world? No one suggested it to us; no one has supported us when we have expressed our feelings or intuitions about unity. Why do we persist so determinedly in thinking that this union is possible? Quite simply, it is because we have had a direct, intimate experience of it and so our certainty is inalienable. We lived this experience well before our conditioning took place.

During the first weeks of his life, the newborn does not feel separate from his mother or his surroundings; he is in undifferentiated unity. These are probably the most troubling and the most powerful moments of our lives. No other feeling will ever replace the primary importance of this experience. It is as if this experience is engraved in us, whatever paths we follow. Sometimes, this feeling will resurge unexpectedly and remind us for our whole life that we can again communicate with it.

Freud called this the oceanic feeling. “One may . . . rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone,” he added, “even if one rejects every belief and every illusion.”¹¹

This sensation of unity against which we will struggle seems to be our first experience as human beings. If we could go back in time, we would doubtless perceive that this sensation has always been the foundation of the human experience, for as far back as we can go, and that it is still inscribed in our brain, in our genes.

Today we know that the brain, before birth, has as many neurons as there are constellations in space—approximately one hundred billion, each of which can establish twenty thousand connections. Very quickly, these neurons begin a process of destruction that will allow the brain to function; over the course of a lifetime, 90 percent of them will be destroyed.^*2 It is a little as if our brain contained the totality of the universe and loses this totality in the interest of being able to function—but the traces that remain leave in us a nostalgia for the whole.

But the development of this idea of separation, more cultural than personal, is it inevitable? While the ego develops—very early on, well before the appearance of language—there appears along with it the feeling of separateness, which the tone of our whole culture will accelerate. We must distinguish ourselves, we must rise to challenges, show how brilliant and competent we are—and none of this happens without inflation of the ego. How does it happen, then, that when we have fulfilled all these functions with brio, this nostalgia for unity still affects us? It is simply because this is our essential nature; we can no more forget it than we can forget to breathe. It is upon this central observation that the whole flexible and spherical structure of Kashmiri Shaivism is built.