Philanike: So you had something you wanted to tell me? Want a cookie first?
Euthymios: Who says no to cookies? Milk?
Ph: Always. Now, what’s your news?
Eu: I was at work yesterday and reading the diagnostic for this Honda, and suddenly I realized something.
Ph: What’s that?
Eu: The numbers on the computer are synthemata of the logos, of the underlying ratio of the universe.
Ph: You don’t say?
Eu: And so’s this cookie. My shirt. The table. The air I’m breathing. The lungs I’m breathing it with. It’s all the same symbol of the same underlying rationality.
Ph: The same? So there’s one?
Eu: Yeah, but it’s so “one” that it’s also many. To say it’s one is to say it can’t be many, but my shirt isn’t this cookie. Wouldn’t want to confuse them! But at the same time, my shirt and this cookie have to coexist in a single, unified universe along with the gods, the Honda, you, and everything and everyone else.
Ph: Well, we could have the shirt without the cookie.
Eu: The shirt is cotton. It grows because the sun shines—Helios, I suppose. The cookie is made from butter, that comes from cows that eat grass, and that also relies on the sun.
Ph: So there’s a sun. That’s what unifies everything? Helios?
Eu: That’s a handy shorthand, but no, there’s more. Helios—the sun, I mean—only shines because of certain fundamental physical constants, and they don’t have to be the way they are. One tiny variation in any of a number of constants, and the sun wouldn’t shine. It’d collapse or explode. Neither are good for cookies or shirts.
Ph: Well, of course, that’s the teleological argument for the existence of god, and it’s flawed in that we exist in a perfect universe for life. For all we know there were countless garbage universes where there was no life. We observe a universe ideally suited for life, but of course we do: we’re alive.
Eu: I’m not making that argument. Obviously we can only observe the universe because it’s a universe in which observing beings can exist. But it’s still marvelous. The cookie, the shirt, my body, this house, you, everything—if there were not these laws of the universe, they wouldn’t be. So they all depend on this one thing: the logos of the universe.
Ph: So you’ve experienced the oneness of everything. What does it change?
Eu: Nothing. Everything. I don’t know. All three, I suppose, at the same time. After all, they’re one, aren’t they?
Ph: You going to quit your job, go barefoot into the wild?
Eu: I don’t have to. My job is devotion now. Everything is a prayer, and everything is a god.
Ph: That sounds airy and not very practical.
Eu: My boss is a jerk.
Ph: Oh, how quickly we fall from henosis.
Eu: No. It’s okay that he’s a jerk. He’s a jerk because this cookie is delicious, because this shirt is cotton, because the sun shines.
Ph: So you’ll just let him be a jerk?
Eu: I’d rather he wasn’t. And if he wants to be nicer, I’ll help him.
Ph: So you’ll make him a project?
Eu: No. The sun doesn’t make growing grass for cows to eat a project. It happens because the sun radiates.
Ph: So you’ll radiate. That sounds like an excuse to be lazy.
Eu: You won’t trip me up anymore, Philanike, because I can see the root of things. I’m questioning myself all the time now, and digging down to truth myself. The sun isn’t lazy. It’s active. Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll be pleasant, focused on my job—after all, why be distracted? The distractions are the same thing as the job!—and maybe, just maybe, he’ll respond to that. And if he doesn’t, well, he’s a jerk, the sun shines, cookies are delicious.
Ph: I have to warn you. Tomorrow you may forget all of this. It’ll be a high you remember as a high but not exactly why you were there. It’ll turn into trite platitudes in your head. “All is one!” “Love is the answer!” You’ll get annoyed at car problems, a bad back, a rainy day.
Eu: Sure. You’ve got to climb back down once you climb up, but the climb up is easier the second time.
Ph: And the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. It’s not “I got it! Aha!” It’s “I got some of it! For a moment.” And that’s the way it is, so that’s okay.
Eu: It’s a kind of being, not a sudden becoming. And it’s okay to be annoyed with car problems or to be human, because that’s part of what we are. We have to be what we are.
Ph: Listen to you, a downright philosopher. You know what “Plato” means?
Eu: It means something?
Ph: His real name was Aristocles, “Noble glory,” but Plato was his nickname. Roughly, very roughly translated, it means “fatso.”
Eu: Then give me another cookie. I’m emulating ol’ Aristocles.
Ph: Better to emulate yourself.
Eu: Already working on it. I was just kidding about trying to be like Plato.
Ph: Oh good.
Eu: But I wasn’t joking about the cookie.