All Is One and One Is All
The world is wild, chaotic, free, whole, broken, awesome, awful, wonderful, and ultimately nondual—a huge canvas on which we are both painting and being painted. This is what the Buddhists call pratītyasamutpāda, “dependent origination”: everything is dependent upon and interconnected with everything else. This is what M. C. Escher illustrates in his 1948 lithograph Drawing Hands, in which each hand holds a pen and is drawing the other. This is the taijitu, or yin-yang symbol, of the Taoists showing the complementarity and interconnection of seeming opposites. This is Jesus’s teaching that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven one must “make the two one, and the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and male and female into a single one” (Gospel of Thomas logion 22).
There is no rhyme or reason, only a continuous and continuously repeating chord progression—Pranava, the hum of reality—played by the rhythm section of the universe and over which you improvise your own fresh melodies. RR