24 25 But how, if everything is one, could we ever vanish into nothing? As all is one, one thing is clear: nobody can ever fall out of this one. Where would we fall, if everything is one? If everything is one, we obviously can’t simply be reduced to the singular body we identify with. We can’t be isolated as a thing in time and space. What we truly are cannot be a limited quantity or shape of matter. What we truly are must be something which is beyond defined time and space. It must be something that is not material but that nonetheless is. Something non-material and yet existing – what could this strange thing be? As it turns out, it is not strange at all, but rather the most ordinary. We all know it. We all have it. You have it. I do. My dog has it, too. This strange thing is experience. The feeling of being there. The experience of being, that sweet and subtle felt certainty which actually is a tiny feeling of gratitude somewhere in my centre. It is a faint gratitude for what has been received, and a vibrant desire to partake in the process of letting others receive, too. What we are is the experience of being as sharing. And this of course can’t die, because it is the thing this whole show runs on. The true self, so the Upanishads tell us, the true self is unborn and undying, it is ancient and primordial, and it can never be menaced, as it is life itself. Being a specific individual object isn’t particularly important. It is not even something that we truly are – as our body, our objecthood, continuously breaks away. What does not change, however, is the desire to be – and offer – life. Being a process that gives life to others, as a function of giving it to myself, is the reality that counts. The great thing is that we carry the truth of what we really are in our heart. Not always; sometimes we need to search for it, sometimes it gets so stressful that we forget it. Then many people take a walk in nature to recharge their emotional, and metaphysical, batteries. They might walk down to a little brook in the afternoon light that glitters with little waves, that shivers under the foliage, the air full of insects like sparks from some unseen fire. They might let their dog drink the water, with that visceral gratitude which cannot be expressed in words, but which can easily be spotted in a body posture of existential enjoyment and satisfaction. People stressed by overidentification with their individual achievements take a little break here. They breathe in unison with the foliage. They remember, in some distant parts of their hearts, that they are spring of life, too, always giving life. When they climb down to a soft, favourite spot with grass and flowers and trees in their vicinity, they might think that what soothes their suffering is going out. But they are really going in, as the nature writer John Muir put it. There is no out, nowhere. There is only in. There is only the inside of life, and we are it, and we know it. After my dog had just died, a very strange thing happened. I had stayed with her when she stopped breathing, and her heart ceased beating, and I closed her eyes (after several attempts, because the eyelids kept opening). I took two locks of her fur, a curl from her white breast and a strand from her always greasy beard. I also took off the collar with the little pearls that my daughter had brought her from Africa years ago. And then I went out into the sunlight of the Italian noon and took some steps on the backroad where I walked with her many times, between unkempt lawns with apple trees and a handful of houses. I spoke to her, addressed her aloud, and my voice broke, as I felt my love for her so much. I told her that I hoped I had acted at the level of her friendship with me, that she did not feel that I had let her down. There were patches of wild carrots with white umbels, and stands of viper's bugloss hanging full of blue curled blossoms, and one lonely linden tree. And suddenly all these things stopped being objects, and were just her love for me. It was very unusual, as of course everything was still as it was, but at the same time it was literally made only of love, and not of some abstract love, but of my dog’s love for me. Or rather, everything had become my dog in the form of her love for me. And that seemed to be all there was. It felt very unusual, yet also like something intimately known. Something you encounter and think, oh wow, true, I forgot… it is like this, of course, I remember now. It was something I knew because I was not outside it. I was this very same love which was everything, and which was my dog’s love for me. She was no longer breathing. She would never drink water from that little brook again. But she had not stopped being the spring of life.
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