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NATURE AS A METAPHOR FOR SPIRITUAL UNION
The concept of the fundamental unity of all things is exceedingly difficult to internalize and yet nature and science abound with metaphors for this very same concept. We need only look to the clouds for just such a metaphor. From a mass of cloud, droplets of rain condense and drift downward to earth. Each droplet either in the form of water or snow, is unique in its own way. Each will experience a unique set of events as it finds its way to the ground, into streams and rivers, in time perhaps even merging into the ocean . The cloud divides continuously into these droplets for several hours, even days. As the first such droplets evolve and merge into the flow of life, still fresh new droplets are being formed to begin their own life cycles.
The one is becoming the many.
In time, each droplet merges with others to form puddles and oceans, and from these puddles and oceans eventually each one dissolves into the air to return to its source, the clouds, only to repeat the endless cycle of condensation and precipitation causing the one to become the many, once again. As each droplet returns to merge with its source, can we say where in the cloud that specific droplet resides before it returns to the earth ? Is it the same droplet which is now descending as the one which rose and merged into the cloud earlier or is it a different one ? Even the question itself has no meaning. The cloud is fundamentally one and as each droplet merges with the cloud, it too becomes one. As the cloud precipitates new droplets, it cannot be said that the earlier droplet is returning to the earth, but just that the one is continuing to spring forth as the many.
Similarly, we can think
of ourselves as droplets of the cloud and one day, we will again be the one cloud
from which we emerged – not a portion of the cloud, but the cloud itself.
Just as it is impossible to isolate the droplet as it merges again with its source
and becomes its source, so too do we become indivisible with our source –
we become the source
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