Three friends and a declaration

When the sun rises, night becomes day. Likewise, when love manifests itself, ignorance, not knowing, becomes conscious knowledge, wisdom.

(Meher Baba)

It was because of the Covid pandemic. That's how the conversations came about. I called my friend in Mexico, to inform him that a dear mutual friend had passed away from Covid in Geneva. We chatted via Zoom, after more than 20 years of not talking to each other. We remembered the times when we had worked together in Mexico City. Then decided to continue zooming and another good friend and ex-colleague joined our virtual conversations.

The topics varied as time passed, months, probably more than a year, in which we periodically continued our virtual meetings. We started by remembering our moments in the office and ended up talking about the universe, life, beliefs, and being. In short, the talks were transformed, from memories to life and philosophy. One of the friends was to blame for this, as in one of our conversations he brought up a video, which he had seen on YouTube, about the complexity of explaining the evolution of the flagella of bacteria, based on theories of natural selection. From there we moved on to the universe, the estimated dates of its origin and so on. And of course, 15 billion years were not easy to cover in an hour and a half, so we went on and on. And we continued, with evolution, from the extinction of the dinosaurs, in the wake of the Chicxulub asteroid, to the evolution of consciousness.

We talked about Teilhard de Chardin, our Catholic education, the myths of Adam and Eve and paradise. We discovered things about semiotics and silence, and we talked about consciousness as a quantum property, as postulated by Federico Faggin, inventor of the first microprocessors that gave rise to personal computers. They were pleasant and interesting talks, we went from astonishment to recognizing our ignorance, and of course, each one of us gave our opinions without really knowing. Because between the three of us together, we could not be a fraction of a scientific scholar and much less a spiritualist, cosmologist or mystic. But we did get entangled in long readings, and as a panel of sorts, we asked each other questions and laughed at the end, realizing that we did not understand anything.

We read that by 2100 the population in China will be half of what it is today, and that today more adult diapers are sold in Japan than baby diapers. We speculated on how these data are the underlying reason for upheavals and fears, among the dominant races and national groups today, and the rise of racism, populism and opposition to migration. The so-called replacement theory. We concluded that we live in a physically globalized world, but with most people having a fragmented and tribal consciousness.

This led us to begin to talk about the interconnection of everything, that we are the result of a cosmic evolution that goes from primordial energies to stars, atoms, molecules, microorganisms, and the whole range of the biological tree, until reaching the human phenomenon, as Teilhard de Chardin would say.

The conversation was now around the question: what is evolution for? And we answered and questioned at the same time: "To develop consciousness!?" Which was followed by another question; why? At that time, we left the topics of science; physics, biology and cosmology, and the facts of history, sociology and politics, to enter the field of philosophy. We linked our networks of thought to explain to ourselves the reason for existence.

We had to start explaining to ourselves who we were, a product of cultures, teachings and beliefs, born at different points and exposed to different experiences, although many of them perhaps common. Aware that in the world, there were at least 7 billion people and that each one of them had a different story. Just like us.

We became three entangled minds, trying to understand something beyond the mind, the origin of all, and even more so, why. We remembered the qualia proposed by Federico Faggin, the feelings, those things which are not thoughts. And we continued our Zoom panels of three, now reviewing texts, not from scientific or social journals, but from mystical interpretations of the universe. And then we came to discuss the theme of love, so present in the treatises and mystical poetry of all traditions.

It was, of course, a subject really impossible to understand with the mind, as anyone who has fallen in love or who has felt love knows. Naturally, we also had to get into the conversation about whether or not there was a God, and what was existence. We chose to conclude that God was just a word that we used to name existence.

We deliberated whether existence arose from energy by chance, as the materialistic scientific model proposes, something analogous to having monkeys equipped with typographic machines, tapping the keys for billions of years, and coming up with Don Quixote. Or whether it was the God of paradise, or a unitary consciousness, an inherent force in everything, an essence of love.

We realized that we could not understand anything, because to understand something that goes beyond the mind is like using a telescope to hear music.

But based on analogies and readings of texts by the great spiritual masters we discussed a concept, which was that of a single existence, a single being, simulating or dreaming a multitude of simulated characters. That, in reality, these characters have no existence, that they are only fictions of the simulator, just as the characters of a dream are actually the one who is dreaming them.

We pondered why we simulate ourselves, and why existence, being one and without time, is dreamed, imagined, and spilt into an apparent temporal multiplicity. We lose ourselves trying to think and communicate what is beyond our minds.

Then we came across a writing from Meher Baba:

God is love. And love has to love. And to love there must be a Beloved. But since God is the infinite and eternal existence, there is none to love but himself. And to love himself, he has to imagine himself as the Beloved whom he as a lover imagines he loves. Beloved and lover imply separation. And separation creates nostalgia and longing, and longing provokes the search... Longing reaches its maximum when separation becomes total, then the purpose of separation, which was that love could experience itself as lover and beloved, is fulfilled; and union is achieved.

And when union is achieved, the lover knows that he himself was all the time the Beloved whom he loved and with whom he desired union; and that all the impossible situations he overcame were obstacles that he himself had put on the way to himself. Attaining union seems to be impossible because it is impossible to become what you already are! Union is nothing other than knowing oneself as the only existence.

And we ended talking about something that cannot be spoken of, but felt, that cannot be explained, but lived, that one cannot understand, but surrender to it -Love.

Love is now the main topic of our virtual conversations. At the end of the day, we still don't understand anything, we know that it cannot be understood, but still, we keep trying. The world, the inner being of each of us, and the one that frames our "outside", continues with its achievements and frustrations, its tragedies and joys, its excitement and boredom, compassion and injustice, wars, conflicts, serenities and so on. As they say in Costa Rica, pure life...

Every week or two, we meet to continue exploring a possible explanation, even knowing that there is no resolution in thought, concept and word. Maybe we do it because of love. And perhaps our meetings will conclude like all human assemblies, with a final declaration. And here is a possible draft:

Love is love: a declaration from three friends - draft

Maybe this is a valley of tears, where we are prisoners of a simulation, characters of a dream, dreamed in order to love. Maybe we lost paradise or maybe we are building it as we walk. Maybe we are a humanity besieged by ourselves in the process of awakening.

We know, or rather we don't know. Or neither. Yes, we feel the pain, longing, confusion, but also joy, beauty, depth. Sometimes it is intolerable and too much when one is in either joy or pain. Because our receptacle is not ample enough to contain the explosion of feelings in all their fullness, it is like containing an ocean in a cup.

However, sometimes we spill into everything and flow out of our container, and we realize in a glance the beauty of it all; Be it valley of tears or tavern of joy, paradise lost or found, the total freedom that comes with being a prisoner, relief and siege, all at once, all in one.

And then love, then only love is.

And there is joy, mixed with sadness, a kind of mother-of-pearl feeling, which goes beyond opposing emotions, a fullness that derives its nature and at the same time is the source of this energy, a unified field of longing and fulfillment, so closely woven that one is the other, while none is at the same time. It is a dark light, a bliss beyond comprehension.

Its essence is so simultaneously human-divine, that it is the most adorable and loving of all possible constructs, imagined or not, in the universes and beyond. An apparition of always and never, which fills itself, being at the same time lost and found, longed for and fulfilled.

Language and thought cannot reach or express this state, this energy, this dimension, this totality, this static flow everywhere, within the same point, which is called love. There is such simplicity in its manifestation (which is happening all the time) that it loses itself in its words, mental elucubrations, and efforts, as it tries to celebrate its own expression.

It is so profoundly beautiful and intoxicating, that its multiple reflections in echoes of impossible mirrors, do not see "the imperishable sweetness that lives within everything and everyone" and that always manifests itself, hidden from the mind, which tries to swim that sweetness, until it ends up drowning eventually in it, naturally. The whole fabric of everything, the imagined and that which lies beyond imagination, is permeated by this totality, which is so tame, predominant, essential and existential at the same time, that it is impossible to think and understand it.

It's amazing the story you tell yourself, when the simulator is also simulated, where every point is sacred, fundamental, and integral to everything else!