The Ocean in a Drop

Dave Brisbin | 5.6.18 You’ve heard of heat seeking missiles…truth is, we humans are all pleasure seeking missiles. We seek pleasure and to avoid pain. Necessary trait for survival of the species. It guides us spiritually too, as long as we honestly consider in what we ultimately take pleasure. You could say that the spiritual journey is really an ongoing refining of our pleasure centers. Chinese proverb—to suffer yourself when all under heaven suffer, to enjoy only when all under heaven enjoy—implies an ultimate refining of our notion of pleasure that Jesus seems to affirm as he leads us to further and further expansion of our sense of relationship and connection. To love the enemy equally with our friends and neighbors and then to see even our attachment to family as a barrier to the fullness of unity are among the most difficult teachings of Jesus. A view of the perfect lover as a mirror that faithfully reflects the beloved without agenda or distortion, a mirror that is empty of self until the beloved steps into frame and empty again as the beloved moves on, seems to be where Jesus is leading: that such a laying down of self is the only way we will ever see that we are intimately connected to everything—not just some things—and that our life is the connection itself. And that apart from everything that is, we don’t actually exist. It’s a disturbing notion for us rugged individualists…the thought of our sense of self returning as a drop to the ocean. But as the poet Rumi wrote, we are not a drop in the ocean, we are the entire ocean in a drop.