The eternal ocean of life

There is a rocky outcrop on the beach nearby, a low hill actually, from where one gets a magnificent view of the sea.

Sometimes I clamber up the rocks and sit there to gaze at the sea.

From my lofty perch up on high the beach looks small and insignificant, a long curving strip of sand on which little stick figures scurry about like ants.

But if I look straight ahead I can see nothing but the ocean, a silver expanse of water stretching endlessly to the point where it becomes one with the sky.

The sun has set and I am still gazing ahead of me, lost in the sea and the sky. On a good day I am the sea and the sky, my consciousness no more than a raft bobbing on the lapping water.

Only the changing light reminds me that I am sitting alone on a rock and that it's time to go down to the breach and mingle again with the stick figures that still remain, before winding my way home.

The other day I came across an interview in Uncommon Wisdom, a book by Frank Capra. And it seemed curiously apt. Capra interviewed Stanislav Grof, psychiatrist and author. Grof is one of those 60s' characters, well-known for using LSD as a research tool for the exploration of the human mind.

This is what he said:

One of the most frequent metaphors that you find in psychedelic reports is that of the circulation of water in nature. The universal consciousness is likened to the ocean - a fluid, undifferentiated mass – and the first stage of creation to the formation of waves.

A wave can be viewed as an individual entity, and yet it is obvious that the wave is the ocean and the ocean is the wave. There is no ultimate separation. The next stage of creation would be a wave breaking on the rocks and spraying droplets of water into the air, which will exist as individual entities for a short time before they are swallowed again by the ocean. So, there you have fleeting moments of separate existence. The next stage in this metaphoric thinking would be a wave that hits the rocky shore and withdraws again but leaves a small pool of tidal water. It may take a long time until the next wave comes and reclaims the water that was left there. During that time, the tidal pool is a separate entity, and yet it is an extension of the ocean which, eventually, will return to its source. Evaporation is the next stage. Imagine water evaporating and forming a cloud. Now the original unity is obscured and concealed by an actual transformation, and it takes some knowledge of physics to realise that the cloud is the ocean and the ocean is the cloud. Yet the water in the cloud will eventually reunite with the ocean in the form of rain. The final separation, where the link with the original source appears to be completely forgotten, is often illustrated by a snowflake that has crystallized from the water in the cloud, which had originally evaporated from the ocean. Here you have a highly structured, highly individual, separate entity which bears, seemingly, no resemblance to its source. Now you really need some sophisticated knowledge about water to recognise that the snowflake is the ocean and the ocean is the snowflake. And in order to reunite with the ocean the snowflake has to give up its structure and individuality; it has to go through an ego death, as it were, to return to its source.