We are all on an ocean journey. Not travellers crossing from one shore to another, but the ocean itself, journeying, appearing for a time as this particular wave, this particular life.
Across centuries, across languages, across traditions that never spoke to one another, the same recognition keeps arriving: that what you are is not separate from the one reality out of which you arise. The wave is not other than the ocean. It is the ocean, moving, for a while, in a shape called you.
What follows explores that recognition: where we come from, why we forget, and what becomes possible when we remember. Watch the short video below for the heart of it, or read the full article, What Are We Here For?
The video gathers the heart of this teaching into a single thread: the seven principles that run through the whole work. They come from the spiritual wisdom of traditions around the world, and are offered here through the image of the Ocean and the Wave.
- There is only one reality
- That one reality is aware
- You are that
- The forgetting is not a mistake
- Love is the structure of reality
- Beauty is the language it speaks
- The return is available now
Take It Further
The seven principles, each with its own explanation, are gathered into a short booklet, or read in full within the essay they are drawn from.
Or read the full essay online: What Are We Here For?
GOING DEEPER
A companion to the video An Ocean Journey. Its text can be found in full in the essay What Are We Here For, itself available as an audiobook. Where those seven principles were offered in a few plain sentences each, this writing and audiobook ask what stands behind them.
What the seven principles point to is older than any single tradition: Heartmind itself, the ground beneath thought and feeling that every genuine contemplative path has, in its own language, tried to describe. Each principle is traced through one root that speaks closest to how it is seen here, the ninth and tenth century teachings of Kashmir Shaivism, Vasugupta, Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, and followed outward from there: into the work of physicists and cognitive scientists, among them Erwin Schrodinger, Federico Faggin, David Bohm, Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup, each arriving, by an entirely different route, at something close to the same ground; into the plain spoken testimony of sages who lived the recognition rather than argued for it, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Neem Karoli Baba; and into the more literal evidence of pattern itself, cymatics, the golden ratio, the geometry that keeps turning up wherever vibration meets a willing surface.
It moves through the architecture of consciousness as Kashmir Shaivism describes it, the kanchukas that narrow infinite awareness into a single life; through Sri Aurobindo’s account of involution and evolution, why the forgetting was never a wrong turn; through love as the ground beneath all seven principles, carried above all by the example of Neem Karoli Baba; through beauty as pattern made visible; and into the final recognition, drawn from Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle among others, that none of this was ever a destination still ahead.
Offered throughout not as proof, but as my own honest sharing: the summation of years of research and practice, given so that we may come, together, into the awareness of our true nature.
