The Oneness of Life

I promised to try to say something about the Oneness of Life.

When asked what enlightenment was, my teacher, Bernie, always said it was “the realization and actualization of the Oneness of Life.” Realization was knowing that smoking was bad for your health; actualization was stopping smoking. Whenever he talked about the Oneness of Life, Bernie used the metaphor of the one body. We are all part of one body, like the right hand and the left hand. Intellectually, I understood what Bernie meant by “the one body”: that’s what Bernie meant by “realization.” The actualization has always been more elusive.

While working with my worries about old friends, I found myself plunged into the oneness of life. It was right there in my fear of losing the person and the gratitude of having that person in my life, the Yin and Yang of love.

I’d had glimpses before. At first, I had only heard rumors. Was it my first year after college, sharing an apartment in Manhattan with Peter, and in the tumultuous beginning of a romance? Peter told me that I would never feel fully at home in the relationship until or unless I knew I would be okay without it. That was brilliant. It helped me work with my dependency but, for a long time, I’ve also felt the other side, to cherish and celebrate my dependency. I will miss you terribly and am so grateful for that feeling, for the experience. When I caught a glimpse of this, I began describing myself as a “Zen romantic.” I quoted Tennyson, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," but I worried that “Zen romantic” was an oxymoron.

Last week was different. Fear and gratitude are both parts of the one body. Bernie knew this. He talked about it in the year after Jishu died. Some Zennies had chastised him, he said, for the profoundness of his grief: shouldn’t a Zen master be free of all attachments and therefore free of loss? No, Bernie said.

Shakespeare knew it too. "Parting is such sweet sorrow." I am beginning to understand. Attachment and non-attachment, sorrow and gratitude, the Yin and Yang of life, arise together as a beloved friend approaches the end of life, as I approach the end of life.

To experience the Yin and Yang of life, to hold the seeming opposites within us, is that what Bernie meant by the Oneness of Life? Is that Enlightenment? Had I been thrown off by the two-hands metaphor? I am experiencing something in the Yin and Yang of “opposing” feelings that I didn’t get from “opposite” hands.

To paraphrase Roshi Bob Kennedy, if holding the opposites of life within us is not Enlightenment, what is it?