Surf. Waves. White caps and troughs. Sand and sun, lotion and lovers strolling along the beach: all parts sharing my experience. I found myself thinking about the habitual process of focusing on parts. The parts of a wave, the parts of a relationship, the parts of the universe, even the parts of a human soul – all these parts spun about, dancing to the rhythm of the sea.

 

What, I wondered, would our world look like if we began to see it, to experience it, to ponder it in terms of wholes and not parts. After all, what is there that is not simultaneously whole and yet part of another whole? Is not the atom complete and yet part of a molecule? Are not molecules whole and yet part of cells, even as cells are included with tissues and tissues with muscles and muscles with bodies and bodies within societies and societies within the world and world within the solar system and so on until one finds all that is smiling down upon her?

 

 Which brings us back to waves. How, I wondered, do they work? How does the moon pull the waves up from the stillness of the depths? In my imagination the moon becomes an external trigger pulling up disturbances from beneath, disturbances that roll across the surface of my experiences, distracting me from the vaster silence of the great deep. Some of the waves can be quite exciting; some of the troughs can penetrate deeply into the depths and yet in one sense neither wave nor trough are the vastness of the ocean. The wave, no matter how tremendous a tsunami; the trough, no matter how deeply it dips, are ever the surface experience of the ocean. The surface sometimes captures our attention so completely we forget the stillness ever present beneath.

 

 Our experiences are the troughs that surge across the surface of the deep, often plumbing the depth, sometimes shallow, yet still the surface. Our sense of self with its artificial identification with separation is the crest of the wave – white caps that capture the attention and yet where does the crest not connect with the wholeness of the water? If we gaze into the water and not into the wave or the trough where does one start and the other end? Where does either separate from the all that lays beneath – vast, still and magnificent?

 

 Each wave expresses the ocean in a slightly new, never ending, constantly re-emerging way. Each trough moves beneath the crest in ever changing ripples of relationship; and yet all this movement, all the expression of individuality is never not the ocean. Can you look beyond the self-wave through which you’re expressing and sense the awesome vastness of the ocean, the all that we all are?

 

 I feel it in the swell of my heart.

 

 

 

This is the expression of unity consciousness, the experience of enlightenment, the return to our Original Face of non-duality. This is the water, the all that is, the place of ultimate, pure potentiality from which we arise. This is the place from which we manifest form – at first unconsciously – and then more and more deliberately as we awaken and as we evolve through the hierarchy of growth and consciousness.

 

 All this from sitting on the beach with nothing better to do than think – it’s pretty frightening, isn’t it? Fortunately, I soon returned home so that I could get rewrapped up in the distractions so readily provided by life. Yet, every now and again, I think about the waves and I think about the beach.

 

 What if I saw my world as waves connecting to troughs connecting to a deeper stillness? Deeper still, what if I saw my world as the ultimate interconnectivity of the water? What if you did? I wonder, would we stop acting and reacting from a center of isolation, constantly reducing our experience to parts and denying the intrinsic wholeness and connection of each of us and each and every thing that fills the glorious immensity of Form’s creation, the grand playground of our own Divinity? Would I love myself more unconditionally? Would I love you, accept you, enfold you into my being just as you are? Would we be different and better, kinder and softer with our partners, our children, or our parents?

 

 

Aloha and Good Morning,

 

 Not long ago, I sat on the sands of Maui, kissed by gentle winds, caressed by the island sun and embraced by the metaphors of nature and humanity. In other words, I found myself watching the waves. Since I’m sitting on the beach and there’s no TV to distract or destroy the possibility of original thought, I discovered heretofore unknown cognitive skills suddenly at my disposal. Of course, I’m still sitting on the beach, so that spontaneous moment of lucidity dissipated before the lulling crash of surf.

If trough, crest and ocean are all just the ever-present water and if I find myself expressing as the crest – could I not, with greater awareness, just as easily express myself as the trough or as the depth in its stillness? And if that could I not just as well transcend wave and trough and depth and be the water? In the moment that I do, what am I?

 I tend to think so. What do you think?

 

 I’ll see you on the sand,

 

 With Love and Aloha,

 

 Holman

Contents © 2008 by  Holman R. Meyerhoffer, LMT—Project Transformation