Oneness.

Lots of people have talked about it throughout history.

The notion that there is a basic unity to the whole thing.

That there is a connectedness that goes beyond all differences. Individuality bowing down to the ground in the face of our togetherness.

A bubble in the ocean surrendering to the overwhelming reality of the ocean itself.

If this was the summer of 1996, and you told me you believed in a force that united us, I would have smiled at you and nodded, and privately thought you were a little on the crazy side.

At the time of the story, I was as far away from ideas of unity/oneness as any person could be.

Why was I so skeptical?

Because at that time, I had chosen to live apart from almost all human connection.

I lived in Lisbon, Portugal. Maybe I knew 1 or 2 people in the whole country.

There was no internet to connect me with ‘my people.’ No social media.

I didn’t even have a telephone. The closest public phone was half the city away.

I only worked, teaching English, about 5 hours a week. Just enough to pay the meager bills.

I would spend the hours and days alone; with no company, no conversations, no connecting, and certainly no oneness.

When I did come in contact with humans, it was with awkwardness.

I experienced people like an alien might experience earthlings.

I also felt like I appeared as an alien to the masses.

Rarely did I meet a person I felt could understand me. People’s understanding almost always amounted to something smaller than what I knew to be true about who I was.

The main reason for my isolation was that I was working on something internal which required massive amounts of solitude.

The other reason was that I didn’t know how to communicate with people; how to explain myself to them.

And when I listened, I heard more than they wanted to express.

And group experience? Communal experience? Forget about it!

I felt sure that no group in existence would fully embrace the fantastically intense and sweeping reality I experienced daily.

On top of this, I was very protective of my Individuality.

I was pretty certain that anybody who ever talked to me about us being part of the same group was doing so to manipulate me.

To make me part of ‘their’ conception of togetherness, be it relationship, family and most certainly country and religion.

By 1996 I was living by the code best espoused by Jiddu Krishnamurti :

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”

I wanted no part of the kind of oneness that depended on belief or shared identity.

And that was my understanding of unity/oneness.

How little I understood.

Everything was about to change in a most dramatic fashion, the day I met a man by the name of Leonard.

About the day I met Leonard

I first met Leonard one Sunday afternoon in July of 1996. It was at a San Francisco subway station where we met.

The hours before I entered that subway station were some of the worst hours of my life.

I had witnessed my ex-girlfriend, the love of my life, on the ground, in front of a toilet bowl, fighting with her boyfriend.

The two of them were fighting over a syringe of heroin.

I was visiting San Francisco from Europe. It had been 2 years since I had last seen the two of them.

In that time, they had graduated from drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana and were now addicted to heroin.

They both were skeletally thin and their bodies twitched.

It was heart braking.

Gone was the lively shine of curiosity in her eyes. The old calm sweet look was replaced by the anxious darting of the eyes, left to right, left to right, left to right, of a junkie looking for the next fix.  And her boyfriend was no better.

When I had last seen him, he was a swaggering young poet. Now he looked like a zombie.

The moment in the bathroom, the fight over the heroin, came to climax.  She had grabbed the syringe away from him.

She was supposedly trying to save him by taking the syringe from him.

I guess in her heart she really wanted to save him.

With the syringe in hand, she looked up at me.

At first I didn’t know what to say or do.

I hardly knew anything about heroin. I only knew that I was very scared of it.

I had seen too many half dead junkies laying out on the sidewalks of the cities of the world I walked through.

That was all I needed to know.

But here is something else I knew.

I knew I loved her. I couldn’t simply watch her with indifference.

I told her to pour it in the toilet and be done with it.

I told her this was her chance and she could do it.

To do it NOW!

She seemed to agree and moved her hand towards the toilet.

Then the syringe was over the toilet. It was the moment of choice.

She hesitated. She shook her head, ‘no’.

She turned to her boyfriend, they looked at each other, and started to kiss.

I felt my heart drop.

I went outside to sit in front of their house and  smoke a cigarette and to think.

I sat there on their porch with a sadness indescribable.

They came outside 15 minutes later.

It was clear by their dazed expressions that they had come to a solution.

I was paralyzed with grief.

I couldn’t find the strength to walk away.

The best I could do was to call a mutual friend and ask him to come over.

He would rescue me, I thought.

He came over and the 4 of us decided to go eat some Mexican food.

At the restaurant my exgirlfriend made a nasty scene and we were asked to leave the restaurant.

I got up the nerve to make my getaway.

I said my goodbyes as we were walking out of that restaurant.

I walked towards the subway where I could get a train to my sister’s house in Berkeley.

I felt a sense of relief mixed with wave after wave of sadness.

I had regained some strength by the time I got to the subway station.

I went down the stairs just in time to see a train leaving the station.

It would be 15 minutes until the next train.

I looked around.

The station was empty.

Then I noticed a man sitting on the opposite side of the platform.

He was sitting on a huge block of cement, cross legged with his back to me, about 50 meters away from where I was standing.

When I saw this man, my whole feeling changed.

Instantly, I walked straight towards this strange seated man as if we had a previously arranged appointment.

When I got to him, I climbed up the on the slab of cement, and without a hesitation, or even a single thought, I sat down opposite him.

We said no hello. We didn’t even smile. Nothing. We just looked into each other’s eyes.

No hello, no words at all. Just looking.

He had uncommonly good posture and he smelled of a campfire.

There was dirt, or camp fire soot, on his face.

His brown eyes were were soft and steady. Peaceful.

After a while, he softly smiled at me.

We continued looking into each other long and long.

The terrible, sad, hopeless images of the day floated across my inner vision.

I couldn’t make the previous experiences fit with the joy that was growing inside me as I connected with this strange man.

To reconcile the incongruity, I said; “Man, I wish I was where you are.”

He replied instantly and simply, in a voice both sweet and high pitched he answered;”I see nothing wrong with you.”

We fell back into our silent connecting.

Then, all at once, something happened.

This strange but agreeable feeling came over me. I was suddenly able to sense, for lack of better words, a sort of energy body about 5 centimeters in front of my body.

It was as if my body was in a bubble and I suddenly became aware that I was the whole of this bubble, not just the body.

He also had a bubble, just like mine.

So we sat there, two bodies, surrounded by two bubbles of light/energy

(I know this sounds crazy, but it happened.)

Then something else happened.

All at once, there was an opening in each of our bubbles, like a window, in front of the center of our chests.

Then, in a flash, I was no longer Alan.

I was pure awareness.

I was the awareness of both myself/my body, and also I was the awareness of the body sitting across from me.

I was him as equally as I was me.

He was me as equally as I was him.

The problem here with you understanding what I am trying to describe, is that words don’t do the trick.

It must be experienced.

Here is my best attempt. All at once it was clear that I was not merely this individual with a body called Alan. I was more than this.

The truth was suddenly and absolutely clear.

I was not merely an individual Alan, but the awareness that all beings share, including the man sitting right in front of me.

The odd thing was that there was really nothing odd about it at all!

It was obvious.

It was as obvious as up is up and down is down.

It was as if we always knew this deep down. Yes, this is the case. We always do know this!

Now, we were both crying.

Gone was the terrible sadness of the day.

Gone was any sense of powerlessness.

Best of all, gone was a primal fear that every person who takes themself to be separate carries with them.

It is a fear of others. It a fear of death. It is a fear of the unknown. It is a fear of change.

I never even knew this fear existed existed until it was gone, it was ALL I KNEW.

Recognizing this fear, before that moment, would have been like asking a fish to recognize water. It was like the air I breathed. Always present, and therefore escaping notice, until it was absent. I recognized it only by its absence. And its absence felt good!

It was like what Leonard (coincidentally the same name as the stranger in this story) Cohen wrote:

“If you don’t become the ocean  you’ll be seasick every day”
– Excerpt from “Good Advice For Someone Like Me”

At that moment, for the first time maybe, I was no longer seasick.

At that moment the train arrived.

We grabbed each other’s hand and boarded the train.

Then things got super freaky.

As we entered the train, it was clear that we were everyone!

There were maybe 50 people in that wagon and everybody  knew that I was them.

It was like I was playing a game of make believe with myself.

But all the bodies couldn’t quite pull off the subterfuge and everyone started giggling.

This was hilarious.

Each person doing their own individual thing; maybe listening to some music with headphones, or reading a book or a news paper or staring out the window, having a conversation with someone.

And their bodies started shaking with a joy they didn’t quite want to recognize.

All of us knew the secret, but somehow we managed to trick ourselves out of knowing it.

So…..on with the illusion.

I became Alan again.

I asked his name.

It was Leonard.

What did he do in life? He was a computer programmer, and father of a 13 year old son.

He was worried about his son’s love of baseball. We both had a good laugh about that.

His bare feet were cold, so I gave him my socks.

Then came my stop. I got off at the Berkeley station, but he was staying on until the Richmond Station.

We waved goodbye.

That was the last I ever saw of Leonard.

Epilogue

It has now been almost 30 years since I had that encounter with Leonard. For the first 20 years or so, I tried to recreate the experience of oneness. There have been moments, brief glimmers, of it, but for the most part, my individuality is firmly here and I am seeing the world, more or less, as a person, an individual me.

Still, the experience changed how I viewed the whole human drama. I understood that each person was another expression of me and I started to treat people with more compassion. Also, over time, I became less awkward and more relatable…I hope 🙂

Eventually, I stopped trying to recreate the experience. I lost interest. I somehow understand that knowing the essence of it, the truth of it is more than enough for this life time. Now I am more concerned with loving wisely whatever shows up with no ambitions for special experiences. I am just who I am with no need for spiritual pyrotechnics.