The same river that flows through the universe flows through me.

I am sure somebody before me has felt and said this exact same thing. But this thought came and shook me awake one morning. It’s one thing to say it, another thing to know it, and yet another thing to feel it as a palpable reality in our lives. Just these few words possess tremendous transformative power. What was a vague idea, something ignored or misunderstood, suddenly becomes a potent catalyst for change. It’s nothing new, but the depth of what it means to us is new. Here’s the deal, we are made of the same elements as the rest of the universe. We are made of the same stuff as stars. And this means the way we live and process information has more in common with the universe than we might have ever imagined. Maybe all of our dreaming and intuition, all of our connections and deeper insights, are just the ways the universe speaks through us. Perhaps that is part of the unknowable mystery, a connection we live in and around everyday without ever seeing, that helps make what seems so foreign familiar.

…the archetypes are not only structures of our unconscious but are the structures of the whole universe. – Edward Edinger

Essentially he’s saying the same thing, that the energy that drives our psyches, the way we think, process, and understand ourselves is the same as the energy behind the way the universe manifests itself. The way ideas are born, the heat of creative energy, and the cooling off of what previously gripped us are similarities we share with the universe. It makes sense that the way we operate is informed by the way the rest of life operates. And if we can create a bridge of understanding, of connection with this sort of underlying energy that unites all things, we will be closer to seeing that we are not separate from the universe, but simply another manifestation of it, built on the same foundations and functions. We may look different from deep space and exploding stars but the truth is those same elements and energies exist within us and inform our day to day living. We have our moments of deep silence and explosive energy too. How much more connected could we be? We are literally a product of our environment.

So when the Bible describes making Adam from clay we see it’s talking about humans being created from the stuff of the Earth, from the elements of the universe. The very thing physics tells us. The truth is the same, it’s the details that are different. And that’s where we get hung up every time. Why does there have to be literally and absolutely only one way of understanding reality. Why can’t all the stories exist if they all speak of the same truth. We let what makes sense speak to our soul, but let’s not forget that it all comes from the identical underpinnings that form all of life. Semantics shouldn’t keep us from seeing we are just another manifestation of the whole.

By the way this is almost the entirety of Eastern philosophy. Sorting out the oneness that hides within the multiplicity, understanding the undercurrents of the flow of energy and how to attune ourselves to it. There is no separateness or compartmentalization even though our eyes and minds betray us. That oneness is the river of energy and it flows through everything, equally, all the time. This energy constitutes the raw building blocks of the universe and everything in it including us. If we focus more of our attention on that we will find a way out of what keeps us excluded from the rest of life. We aren’t trying to get there, we already are there, we are right in the middle of the flow of the universe. We’ve only forgotten. This is why I am continually struck by Arjuna’s words at the end of the Bhagavad Gita, because they speak to this, he hasn’t become something new or different, he’s just “regained his memory.”

And so it can be the same for us.

The same river that flows through the universe flows through me.

kb