Big idea, small package
angels, unity, and the spontaneous, uncontrived life
I have a big idea, but something tells me not to open this essay with it. You, the reader, don’t need a huge thought, with the heft of a truck’s drivetrain. You want an easy 5-minute read.
So, I will begin with baby Lewis, the grandson. He has a little faint red spot on each eyelid. By tradition they are called “angel kisses.” They can represent a sign of protection, of a past life, or of blessings to come. Some view it as a “symbol of one’s divine connection… a portal to heaven, linking the child to the angelic lineage.”(fromtheangels.com)
Is this little guy a descendant of angels? I would like to think that if one person is, we all are. All connected to the ground of all being in some way.
There is something amazing, miraculous about Lewis’ tacit abilities. No one is telling him how to live; he just does it. Granted most of life at this point is sleeping and eating, but all his reflexes — sucking, swallowing, crying, even those perturbed movements of this hands and fingers often joined by that of his legs and feet — all these are untaught. They are spontaneous and uncontrived.
Lewis does not deliberate at this point in his life. His movements are life itself, unadorned by words or measurement or intention — all these are ascribed to him by older humans.
This brings to mind an alternate cosmology as referenced by Alan Watts. In one of his lectures he said that “Hindus see god as a cosmic centipede with a thousand arms.” And the thousand arms… are us.
In his 1966 book “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” he says:
What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call 'here and now,' and you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. Every wave is the whole ocean waving.
We are all something that everything is doing.
Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
Right now Lewis’ unique action is growing at a pace that seems to us surprisingly fast.
His unique action is in those deep, limpid eyes that one moment take in nothing and the next, everything.
His unique action is to feel so utterly connected to everything around him, that he can’t even distinguish himself from the whole.
He has yet to develop the concept of “I.” Everything is altogether. A great unity.
Maybe we can’t get closer to the truth of the world than where he is right now.
This is my 66th weekly post on Substack. The number is not significant. I started March 5, 2025. I wanted to explore the processes by which we make meaning, and the errors and difficulties along the way, and to do this through stories, anecdotes, and reflections.
But as with everyone I know, a lot of our attention has been bent around the warping effects of the black holes of self-absorbed world leaders and the chaos that emanates from them. For instance, a national news headline on March 5, 2025 was “T— warns that death awaits Hamas leaders and Gazans if hostages aren’t immediately released.” Bluster. Name-calling. It’s like someone took a bicycle pump to the archetypical grade school bully until it swelled into an outsized, mango-colored maelstrom.
It has been challenging for the Quaker/Humanist side of me to contemplate “that of God in each of us.” If he is, then his presence must be highly concentrated in some and very, very diluted in others — measured in parts-per-trillion, if you know what I mean.
The challenge is to find the light that is still out here in the world, and to believe against a lot of evidence that there is some unifying principle or force that ties together communities, nations, humanity. It is tempting to give up on the quest, but something calls us back, I believe, to keep looking for it.