I was sitting in a sauna one evening with the inimitable Jeff Carreira and several other of my close friends, and as so often happened in those days, we started speaking about philosophy. Jeff had been reading many different writers, but was particularly influenced by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and his concepts of number being fundamental to human experience.
Here's the basic idea: life's dimensions can be seen very broadly in terms of number. Particularly, three different perspectives emerge, all with tremendous insight and validity, when looking at life through the numbers 1, 2, and 3. To begin:
Oneness
Have you ever meditated and felt "I could do this forever. I have everything I need right here, just Being. Just being is all I need. In fact, just being is all there is." If you haven't, I highly recommend it. Nothing brings more peace, relief, and lightness of being than recognizing that you're free from the world and from any troubles you may have had, or will ever encounter.
You may have experienced this kind of peace when just lying in bed—we experience it every night in deep dreamless sleep. It's the experience of being completely alone, and yet completely full, totally content, lacking for nothing.
It's the seat of contemplative practice, this understanding that "I, all by myself and without anything else added to me, am full. I am complete. I am whole, undisturbed, untouched. I have always been this way and will continue to be this way forever."
If you want to get metaphysical about it, you can say that this oneness transcends birth and death. It's the part of you that existed prior to the Big Bang and will exist after everything falls away, including our bodies.
It's the experience of freedom from relationship, which is why it is ONE. There is no other, not yet. It's you before you were born. It's the universe before the Big Bang. It's God outside of space and time. And so, in a certain sense, that is the meaning of life: being awake to your primordial oneness, understanding it, and resting there.
But that's not the whole story. It couldn't possibly be. Why? Because you're reading these words, so there's obviously something else happening here. And that's:
Twoness
Once the universe sprang into being, so too did "the other." With the birth of things came the birth or relatedness. Suddenly there was interaction and everything existed in relationship to everything else. Which means there is no such thing as isolated existence. Everything about you exists in relationship to everything else.
Your body exists because of the food you eat and the water you drink. Your mind exists because of the culture and language and values that formed you. Your skeleton and biology exist because of millions of years of evolution on a planet with the gravity and atmosphere that we experience.
Your sense of value and contribution to the world exists in relation to the people you interact with. Your feelings of love and other emotions are a result of your relationships with those you're close to. You could even go so far as to say that everything you know about yourself comes from your relationships with others.
For instance, I know I'm tall because when I look around I see the top of most everyone else's heads. If it were just me, floating in a dark vacuum, I would have no sense of my tallness.
As for the "meaning" of all this, being awake to your profound relatedness is freedom and happiness. Letting go of the idea that you are somehow a separate island, alone in this cold world, is a powerful first step. Letting in the fact that you only exist in relationship to everything else is the most empowering thing there is, because you're no longer afraid of "the other." You realize that being more empathetic or caring about others is not something you may need to work on, it's the very fabric of who you are. You just need to surrender more and more deeply to that fact.
Think about it, if the nature of your being is relatedness (which it is), then what is there to fear about being profoundly intimate with the world around us? That intimacy is what makes us who we are. So let yourself be moved by the natural world, let another person in way too close, give up the control that you think you have in favor of a view that is much more aligned with reality: you are dependent upon everything else and everyone else for your very existence.
Threeness
Threeness is movement. Life is not simply Being and solitary "oneness." Nor is life simply relatedness and a static "twoness." Life is dynamic. It is going somewhere. It has been developing since the very beginning, 13.7 billion years ago. All the atoms that make up my body were present back then, but I couldn't type this then, nor could you read it and think about it. So clearly, something pretty amazing has happened during the vast span of time between the birth of the universe and 2013 CE.
Movement, development, becoming—these are also the meanings of life. If you are developing, you are alive. If you are stuck in a rut, you are dead in a way. If there is movement, there is life. That is true in terms of your relationships (twoness) and your being (oneness).
So how are you moving forward? How are you contributing to an increase of consciousness? How are you bringing forth a world of greater complexity and harmony?
Trying new things, exploring frontiers, sniffing out the grandeur of life from the sleeping crevices; so much is possible right now. If you're reading this, it means you have all the capacities you need to play a significant role in the process of the universe awakening to its own majesty. As Seth Godin says, "You've won the birth lottery." You're alive in a time of great change, with unprecedented wealth and education. So what possibilities are you exploring? How are you using your being and relationships to uncover new realities about the world around us that no one has seen before?
That's the role of the artist and visionary. You look around and create something new from what's possible. You take us all a step further, and from there we can see a little bit more about what's next. And on and on it goes.
What's your experience of oneness, twoness, and threeness? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
