CHAPTER SIX: On Oneness

I’m starting this final chapter four weeks and two days after undergoing ostomy reversal/takedown and reattachment surgery.

In the hospital, as with my two prior major (and one minor) surgeries, I ended up watching a good deal of Hallmark Channel television. Sometimes a predictable happy ending is just what a person needs.

One of the movies involved the ‘obligatory’ nanny and prince story. Which goes something like this. Through unforeseen circumstances, inexperienced American nanny goes to England to take care of a child, or perhaps two children, in a royal family, in a castle. Said children are decidedly horrible to new nanny at first, but she eventually gains their trust and falls in love with the prince, and the prince with her. (The prince might be the children’s uncle, for example.) The queen or some other authority figure isn’t impressed with the nanny, finds the prince’s flirtation with her trivial and not of his aristocratic social class, and causes conflict. Oh, also, the American nanny usually ends up befriending the castle staff, which the queen finds horrifying. Ultimately, she softens and the nanny and the prince either get married or otherwise publicly declare their undying and devoted love to one another.

I’m no stranger to fairy tales. I grew up on CINDERELLA and SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES just as my heartland contemporaries did.

Somehow this story struck me differently at that moment. It was almost amusing to me to see one person curtsying and the other being curtsied to. And having to have lessons in curtsying!

Granted, I was likely under the influence of opioid pain medication at the time. Highly probable. I just laid there in my hospital bed and thought to myself, “What a charming and quaint custom.”

That’s the only way I could keep from thinking how completely nutso it is, one person curtsying and the other being curtsied to – that it’s a quaint and charming custom.

Nothing against the monarchy of any country, please; that’s not what I mean. These customs have been in place for centuries and will likely continue to be.

Yet this time, it brought me to the topic of ONENESS.

That’s a very nice word, oneness, but I don’t think any human who isn’t extraordinarily highly evolved (that would not be me) has any idea what it truly means. A brief online search denoted terms like wholeness or unity.

Great! Oneness. Wholeness. Unity.

What the heck does any of that truly mean? Words are made of symbols (letters) and represent something that are symbols for something else – how on Earth or anywhere else do we determine what Oneness really means?

Well, we don’t.

We can only experience it.

This is what I know oneness is NOT. People of one colored skin putting people of other colored skin in chains and forcing them into slavery, or into doing anything at all. Allowing only certain people to do anything (vote, marry, own property, etc.) while refusing others. Disregarding the natural resources of our planet while making some species extinct and filling the air we breathe and water we drink with pollutants.

I’d love to say I’m a master at experiencing oneness, but I’m not – I’m still in a human body. So far, I can’t imagine what “heaven” is like. I’ve had moments of feeling complete bliss and connection with energy flowing everywhere including very heavily through my body (SO AWESOME!) but that’s about it.

So, here I am writing to you from the border between what was in general human consciousness and what it is now becoming. In fact, that’s the title I was given for this book: WRITING FROM THE BORDER.

Which brings to mind a practical and helpful toolkit for anyone reading this who loves someone going through a health crisis. It can be very hard to know what to say to someone who has cancer or another life-threatening illness.

·       “I’m sending positive thoughts and prayers” is great if you mean it and truly are. The resonance of truth is palpable. Letting someone know you’re burning a candle in their honor, for example, can be helpful.

·       “What can I do to help? Let me know how I can help.” This is always my natural inclination and it doesn’t hurt at all. Yet a very sick person, at home or in the hospital or in post-op recovery, can’t wrap their minds around this kind of offer. (Also, people can say it automatically without thinking through what that might entail, and then not follow through. We’ve all had experiences like that.) All of our energy is going towards just staying alive, getting from one hour, or even minute, to the next.  After a while, it might be helpful to ask something like, “Can I bring you some soup tomorrow or Friday? What kind?”

·       Sometimes you just really want to hear something like, “That is hard.” “I’m sorry (not in apologizing – some people think that ‘sorry’ involves an apology and it doesn’t need to) that you are going through this.” “This sucks so bad!” It helps hearing people acknowledge how hard it is. Saying “You’re going to get through this just fine,” not so much. We don’t know that and it sounds like a platitude instead of genuine understanding or connection.

·       Don’t be afraid to ask questions. About anything. Even gory details of the surgery. We’ve been through it and figure people don’t want to know so we don’t bring it up. If you’re interested and want to know, please ask; connecting is wonderful and sharing the details helps us release them.

·       PLEASE share about your life and anything you’re going through. I can’t count the number of times people didn’t want to share with me because I had gone through “so much more” or “so much worse”, when all I wanted was to hear about them and take my mind off my own troubles. It’s extremely helpful to just have a normal conversation and share what’s going on with each other.

Keep in mind these suggestions come from my personal health journey. Other people may not want to answer gory questions about surgery or may have 16 ways you can help them right off the top of their head.

Now back to the impossible-to-describe topic of oneness.

From my limited perspective, I understand that means there are no individuals in the realm of the soul. We see individuals and different humans because of our consciousness level while in human form. We’re actually all one big cosmic soup, so to speak, with our individuality being like waves in the ocean or bubbles in sparkling water. We’re all together as one infinite mass of consciousness, but in human form we see ourselves as individuals.

Did I mention I don’t really understand any of this? Good, because I don’t. I’m starting to catch glimmers of opening, so that’s something.

And this much has become clear.

One must put the good of the whole foremost. If the individual takes away from the good of the whole, chaos erupts. It’s not the natural order. The individual will be fighting the natural order the whole way, and will cause great disruption to the whole, which will impact the individual in ways not foreseen.

I don’t want that kind of karma. I’ve dealt with enough already. You?

I’ll leave it at that. Take from it what you will.

I ask that the Source within me become the dominant relationship in my life, which enables me to have power over my own thoughts and actions so that I can then be of the highest value and service to others. -Julanne Dalke, YOUR ETERNAL IDENTITY: Practicing the Principles of A Spirit-Supplied Life www.julannedalke.com Used with permission

I’m realizing now that everything is sacred. Everything, including elimination, as I’m pooping out of my butt again! My poor rectum has been through so much. From around 14 centimeters to around 10 – it’s trying so hard to help me deal with the diarrhea and get us (by ‘us’, I mean all body parts) working together again. The blessed rectum. I sure do love it. In a future speech, I’ll ask the audience to repeat after me: rectum, rectum, rectum! (Here’s a note from my husband – always look at your poop before you flush to make sure what’s in there. Gut health is so important to overall vitality!)

There are ways to test for physical problems and all other issues – kinesiology/muscle testing (see David R. Hawkin’s POWER VS. FORCE and LETTING GO) that bypass the human error factor and go straight towards higher wisdom stored in the body. When my thought-making-machine mind keeps bringing up unbidden thoughts, I have learned to transfer them to the right brain side, where openness and creativity come from, instead of being stuck in those same darned thought patterns, over and over. I’ve even learned to ask myself “Who is this?”, when an unbidden thought pops into my head. Sometimes it’s divine guidance, but mostly I get no immediate answer, which tells me it’s just the thought-making-machine.

This is the reason I’m writing this book. To help you create inner peace and listen to higher guidance. It’s what I have to do myself to coexist peacefully in this world, and we teach what we need to learn.

The only way life on this planet functions effectively is if everyone puts the good of the whole foremost in mind alongside personal goals. What isn’t good for the whole isn’t good for any one individual. It’s impossible for it to be, in the long run, and we have to stop pretending to ourselves that the Universe really works in any other way. We all know this deep inside.

We know it.

Now it’s time to live it. To CHOOSE it.

Here’s to your life, and to your empowering and powerful choices. I send you radiant light and joy.

Love Your Voice & Voice Your Love,

Laura