One day last year, I was sitting outside at my neighborhood coffee shop, and three different friends all came up to me, one after the other, and told me they were having hard weeks. It was uncanny. I mean, that’s weird, right?

One was Bill, an indestructible heroin addict with the erect posture of an Archbishop and enough raw vitality to light up Houston. “Everything just feels so epically fucked up,” he said, laughing with sheer astonishment. 

Less than an hour later, my dear old friend, Jack, showed up. He’s a yoga teacher who lives by old-world – in fact almost Homeric – codes of honor. Truth, valor, protection of the vulnerable, all of that stuff. He is also a master of pop culture trivia. Imagine if Achilles was a Zen monk who also had an encyclopedic knowledge of Frank Sinatra, Jimi Hendrix, and John Wayne. That’s Jack. He sat down, looked off into the distance, corrugated his forehead, and said something about life feeling so difficult. I could see the muscles working in his jaw. It was disconcerting. If Zen monk Achilles can feel that bad, what chance do the rest of us have?

The third friend who dropped by was a Falstaffian giant with a hoary beard and hieroglyphic tattoos on his beefy forearms. His name is Craig, and he’s usually as exuberant as a Russian Cossack. On this day, however, he stood, towering over me like a mountain, and wondered whether life was worth the trouble. All three of these, I remind you, were in one day. Meanwhile, oddly enough, I, too, had been feeling struggly that week, even by my standards.

After Craig lumbered sadly away I thought: That’s kinda weird. These three guys, plus me, all having really brutal weeks, for no discernible reasons. Then, like a good little Westerner, I thought, well that’s obviously just a coincidence. 

But, I then thought, what if it’s not? What if the four of us were having tough weeks because we’re all connected in some invisible way?  All “tuned in” to something or other. What if there really is a unifying Field of Consciousness and there’s been, I don’t know, like, some kind of “disturbance in the Force” that people are affected by? 

I know most people would say that – even if it wasn’t just a coincidence – there was surely some other nice, non-woowoo explanation. Something in the headlines that day. Or maybe a low-pressure front. Or a kind of pollen in the air. Or a new 5G tower zapping us with Martian death rays. Astrology buffs would no doubt say that Mercury was, yet again, as always, in fucking retrograde.

Here’s the thing though. Imagine if the world’s most prestigious scientists suddenly announced, with Viennese accents and everything, that there is, in fact, a unifying Field of Consciousness. The whole damn universe is floating in it, like an idea in God’s mind. They’d scientifically proved this. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. All of existence is brilliantly alive, and all separation is a superficial illusion. Newscasters were talking about it on the news every night, even grudgingly on Fox.

My question, then: If this happened, would I notice way more signs of this now-officially-sanctioned Oneness? Would I observe far more trippy synchronicities, strange correspondences, mysterious patterns in my life, psychic voodoo, and tacit feelings of connection with all beings…for the simple reason that I was, so to speak, allowed to? For the simple reason that authorities and pundits on TV had formally ratified the possibility?

And that question leads pretty unavoidably to this question: Where, or from whom, do we get permission to notice what we notice, and to know what we know, to presume the paradigm we presume, and, therefore, to live how we live?

Here’s a piece of Dharma from my Guru that this reminds me of.

“The fusion of scientific materialism and scientific method is a very destructive force that is overwhelming world civilization. And it’s forbidding human beings from entering into a depth of involvement with Reality that has been used since the most ancient of days, for tens of thousands of years…to be entered into the sphere of Reality beyond the merely gross appearance of things. No authority, scientific or religious or of any other kind, has a right to make declarations that enforce belief or prevent getting to know the Truth. No such right exists, and no such right should be allowed to be presumed.”

                                                – Adi Da Samraj, from the CD, Science is a Method, Not a Philosophy (Note: I transcribed this from the audio, so punctuation is all completely made up by yours truly.)

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