The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--37. One

Morning Cloud, Steve Brown 2024

And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.  This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein.  Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things--plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time.  It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

--John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, 1941

I am obsessed with near-death experiences and reports of an afterlife.  I spend more time reading books and watching videos on that than any other subject, including Steinbeck, the subject matter of this book. Although many years ago I was seeking some assurance that this life isn't all there is, after reading and watching videos of hundreds of accounts, that is no longer what draws me to the reports.  I am already absolutely sure I will still exist long after I stop breathing.  No, what draws me to these accounts is that same oneness Steinbeck speaks about.  Though clearly an agnostic, and at most times in his life, an atheist, Steinbeck identifies through the study of ecology an "expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time".  

Through a different set of lenses, all near-death experiences reinforce that same oneness profoundly, including the "elastic string of time."   Time, as we know it, apparently only exists in this realm.  But unity, oneness in purpose, is eternal and God-driven.  

This is sometimes difficult to comprehend in a world of predator and prey, of conflict and survival, and yet, I believe we all have had glimpses of it.  I know William Blake did.  As did Wordsworth.  It is that feeling we only get when we are fully connected to now.  The feeling a young boy gets watching an ant move across a concrete walk on a fall afternoon when the shadows are chilly, and the sunlight is so gloriously warm on the skin.  The way that light hits the black ant body and turns it almost golden, but not quite.  The way the quartz crystals in the cement sparkle and dazzle the observer's eyes.

I'm certain everyone has had such a moment.  Maybe, it was sitting on the edge of a soccer field squinting into the late afternoon sunlight as you watch your son or daughter kick a ball.  A blanket over your lap, your eye focused only on the movement of your child--how glorious he looks with his long shaggy hair glistening under the warm touch of the late afternoon sun.

Sometimes I see that moment and know that truth doing dishes--when sunlight streams in window just right and turns the bubbles into pearls.

We don't doubt unity at such times.  We know it.  Because we are fully in the now--that magical suspension of time and thought where all we do is exist.  And feeling that, knowing that, produces profound gratitude because at some deep level we've always known it:  despite the duplicity of this world, we are all one in purpose.  We exist to exist together as one.  Here, now, and into eternity--we are always in school, always learning an ever-deepening connection to God's love.

I've seen cats experience that often.  Dogs too, but not quite as frequently.  They'll just sit in a shaft of sunlight and stare off into space--happy to just exist as part of everything else.

Steinbeck may have been an atheist.  But he is a mentor.  He saw the connections between everything, how everything we do impacts everything else.  And that it matters profoundly.

He looked in the tidepool and saw the universe.  He looked out at the universe and saw the tidepool.  And he recognized that they are the same.

After reading and watching hundreds of near-death experiences, I know there are literally thousands of individuals who know that oneness in God's love is our reality beyond a shadow of a doubt because their unshakable experiences with the afterlife.  They fully comprehend this life is but one tide pool in an ocean of existence.

But we don't have to die to know that.  The cat stretched out in a bar of sunlight knows it.   And we can feel it too.  Anytime we are willing to stop and be still.  It is a gift to all life.  The lion and zebra know it when they come to the water pool at the end of the day, and there in that late afternoon glow, suspend their roles as predator and prey to drink from and be sustained by the living water that is all life. 

And once we are willing to absorb those moments, we will never ever be the same.

God is all.  All is God.  The purpose of life is living.  And the moment to do that is now.

In this mortal life, it is perhaps impossible to remember that always in the midst of the tempest and turmoil, but the more time we spend in those magical suspensions of time soaking in sunlight, the more humanely we respond to the chaos and conflict around us as we are slowly and continually refined by God's love though our willingness to simply to exist as part of the whole.