Article in Stretton Focus, April 2014
You could say (and I will!) that life is about ‘making connections’. Our life begins as a connection between egg and sperm in the womb: followed by a myriad of interconnections and link ups as the foetus develops. After birth the child begins to make connections with the outside word: making relationships and growing to understand those relationships: and in this way developing a sense of SELF (which is the most important possession we have).
There is always a tension between the self and its relationships. If this is a healthy and creative tension, the self will remain balanced and continue growing to full maturity. As life goes on there will be more and more opportunities for making connections. Things will just happen (that is, life will happen!) and the self will have to choose which connections are valuable, and how to incorporate them into the person you want to become.
One of the things that could ‘just happen’ is the idea that we live in ONE world: which is part of a UNI-verse, where all things are connected in what might be called a Cosmic Web. Such a thought is a concept beyond our full understanding, because we are part of what we are thinking about. Nevertheless, this is not a problem to be solved but rather a situation that can be accepted.
The best word for describing such an acceptance (which in effect would be a humbling of yourself before an unfathomable mystery) would be the word GOD. Making this connection with God, you could imagine your ‘self’ as part of a Greater Self: your own ‘being’ as one with Ultimate Being, which some religious thinker has called The Ground of All Being.
Making that connection you will feel desire (or even compulsion) to become your ‘best self’; to find what in effect is your ‘true self’. This would reflect the Biblical point of view that we are all ‘made in the image and likeness of God’ which the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has called ‘the single most powerful idea in Western civilisation’.
Life then becomes a matter of making those connections (physical, spiritual and psychological) that will advance the knowledge of your true self, and enable you to become the person you could be, and God wants you to be.
Donald Horsfield
