When we embody the element connecting, we experience more of what is around us as part of us. Less feels separate or different. In the worst offender, we feel suffering and seeking, distortion and disconnection not unlike we’ve felt in our self. In the most brilliant being or cosmic intelligence, we feel resonances and bonds. We experience all things as sharing essence.
Our culture conditions us to push many things away—from the greatest to the tiniest life forms. Some we make higher, remote, inaccessible, and utterly other. We never come into genuine relationship or partnership because we imagine them as so different and removed, so unlike us. These could be anything from what we conceptualize as divine to people with vastly more wealth or power. Our imposed deference limits what we could do together.
Others things we place far below us. We see them as mundane or inanimate. A cell, body element, or plant intelligence—these aren’t things with which we normally consciously engage. Nor do we imagine them as partners. We do the same thing to patients and the poor and a myriad of other things that somehow seem lesser.
When we are disconnected in this way, the world becomes a lifeless and non-participatory stage upon which we must act. We move as bubbles, energetically cut off from everything. We relate to other things as objects and often try and exert power over them instead of with them. Disconnection is the source of violence and most unwise action in our lives, organizations, and world. And it is the source of existential aloneness and fear. When we separate, we see and feel only ourselves.
As we become more consciously aware of our deep connectivity, nothing feels distant or inaccessible. There is a sense of plentitude. And there is awe. Not the awe of forced respect for that which is different, but the awe of participation in that which is immense.