ONE…

Stage 36 / Monday 1st June / From Éauze to Nogaro / 20 km

 

I begin a new week. The last two have been heavy with well-being. Through goodwill, the “good” came first, made evident with my near accident before Rocamadour. It made me "well". Then after Lauzerte, I focused on “being” with such intensity that I had to rest yesterday in Éauze to recover from a whirl of thoughts! An exhausting "well-being", yes! Why? Because I spread myself too thin! Now I must reassemble the scattered components of my being! “All for one” would say the four famous Gascons (Alexandre Dumas – The Three Musketeers – 1844). For I am walking now at the center of the old province of Gascony: OK, musketeer, let’s go forward and do not stop cut anymore!

 

It’s well known that sleep regenerates. Consciousness needs slumber in order to be more functional upon awakening to the world. It’s as if it needed the night in order to unify itself by resting in the original unity of the world, in something simple, unique and without complexity. Once consciousness is rested and unified, it awakens and disperses again. A whole “surrounding” of various solicitations shows up, then. When awake, consciousness associates each entity it meets during the day with a finished form, a sound or series of sounds more or less describable, a smell, who knows what else? The scattering multiplies as the waking time progresses, until it reaches such a level of proliferation that rest becomes imperative.

 

Today, these solicitations will for instance be an extensive spread of canary yellow fields of colza, and the musky smell that they emit … Or the flight of a wood pigeon slapping its wings at take-off … Or these two partridges that cackle in running along the path. To these multiple and complex sensations that pile up in my real-live experience must be added some which act more subtly on what I am, whether awake or asleep. Moreover, these sensations do affect my subconscious just as much.

 

These subtle factors which continuously solicit me are gravitation (feeling of heaviness) caused by the pull of the earth on my body, and also light, coming from the sun farther away, and even farther still: the stars! I dream with stupor of the fact that everything which makes my body, all I breathe or touch, everything I hear or see, comes from materials which have existed since the beginning of the world. These materials have been scattered several times by expansions of energy then amalgamated anew under the tutelary influences of the law of universal gravitational attraction!

 

In moving back to the oldest moment known to science today, everything was at first compressed into an infinite density, a unity ready to explode at the moment of the big bang. This is how, after “unic-ity,” the unique, “divers-ity”, the diverse, began to appear. An incredible explosion led to the gradual formation of chemical elements of increasing heaviness. Their properties allowed them to be carefully arranged in a growing atomic order. In 1869, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907) initiated this classification in the periodic table of chemical elements: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, azote, etc. From the lightest, hydrogen … to the heaviest, uranium!

 

Beginning of the classification: periodic table of elements, colored by Michael Dayah 
“What di-vers-ity in the uni-verse, here is material for … numerous verses!” 

 

The big bang was gigantic fireworks leading to a rainbow of atoms, more and more differentiated from the fissile primordial package! I don’t know if it was white like light, this primordial packet, but I like to imagine it thus, given that when one decomposes light by a prism, one obtains a rainbow of colors. And in the Bible (Genesis 9:8-17), the rainbow is the sign of the first promise of God to humans! It is intriguing to note that one particularly likes to put Mandeleev’s classification in a colored table associating certain common properties which are repeated among certain atoms in a regular way (henceforth the word “periodic”).

 

With the theory of the big bang, which successfully explains many things, and is therefore increasingly accepted, the universe was at a given moment entirely concentrated in a point: “All in one!” This was 14 or 15 billion years ago, so a good long time before the life of the real Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, count of Artagnan (born circa 1611, died 1673), served in 1844 as the central character in Alexander Dumas’ cape and sword novel.

 

Today I pass within 20 km of Lupiac, the village which saw the birth of this Gascon character of posthumous and legendary celebrity. Since – and this is a statement of the obvious – all is in all, certain elements of the surging matter from the big bang, subsequently transmuted, eventually served to constitute the organs and living matter of him who would become the captain of the guards of King Louis XIII. These are the same “dusts from stars” (Hubert Reeves – Poussières d’étoiles [Dusts from stars] – 1984) that constitute my own body!

 

All is in the all. And “all” being a collection of collections (with all the collections possible of all its own parts), is indefinable since it cannot define itself in relation to “nothing.” Now, “nothing” is the empty set, which is moreover part of all. It therefore becomes difficult to imagine “all” beginning from “nothing”: one has the feeling that “nothing” is the whole reminder. But in fact, it is not just the reminder, because “nothing” is part of “all!”

 

Moreover, if the “all” can easily conceive itself as much more than the simple additional accumulation of all its parts, it is less easy to envisage all these parts as being under the ruling of all. My own unicity (my uniqueness), how could it be, in spite of everything else I feel, how could be under the control of the universe?

 

I easily accept that the mass of stars and other clouds of interstellar matter are part of the universe and obey the consequences of the big bang and the expansion which followed. I conceive far less what could have provoked the passage of this inert material into a living body whose organs function in synergy. A symphony unites the plurality of notes in a coherent musical all, but where is the orchestra leader who has ordered my organs to function in the synergetic way that animates them? Who has modeled certain parts of everything so that the result is this “one”, this un-ique person, the in-dividual (the un-dividual?) that I am?

 

The force of gravity is not sufficient, I’m sure, even if I know that this force is acting on me constantly. This universal gravitation has a component issued from all the parcels of the universe: the earth of course, the moon, other planets, the sun and many other stars and invisible spatial material situated between them. From that to modeling me, no way!

 

If not synergic, the universe is surely interactive, and each effect which appears comes most often from multiple causes. Would there then be the possibility of an occasional objective chance? Either the universe, coherent in itself, would support in its totality each event that occurs there? If so, the notion of chance would only be a way of qualifying a fact only through its observable, only through a human partial vision, incapable of taking into account all the influences of everything on the parts of everything.

 

If not, if pure chance exists, completely random, one must suppose a source of creative unpredictability there where the “One who was all” does not suffice: dilemma therefore, because I discover a universe in its multiple “Reverse side” (already evoked), opposed to a “Right side” that the scientific would believe unique? Necessarily then, to account for the present universe, where “the inert” in its pre-determined evolution and “the living” in its free evolution co-exist, I must imagine a third entity.

 

This would be a thinking individuality, capable of rendering communal, “as one”, this coexistence at best disconcerting between the known which is, and the knowledge which discovers it. He, the one who knows, the builder of this bridge between inert and living, would be capable of making One of all: creation and creator would be intertwined in space and time. He would fix the future. There would be a one-and-only reality beyond the limited perspective which makes me envisage separately soul, heart, body, spirit, love, life, God and Being separately. No longer any initiative on my part? Oh no, then! No way!