At the end of my last week in India, as it were for a fare well celebration, we all went together to a beach resort at the Indian Ocean. Though the resort was located at the other end of the subcontinent, the seasonal weekend promotional packages with red-eye special air transportation, made the grand party surprisingly inexpensive.



      As it turned out, none of us had ever been at the Indian Ocean. I welcomed the opportunity to tell everyone about Helen's version of Nicholas of Cusa's principle for uniting diversities. I explained that Cusa was one of the intellectual pioneers of the Golden Renaissance in Europe. Among other projects, he had set himself the task of bridging the religious diversity that had deeply divided much of humanity during the dark ages and had stood at the center of countless wars and atrocities. I explained that in order to bridge that division, Cusa created a story to illustrate the higher principles that were being ignored by society.

      In Cusa's story, the sages of seven great religions of the world gathered together into one place to ask the God of the universe the one question that was on everyone's mind. "Why do we all fight and kill each other in your name?" That's what they asked. And what was the answer?

      In Cusa's story the God of the universe answered that there is only one truth. He, the divine Wisdom, suggested to the sages that they were wise men and should know that, and that they should also recognize that this one universal truth is above all and is reflected in all. The God of the universe suggested further that if they did this one thing they would immediately stop killing each other.

      The sages replied that they understood all of this and had always recognized that there is only one truth. "Still, we fight each other," they said. "Why do we do this?"

      The God of the universe replied that the answer is actually quite simple. He told them that they had mistaken their traditions, which are many, for the word of God, the one universal Truth. He said that they had placed their faith in traditions instead of in their ability to understand the truth.

      I explained to everybody, while we were walking together at the beach on our first morning, that my friend Helen in Germany had told me that she would have created a different ending for that story, that she would have brought all the sages to the seashore and would have asked each of them to pick up one grain of sand. Then she would have the God of the universe explain to the sages that they mistakenly believed their single grain of sand to be the seashore. She would have created the story so that God would instruct them to drop their grains of sand and embrace the seashore as a whole and to relish it, and understand it, and feel the actions of the wind, and of the tides and the waves, and of the sunshine upon it. She would then have the God of the universe tell the sages that if this embrace happened honestly with all their heart; and with all their mind; and with their soul; their lives would be so filled with sunshine and riches, and wonders to discover for evermore that they wouldn't have time to fight one-another; nor would they dream of it, because they would discover each other the same light as in themselves, and therefore love and honor each other.

      I suggested to everyone that the seashore is love, which is made up of countless grains of sands, each being sovereign in its existence and individual in its shape, while each grain of sand is also a part of the seashore and its principle, and gains its identity from it. I suggested to everyone in our family of eight, that if love is seen in this manner, it can never be judged with traditional yardsticks. And why should it be so judged? I suggested that we would then be far too busy to explore its vast dimension, and be enriched by it, to ever wanting to define it. We would then just live in its presence and rejoice in its light. I also suggested, that if we did this, we would find that not a single grain of sand is actually unimportant, or be related to stereotyped models of perception. I suggested that with stereotyped models and perceptions we blind ourselves, just as the sages of the world have blinded themselves to the one universal truth that they couldn't see by limiting their vision to but a single grain of truth, or just a few grains of it, or none at all.

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Stories about  Sex from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche