100 — LOVE KNOWS NO DISTANCE: THE NONLOCAL UNIVERSE
The interconnectivity of being is neither doctrine nor dogma. Rather, it is the fully accessible nature of reality if we just take the time to notice. Being enmeshed in a web of connection is the essential erotic experience of mystics throughout the ages. But the rest of us catch glimpses of it as well. We have all known those moments of seemingly inexplicable coincidences — a mother having a piercing pain in her chest precisely when her daughter two thousand miles away has been in a car accident, or that time when you thought of an old friend only to come home to a message from that person on your answering machine. These subtle synchronicities are all part of our daily reality. They are the faint yet persistent whisperings of the universe saying, “You are not alone. Love knows no distance.” The all is connected to the all.
In the last twenty-five years, an enormous amount of serious scientific investigation has been done into what is called “nonlocal distance healing.” It involves the ability of a person at great distances to effect healing. The results of such healing have been verified through many scientifically sound experiments that measure indicators of health, ranging from protecting red blood cells to lowering blood pressure and much more. What is critical is that these experiments reveal that we are not discrete units but rather interconnected indiscrete “unities.” Like a network of rivers that interweave along their way back to the sea, we are beings fully woven into each other and thus able to traverse all the frontiers of separateness, including space and even time.
Physics has for years been speaking about a nonlocal universe. One of the recent leaders in this work is Irish physicist John Stewart Bell. Bell showed that if distant objects have once been in contact, a change in one causes an immediate change in the other. It is irrelevant how far apart they are. Even if they are later at opposite ends of the universe, the connection is not broken. We have known forever that there is a deeper level of consciousness available when we allow ourselves to let go of our separateness even as we maintain the individual integrity so necessary for responsibility and ethical action in the world.
Similarly, the worlds of music, dance, and, most of all, orgasm, allow us glimpses of our higher reality. Here again the sexual models the erotic — the experience of being on the inside of reality where all of being yearns for connection and every living thing knows it has a patch called home that is part of the great quilt of the universe. Outrageous love is the Eros of connection — the underlying interdependence of things, the bond between all living things, the emotional ether in which we all live.
LOVE LETTERS AND LOVE NUMBERS
In biblical mysticism, love and oneness are identical. In Hebrew, there is a mystical technique called gematria in which each letter, and thus each word, has a numerical value. The Hebrew word for “love,” ahava, has a numerical value of thirteen. Echad, meaning “one,” also has a numerical value of thirteen. To the Kabbalistic mind, this is more than just a coincidence. It is as if a mystical law has been encoded into the letters of these words. Love is oneness, and oneness is love. “One” is but another word for the erotic interconnectivity of all being.
But the pattern of mystical meaning continues, for these two words added together equal twenty-six. Twenty-six is a central number in Hebrew mysticism because it is the numerical value of God’s four-letter name: Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei, the divine name of healing and love. Thus, God is one is love. Love is the universe’s way of embracing us and telling us that we are not alone. We have a home, a bayit. We are connected. One + One = One.
— An excerpt from the book “A Return to Eros” by Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Kristina Kincaid
