Figgs' belief=oneness with all that is. Unity of Being between all things in existence. One man coined the phrase Aria Invictus to define all as one. I like that. Hindus call it Vedanta. Buddhists also share the same belief. So does Jesus, but his followers rarely understand parables and take them literally, unfortunately.
This next quote is the near end of a book I just finished reading (and just as recently began again) called The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, by Alan Watts. I recommend this book to Debussey because I truly believe it's the most important book I've ever read in my life and it may just have that same effect on you. I follow the quote with more quotes to try to propel my point about "Aria Invictus."
"I presume, then, that with my own death I shall forget who I was, just as my conscious attention is unable to recall, if it ever knew, how to form the cells of the brain and the pattern of the veins. Conscious memory plays little part in our biological existence. Thus as my sensation of 'I-ness,' of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the 'central' self-the IT- appears as the self/other situation in its myriads of pulsating forms-always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst of many. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.
Actually, we know this already. After people die, babies are born-and, unless they are automata, every one of them is, just as we ourselves were, the 'I' experience coming again into being. The conditions of heredity and environmental change, but each of those babies incarnates the same experience of being central to a work that is 'other.' Each infant dawns into life as I did, without any memory of a past. Thus when I am gone there can be no experience, no living through, of the state of being a perpetual 'has-been.' Nature 'abhors the vacuum; and the I-feeling appears again as it did before, and it matters not whether the interval be ten seconds or billions of years. In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant.
This is so obvious, but our block against seeing it is the ingrained and compelling myth that the 'I' comes into this world, or is thrown out from it. Thus we do not trust the universe to repeat what it has already done- to 'I' itself again and again. We see it as an eternal arena in which the individual is no more than a temporary stranger- a visitor who hardly belongs- for the thin ray of consciousness does not shine upon its own source. In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself-through our eyes and IT's."
-Alan Watts
Another gem from that book:
"But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. Each organism experiences this from a different standpoint and in a different way, for each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety."
"I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons."
"In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single 'greatest man. . . .'"
"At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons."
-Carl Jung
"Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely 'some day': now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end."
-Erwin Shrodinger
"When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, then shall you enter the Kingdom. I am the Light that is above them all, I am the All, the All came forth from Me and the All attained to Me. Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone and you will find Me there."
-Jesus
