True atonement comes only at the end of life when our energies unite. The melting of me with the energy of the world is becoming at one with the universe. This is my soul joining with the souls of others and with God, the infinite energy. Our desire for atonement begins at birth when we are expelled from our mother’s womb.
We are torn from the oneness of mother and child where all our needs had been met. We had eaten without swallowing. We had breathed without inhaling. We had floated in warm water, swaying gently with the movements of our mother, embraced by her. We were as one, attached to each other. We depended on her. She had made all the decisions for our well-being. And then, without warning, we feel the walls closing in, suffocating us. We are being pushed, pulled and squeezed. And birth separates us from that oneness, in an instant, when the umbilical cord is cut, just like Adam and Eve escorted out from the Garden of Eden are separated for the first time from God, their life source.
Just as we were cut from our oceanic connection with our mother in a nanosecond, separated from her, our source of life, in order to begin a life separate from her, we were cut off from the Garden of Eden, a place of oceanic limitlessness, a merging of boundaries where one cannot see the other because one is with the other, part of the other, and we are sent on a journey to find and create our “self.” And with the expulsion comes a yearning to return to that safe place. It is a yearning that follows us all of our lives, a desire to return to the Source.
