Absolute Oneness

Inspired By "Like Stories Of Old"

This piece is dedicated to all who are struggling right now. May your sorrow serve as sacred soil, from which the seeds of your soul ripen, transforming you into absolute beauty.

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We’re only here briefly.
And while I’m here,
I want to allow myself
joy.

Over the holiday break I found myself moved by the cinematic essays of Like Stories Of Old, which explores, the boundary between media analysis, philosophy and personal development in an empathic, emotionally resonant way.

I’ve come to quickly appreciate the craftsmanship of the channel’s creator, Tom van der Linden, whose work feels less constructed than confessed, his often poetic writing woven surrealistically with awe-stricken visuals, suffused with hopeful melancholy, and carried by the lo-fi, stoic reverb of a voice that captures the fullness of lived experience. I feel inspired by his ability to effortlessly interweave the philosophical with the emotional, grounded in embodied honesty that stands unflinchingly in the face of fear.

There is one video, in particular, that touched something unseen within me while flying home, a day into the new year. Enclosed within a darkened fuselage, suspended in silence, seated along the aisle as exhausted bodies slept beside me, I listened to In Search of Absolute Beauty. At a certain moment, something long-buried was disturbed — raw, fragile, and intolerably tenderhearted — pressing upward from my chest, catching my throat, until tears welled around my eyes, before I could suppress their expression.

It’s when the words of a poet or an author
reflect what already lives within your own heart,
articulating parts of yourself
you could not have named on your own.

It’s when a piece of music or a film
perfectly tunes itself
to your inner feelings,
making them come alive
with vibrant ecstasy.

It’s when the love you have for your partner
matches the love your partner has for you so completely
that you feel like you could melt into each other.

It’s in those moments
where you are at once losing yourself
and finding yourself.

Moments of true synchronicity,
of absolute oneness.

I just want to stay, right here.
Life is being in bed with you.

When I’m with you,
everything else is just waiting.

I forget everything else.

I am here, and I’m looking at her.

Two, no more.

One.

I felt Tom speak, with startling clarity, the truth of how I understand “the one”: not as a soulmate, nor a twin flame, nor a fractured half made whole, but as the desire for complete intimacy between two already whole beings, melting into one, and in doing so, losing themselves in a rapture of unity. Two sovereign souls, long wandering the desert without water, misled by mirages, betrayed by self-serving swindlers, who have endured through shameful suffering, and yet still thirsting for enlightened desire.

Upon hearing these words, When I’m with you, everything else is just waiting, I felt beauty, peace, unbearable lightness, but above all, I felt seen. A longing that had gone untouched, one I had not been able to articulate or codify into words, like a writer cut off from the sacred well of creation, lost without a muse, unable to part the petals and suckle the sweet nectar meant to inspire him.

I think of those extraordinary moments in my life when I have encountered someone so rare, so undaunted by fear, capable of courageously expressing a Love greater than my own, moments that make everything preceding them feel like mere prologue. Moments that will linger in my heart, long after the mind has dimmed and the body has forfeited to its final breath.

There is no greater experience for me than to lie bare beside another naked soul. In their eyes, I glimpse the glory of my own being reflected back to me; their Love becomes my salvation, just as mine becomes theirs. In that act of mutual soul-beholding, time falters, the world recedes, and nothing remains but the unbearable intensity of transcendent connection.

The line, life is being in bed with you, felt like a revelation, breathing a living voice to a yearning I have felt my entire life: an insatiable hunger for intimacy that reaches far beyond the body, a lament for how something sublime has been made superficial into carnal necessity. I speak with so many who know intimacy only as sex, in service of the ego, never having tasted that heavenly ecstasy where one is utterly undone and yet finally whole. Where the limits of existence deliquesce into infinite possibility, and the existential woe of loneliness is filled with awe, enraptured in ravishing beauty, restored to absolute oneness.

To experience absolute beauty
is to feel that you matter,
that you belong in this universe,
that you are a part of it,
and that it is a part of you.

It is the point where self-transcendence
becomes synonymous with self-actualization,

where the beauty around you
is the same beauty you begin to see in yourself.

It is to simultaneously embrace
and be embraced,
to touch
and be touched,

to be at once
enveloped by light and shining.

I feel solemnly soothed hearing Tom give voice to this vision of oneness, not simply the act of embracing and being embraced, but the rare and almost insufferable feeling of being truly held, truly touched, with an intention so reverent it dissolves the boundary between self and other.

Upon reflection, it now seems tragic how I spent my entire life striving to surpass through the self — effort, improvement and force — only to realize that every true trace of transcendence came through a rebel’s compass, its needle defying safe harbors and instead guiding me toward the counter-intuitive act of surrendering before another. The rarest moments of beauty came when I finally released my grip on control, when I let my breastplate drop, exposed something tender and inimitably beautiful within me, and allowed light to enter places I had kept dark, all while learning to truly behold the wholeness of another. Endearing moments when I never wanted to leave the Elysian bedsheets, when I never wanted to loosen my embrace of beauty, be released from another’s arms, or be abandoned by their eyes.

Within these fleeting states of satori, I no longer felt alone, free from the suffocating solitude of myself. Instead, I knew the oneness of all things. I felt a depth of beauty — a stillness, a serenity, a magnificence — that I had never known. I was given a glimpse of absolute Love.

And it was only then, in a moment too small for memory to hold, standing unguarded and grateful to be held in another’s light, that my own light finally began to shine, joining the shared brilliance of our absolute beauty.