The One

I was listening to Van Morrison's "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You" where he sings of giving praise to THE ONE. 

There's a love that's divine

And it's yours and it's mine

Like the sun

And at the end of the day

We should give thanks and pray

To THE ONE, to THE ONE

I thought I'd check out anagrams of THE ONE and discovered NO THEE which is most apt. THEE is an archaic form of YOU and so what more eloquent equation that this:

THE ONE = NO THEE

From the perspective of THE ONE, there is indeed NO THEE but our perspective that means NO ME. The mention of ME conjures up the word EGO and recently I came across another eloquent equation that involved this word.

For a mathematician, this makes perfect sense. This talk of Mathematics and ME and THEE puts me in mind of Omar Khayyam and his famous Rubaiyat where he says (in Edward Fitzgerald's translation anyway):

There was a Door to which I found no Key: 

 

There was a Veil through which I could not see:  

 

Some little Talk awhile of Me and Thee 

There seemed — and then no more of Thee and Me.

I found this blog post from July of 2010 that interprets these words very well I thought:

It’s been too many months since we last had a selection from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. First, just take a moment to speak these lines aloud. Really feel its rhythm on your tongue, and let its rhyme dance in your ear. I’m not normally a big fan of strictly rhymed verse, especially in translation, but something about Edward FitzGerald’s translations of Omar Khayyam bring a big smile to my face every time I read them. You can taste the sugar in each line.

There was a Door to which I found no Key:

There was a Veil through which I could not see…

The door that has no key and the veil through which one cannot see is the final barrier that separates us from the Divine Beloved. That barrier is dualism itself.

Some little Talk awhile of Me and Thee

There seemed

At first there is the dualistic perception of “Me and Thee,” of the separate identities of the lover and Beloved. That sense of separation — separation from God, separation from Source, separation from the True Self — is the fundamental pain of the soul.

Caught in the midst of this dynamic, we feel pain, we struggle, we encounter a terrible emptiness we try to hide from through the dramas of life. But looking back from the perspective of deep realisation, it can be seen as a sort of dialog between the soul and the Eternal. The dramas of life… “Some little Talk awhile of Me an Thee…” But there is only a surface appearance here, a seeming — “There seemed”

— and then no more of Thee and Me.

When we look, when we learn to really see, that’s when an amazing thing happens — suddenly that final veil falls away. The barrier is passed, not through some action or “key,” but through the instantaneous recognition that the barrier does not, in truth, exist at all. We are stunned to discover that there is no separation (only the ego’s pretence of a separation). And then — “no more of Thee and Me,” only Divine Presence within, without, everywhere!

Omar Khayyam was best known in his time as a mathematician and astronomer. His theorems are still studied by mathematicians today. His poetry really only became widely read when Edward FitzGerald collected several quatrains (rubaiyat) that were attributed to Khayyam and translated them into English as the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

The common view in the West of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is that it is a collection of sensual love poems. Although some scholars debate this question, many people assert that Omar Khayyam was a Sufi, as well as a poet and mathematician, and that his Rubaiyat can only be truly understood using the language of mystical metaphor.