Opennessence is water
Opennessence IS water. Water is LIFE. Life emerges into CONSCIOUSNESS.
In the Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathon Haidt said maybe the “Greatest Idea” had been already discovered. Opennessence is that Greatest Idea.
Too simple? Simple as water… …? “…the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” David Foster Wallace.
All of the world’s major religions see their truth as emerging from water. Water is deliciously ubiquitous -- both constant and changing - formless and always taking form. Throughout the history of religions, water has been the best analogy for reality. Wallace proposed a “mystical oneness of all things” that we could know. Thales of Miletus – the world’s first western philosopher in the 500s BCE – theorized that water is the singular substance of all reality. Greek philosopher Heraclitus forged an early version of emergence theory with his “the world bubbles forth” – also known as panta rhei, “everything flows.”
The symbol for Confucianism is the symbol for water in Chinese.
Water “cleanses all” in Shintoism, a religion largely centered around purity. Chozu-yu water-cleansing pavilions are placed in the front of Shinto temples in the way that Catholic holy water or Islamic fountains are similarly. Shinto temple entrances have torii gates where kami spirits are said to enter them, and they are placed in water (the ocean often) when they can be.
Daosim says to follow the natural way …the way of water. It is represented and explained with and by the idea of wu wei – “actionless action.” Water yields to everything and it often can move everything.
Hinduism’s creator and eternal “essence” deity Brahma created another deity called Himavan who himself became the Himalayan mountains. Himavan fathered Ganga – the goddess of the very pure and sacred Ganges River. She cleanses people of their “sins” and aids in the journey to moksha – a paradisical release from the cycle of rebirth called samsara.
Buddhism symbolizes enlightenment as the open bloom of a water lotus. It represents the open mind, the open spirit, a fully open self to the cosmos, and a transcendence to the beyond – above and beyond the water.
Islam’s center, the Kaba, stands over the top of its origination well called Zam Zam.
Crossing the Red Sea out of Egypt, springing water from a desert, and crossing the River Jordan, the Jews entered the center of their holy land -- defined by bordering bodies of water as was the Garden of Eden.
Jesus was baptized in the River Jordan by a family friend who might have been an Essene Jew – a group with a strong focus on a cleansing immersion into and emergence from water and also known as baptism. The “earliest identified Christian house church” ever found is in Dura-Europos, Syria and it has a room for ritual baptism with an immersion “pool” in the back of it.
We are born when our mother’s water breaks, and we often shed a tear at death. In between these two seminal moments, we go from being 70% composed by water with a brain floating in water to spending out lives recycling water in and out of our bodies and in and out of our lungs until we die in old age at about 60% water. “H2O: The molecule that made us.” PBS
The modern fully-conscious human brain emerges over our lives, and it previously emerged within the Homo sapiens sapiens species as its brain enlarged over the generations; thus, childbirth became more painful for women and humankind’s daily tool-dependent existence became more demanding and complex.
On a planet that is over 70% water, climate change is warming the oceans and raising sea levels, drying and burning forests, and increasing and strengthening tropical storms. From the Earth’s truly one ocean and one atmosphere, the whole of humanity is connected by water from above and below and opened to an existence that allows us to transcend our time and space into a cosmic experience/essence of fully being alive – an enlightenment, salvation, or super-consciousness of sorts.
Opennessence is this water of all ideas – the Greatest Idea of All. Be open. Open 2 happiness. :)