Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone

The hermit sitting in his cave is not trying to hide from the world. He is beyond that. He has arrived at a place where he is intimate with the world in an intellectual way that makes participating in the daily rituals of that world seem superfluous. He is waiting for the world to catch up with him.

And yet at the same time he sees that his own depth of intellectual understanding is itself superfluous. The world goes on about its business without any deep intellectual understanding at all. The existence of the hermit is the world's way of saying that it wants to understand itself. He's a little like the guy who asks the bartender to "Make me one with everything."

"Everything" has a long history. The essential reality of the world is that it is not static. It is evolving toward a future that is both already well defined and largely undetermined. The world as we know it is called Now. The world of Now is defined by its past, in such a way that the world effectively contains its past. And it is anticipating its future.

In a strong sense, our world, Earth, is the hermit's cave. And we are the hermit. There is a sense in which the hermit is waiting for the the rest of the cosmos to catch up. 

The hermit waiting for the world to catch up is displaying his impatience. That he chooses to do so passively is perhaps a sign that he understands the need for patience. 

He knows he could be out in the world, trying to bring others to embrace his understanding. Taking on the role of the messiah. Preaching the truth he sees. Hoping to find others who are ready to understand as he does. Probably he has already given this role his best shot, and has passed that mantle on to those others.

The best we who have not become hermits can do is recognize that this evolving Now is the nature of the world, and we are part of that nature. Recognizing that, we are faced with a choice. We can choose to accept nature as we find it. Or we can try to discover in nature some purpose in our special existence. 

The usual path is to accept nature as we find it. To know whatever we have been given to know of the past, and to rely on this knowing to help us deal with the possibilities of the future as they arrive in Now. Accepting into our past whatever our encounters with the future reveal.

The alternate path, available to those who have the good fortune to not find the immediacy of Now intimidating enough, is to make an effort to assess the possibilities of the future available to us, and to choose among them before they arrive, and do what we can to guide their arrival. 

Perhaps surprisingly, this path leads us to consider the nature of Oneness. There is the idea that every hermit's intellectual understanding of the world may include the notion that they literally are one with everything in some sense. Where does this notion come from? 

Is it not evident to the senses of every individual that they are somehow separate from everything else they may be aware of? And should we not assume that the notion of "everything" must include every individual atom, every smallest particle? Is this "everything" not simply a matter of enumerating distinct viewpoints, and is not every viewpoint available in the entire cosmos distinct in some way from every other viewpoint?

This question is rife with complexities. The most obvious is that we as individual entities comprise many sub-entities. Not only organs and cells that are undeniably alive, but also molecular entities which have their own complex interactions with each other, involving various energies. Where is the oneness in all this? Fortunately we don't have to consult atoms and molecules to find a satisfactory answer. It is not until we begin to encounter individuals who do not find the immediacy of Now intimidating enough to preclude the contemplation of both Yesterday and Tomorrow that the question may be considered. 

The best answer we have from such individuals comes from a recognition of the oneness of the cosmos. A oneness at this level has long been assumed. It derives easily from our experience as an individual animal. We happily subsume all of our body cells and organs into this sense of oneness. Then by analogy it is easy to attribute such a oneness to whatever we assume must be all that is.

Now, miraculously, we find that, contrary to what some doomsayers may imagine, our best observations of our actual physical cosmos, and our  best mathematical understanding of its evolution, lead to the same conclusion. In the beginning, all was one, and throughout the ensuing processes of differentiation into separately identifiable component galaxies, stars, and planets, all remains one. And just as we experience a oneness in contemplating our bodily existence, we can experience a oneness in contemplating our cosmic existence.

From this comes the sense that both the past and the future are part of this oneness.

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone