The one and the many

December 19, 5:39 AMLA Religion & Spirituality ExaminerKurt Barstow

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Indra's Web with Erato and Poets

Spirituality is nothing like I ever thought it would be when I was younger... well, even three years ago. Having taken a class in Zen Buddhism in college and for much of my professional life working on Western devotional material from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, I had a notion that Enlightenment was something that happened in distant lands and sanctity was something that was relegated to the past. I thought we lived in a thoroughly modern or post-modern world that essentially had nothing to do with such charming relics of days gone by or foreign esoterica and the fact that I was concentrated more on work than what was actually going on in the world spiritually served to reinforce that idea. I had no idea, for example, that there was a synthesis of the world's wisdom traditions that had been going on and would be popularized on the Internet and in movies. I didn't make the connection between the state of the planet and the imperatives of contemporary spirituality. I didn't realize that so many current day saints and awakened people were in our midst and available to the public. And I had no idea that the basic technologies of awakening and the information to provoke a shift in consciousness were being made available to and were interested in by so many.
 

Re-watching An Inconvenient Truth and One: The Movie last night reminded me of how dramatic has been my own shift in consciousness. I certainly never, up until about three years ago, had the sense of Gaia as a unified system or of Unity Consciousness wherein we experience ourselves not as separate beings but as one with the Kosmos. The popularity of Eckhart Tolle and The Integral Institute, whatever their differences might be, are further signs of this new moment. My most intense experience of Oneness came at a meditation seminar given by Jack Kornfield at The Skirball Center that was geared primarily toward therapists and other health care providers. In one exercise we had a guded meditation in which we had to look directly into the eyes of the person (often a stranger) sitting next to us for about twenty minutes as Kornfield spoke about us all being part of the Great Web of Life. We imagined the person next to us as a child, as someone with hopes, desires, fears, relationships, unspoken dreams and pains that we will never know but that are exactly like our own. We imagined them, with the idea that reincarnation is true, as someone who could have been our mother, our father, our sister, our brother, our child in a previous lifetime. To look directly and steadfastly into someone else's eyes--the gateway to the soul--while imagining these things is to experience that sense of Oneness very directly and intimately. In the end, it was like God looking at God looking at God. There result of this exercise was both a great appreciation for the diversity of creation and the absolute conviction that there was no separation between people, that we were all the same beholder. People wept openly.
 

I don't want to sound too starry-eyed, but how amazing, how extraordinary that we are these two things at once: a private, separate unique individual unlike any other and a being that is exactly the same as all others. Although this has been known for a very long time, for me it was a new principle both for the boundless appreciation of difference and for a radical, complete conception of equality. The great Indian metaphor for this is Indra's Net, in which there is at every point of connection a jewel that reflects all the other jewels. This reflection is reveaing of our complete interdependence. But what is this thing that makes us all one despite our seemingly separate self existences? It is rather more than just a system that connects us because, in one sense, literally, we are one. That sense resides in the part of us that is divine and is the same in each and every one, the loving and impartial observer of our lives, the witness of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. That part of us that is God or absolute spirit.
 

Another rendition of Indra's Web

In his great anthology The Perennial Philosophy of 1944, Aldous Huxley cites a number of sources from the various wisdom traditions that make this point. In his first chapter, That art Thou, which we might consider Perennial Philosophy 101, he cites Plotinus, the 3rd-century Greek philosopher, who says, "Each being contains in itself the whole intelligible world. Therefore All is everywhere." Shankara, the 9th-century Hindu philosopher, says, "Caste, creed, family, and lineage do not exist in Brahman. Brahman has neither name nor form, transcends merit and demerit, is beyond time, space and the objects of sense-experience. Such is Brahman and thou art that. Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness." Kabir, the 15th-century Sufi poet, says, "Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray." St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the 12th-century Cistercian monk, says, "In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself." And Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century Dominican friar, says: "To gauge the soul we must gauge it with God, for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same." This is also what is being communicated in Ken Wilber's riff on I am in The Integral Vision. "What was present 5 centuries ago?," he asks. The answer is, "All that is ever-present is I Amness. Every person feels this same I AMness--because it is not a body, it is not a thought, it is not an object, it is not the environment, it is not anything that can be seen, but rather is the ever-present Seer, the ongoing open and empty Witness of all that is arising, in any person, in any world, in any place, at any time..." Father Thomas Keating at the end of One: The Movie puts it something like this, his formulation of the mystical journey: "First, you have to decide that there is an Other (God). Then you try to become like the Other. Then you realize that there is no difference between you and the Other."

The psychological terms for these two aspects of identity--the separate self-sense and the sense of Oneness--are ego and Self. The ego is that insubstantial creation made up of our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and stories about ourselves. It helps us to survive in the world. It defends us against the many things that it sees out there that might annihilate us, or alter our conception of our unique and individual selves, or detract from the fulfillment of our desires. Its dismantling is universally held to be among the first steps on the spiritual path. The Self (or the authentic or true or transpersonal Self), however, actually stands at the center of the psyche rather than the ego. After the development of the ego it is naturally this Self toward which we grow as we mature and which endows us with a sense of wholeness. As the psychologist David Richo says in his book Shadow Dance, "The Self, Buddha nature, Christ consciousness, is our essence, always and already whole. It is existential as well, cultivated in our daily practice. The purpose of spiritual practice is to display in our lifetime the timeless life of the Self, our Buddha consciousness... This essential reality is described as a void or emptiness because it is empty of separate, self-standing existence... True emptiness is unconditional reality, beyond concept, time, and division. In this freedom from division is the access to awakening and to compassion." In The Inward Arc the psychologist Frances Vaughan discusses disidentification from one's thoughts, feelings, and sensations (as is typically done in meditation) as a way to gain access to the transpersonal Self, which she sees as not quite but almost pure spirit. She says, "The expanded sense of self that results from practicing disidentification is appropriately considered transpersonal rather than impersonal, since it is manifested in and through the personal, and yet transcends it. The transpersonal Self thus serves as a bridge between existential self-consciousness and transcendental unity consciousness... As an organizing principle, the transpersonal Self guides evolution toward wholeness, and awareness of it can be a source of inspiration and healing. Healthy transpersonal identity depends on self-knowledge, self-regulation and self-mastery, and a new experience of Self in which the separative egoic and existential identifications dissolve."
 

Alex Grey, Net of Being

So if we're all one, you ask, then why can't I get my partner to take his medicine or rinse out his cereal bowls? How come I'm not really connected, then, to get a great job? Why is my boss my boss and not me? Why won't the kids stop fighting? Why global poverty and war? The answer is, of course, that we do exist as separate selves in some sense. We're not The Borg. And those separate selves have different talents, capacities, intelligences, histories, and problems to overcome as well as sometimes competing interests or simply selfish desires. Biographies would be really boring if we came out of the womb and felt nothing but unity consciousness for the rest of our lives. Both the ego and the Self are developmental, the ego being of a lower developmental stage, and just because we have a realization of Oneness doesn't mean that the ego goes into the garbage bin. Instead we simply have a lower order and higher order awareness. It is heartening in that regard that cultural development seems to mirror individual development in so many ways, since the progression from ego to Self or separate-self to One as our framework for relating means no global poverty, no ecological disaster, no war as the ideals. That is the good news of the One for the many.