Have Faith: Word is Saving Unity

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Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other. ~ Honore de Balzac

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[Michael]

As a mystic, I know only this; everything is connected. There is not the slightest separation that was ever possible or ever will be. Everything is connected into One Thing. The scientist calls this the Universe. It’s an apt moniker, if you ask me. However, some people prefer other names. Some even say that the ‘true name’ is a powerful secret. 
 
Regardless of terminology, the unity of creation is so fundamental to mysticism that the two ideas are nearly identical. As Golas says: “Whether you realize it or not, you are at one with all that exists and all that doesn’t exist.” We cannot even escape our connection to nonexistence, much less to existence. Resistance is futile; you are, right now, fully assimilated. Even death changes nothing in this equation.
   
Could all this be wrong? Of course it could be, but the implications are staggering. It would mean that the Universe does not exist.

Why do people feel isolated if they are not? Most mystics agree that this feeling is the result of a narrowing of consciousness. Others simply call it an illusion, which amounts to the same thing. Illusions are created when some aspects of experience are ignored. Since the mind is never able to accommodate all aspects of an experience; illusion is part and parcel of the human condition. We don’t have all the facts; we cannot have them all because they won’t all fit into our consciousness. There simply is not enough room. Therefore we must ignore some aspects of our true condition. This ignoring, this ignorance, gives rise to the feeling of isolation. This is all standard metaphysical fare.

The expansion of consciousness that characterizes the mystical experience allows a glimpse at the unity of creation. For a brief time, the mystic transcends the bounds of ignorance and experiences the unity of creation. He doesn’t do this by gaining all the facts. Rather, he begins to see that all of the facts presented are intimately connected. Despite the recalcitrant residue of his lingering ignorance, he is now only one step away from the conviction that all facts, both visible and hidden, are connected. This step requires faith, a faith typically born, on wobbly legs, of the mystical expansion of consciousness. Such is the genesis of the concept of universal unity. 

When I first read your opening post Francis, I was irresistably reminded of an Adyashanti passage where he discoursed on the meaning of meaning, and how at a certain "stage" or "state" (take your pick) of awakening, the need for meaning, or awareness of essential Unity or Connectedness becomes unecassary, and even absurd.  The need for meaning simply disappears.

But I didn't respond to your post in that vein because I couldn't really find the words to express that very well. and still can't.  So it goes...

So I'll respond with an Allan Watts passage instead.  I'd like to particularly highlight the bits about discord being an essential part of harmony...

We've got this little partial view. We've got the idea that 'No, I'm something IN this body.' The ego. That's a joke. The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. It's like the radar on a ship. The radar on a ship is a troubleshooter. Is there anything in the way? And conscious attention is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment, like a radar does, and note for any troublemaking changes. But if you identify yourself with your troubleshooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety. And the moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism, we realize first thing how harmonious it all is. Because your organism is a miracle of harmony. All these things functioning together. Even those creatures that are fighting each other in the blood stream and eating each other up. If they weren't doing that, you wouldn't be healthy.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level. And you begin to realize that, and you begin to be aware too, that the discords of your life and the discords of people's lives, which are a discord at one level, at a higher level of the universe are healthy and harmonious. And you suddenly realize that everything you are and do is at that level as magnificent and as free of any blemish as the patterns in waves. The markings in marble. The way a cat moves. And that this world is really OK. Can't be anything else, because otherwise it couldn't exist. And I don't mean this in a kind of Pollyanna Christian Science sense. I don't know what it is or why it is about Christian Science, but it's prissy. It's got kind of a funny feeling to it; came from New England.

But the reality underneath physical existence, or which really is physical existence--because in my philosophy there is no difference between the physical and the spiritual. These are absolutely out-of-date catagories. It's all process; it isn't 'stuff' on the one hand and 'form' on the other. It's just pattern-- life is pattern. It is a dance of energy. And so I will never invoke spooky knowledge. That is, that I've had a private revelation or that I have sensory vibrations going on a plane which you don't have. Everything is standing right out in the open, it's just a question of how you look at it. So you do discover when you realize this, the most extraordinary thing that I never cease to be flabbergasted at whenever it happens to me. Some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe, wherein God is a brilliant light, only somehow veiled, hiding underneath all these forms as you look around you. So far so good. But the truth is funnier than that. It is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now that the experience you are having that you call ordinary everyday consciousness--pretending you're not it--that experience is exactly the same thing as 'it.' There's no difference at all. And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That's the great discovery.
 
In other words, when you really start to see things, and you look at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature of what it is to see what vision is, or what smell is, or what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos. Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter. Only they're hidden in the sense that all the points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup they don't blow your eyes out. See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So if I hit as hard as I can on a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it's like a hand beating on a skinless drum. No light. YOU evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having a soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything.

But in the mythology that we sold ourselves on at the end of the 19th century, when people discovered how big the universe was, and that we live on a little planet in a solar system on the edge of the galaxy, which is a minor galaxy, everybody thought, 'Uuuuugh, we're really unimportant after all. God isn't there and doesn't love us, and nature doesn't give a damn.' And we put ourselves down. But actually, it's this funny little microbe, tiny thing, crawling on this little planet that's way out somewhere, who has the ingenuity, by nature of this magnificent organic structure, to evoke the whole universe out of what otherwise would be mere quanta. There's jazz going on. But you see, this ingenious little organism is not merely some stranger in this. This little organism, on this little planet, is what the whole show is growing there, and so realizing it's own presence. Does it through you, and you're it.

When you put a chicken's beak on a chalk line, it gets stuck; it's hypnotized. So in the same way, when you learn to pay attention, and as children you know how all the teachers were in class: 'Pay attention!!' And all the kids stare at the teacher. And we've got to pay attention. That's putting your nose on the chalk line. And you got stuck with the idea of attention, and you thought attention was Me, the ego, attention. So if you start attending to attention, you realize what the hoax is. That's why in Aldous Huxley's book 'Island,' the Roger had trained the myna birds on the island to say 'Attention! Here and now, boys!' See? Realize who you are. Come to, wake up!

[Francis]

Even those creatures that are fighting each other in the blood stream and eating each other up. If they weren't doing that, you wouldn't be healthy. So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

I'm not sure how I can reconcile this with my thesis that you quoted. Right out of the box, I'll say this: Oneness, as a perspective has a fundamentally discordant relationship with oblivion or nonexistence ("zeroness"). The Universe is the prodigal son of oblivion.

Some nihilistic schools of mysticism go the extra step beyond oneness and actually embrace oblivion. These mystics discount oneness just as I'm discounting duality, triplicity, quatricity, etc.

These guys are graduates of life and are working on mastering death. So this is perhaps the next step. I'm not sure.

This article seems to try to explain this rather awkward topic:


The Buddhist technical term Shunyata, like its Taoist counterpart Non-Being, has long given rise to misunderstanding among Westerners, who erroneously construe such negative words to mean nothingness, the absence, deprivation, or extinction of Being. This produces a righteous repugnance to what is wrongly believed to be a nihilist doctrine, despite the Buddha's express warning to the contrary, for he condemned both extremes of absolutism and nihilism as contrary to his Middle Way. Emptiness, the Void, Non-Being are negative only in verbal form, and since they negate all negations actually affirm the most positive though ineffable Reality. One should constantly be on guard, therefore, against misinterpreting Shunyata either as the emptiness of absence or the emptiness of annihilation. It should be envisaged not as mere vacuity but as the Emptiness of Emptiness, that is to say the non-conceptual reinstatement of every minute particular in its permanent actuality. So this Void is simultaneously a Plenum. But of what, it may reasonably be asked, can a Void be full? The only answer is: of infinite possibilities, manifest and unmanifest, in a coincidentia oppositorum

So, I guess the idea is that Oneness arises out of the Void, just as Duality arises out of Oneness, Triplicity arises out of Duality and so on. If all this makes sense to you, then you're way ahead of me.