Printed in the Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Goldsberry, Clare, "Oneness Is Not Sameness" Quest 110:2, pg 12-13
By Clare Goldsberry
We often hear people say, “We are all one.” Yet I have never found anyone who can explain that statement. Most people who throw it out into the air believe that we are all one if we are all the same: if we have the same religious and political views—the two issues that would seem to divide us more starkly than any other.
The primary reason no one can explain this statement is that the minute we say “we,” we admit separateness. “We” = “you and I,” and that is the acknowledgement of separateness.
Transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber says, “Consciousness and the universe are not separate entities.” We merely perceive them as separate because we objectify the world in which we live. In fact, there is no object “out there,” for everything is created by and in our mind. “Falling into the real world, where the observer is the observed, it becomes obvious that you and the universe are not, were not and never will be separate entities” (Wilber, 90). Separation is an illusion.
Unity, which Wilber describes as “nondual awareness,” is difficult to experience on this level of consciousness, which is grounded in duality and opposites. For example, there is “self” and “other”—or at least that is the way we perceive the separateness between my “self” in here and “you” out there. Duality is the conventional truth of the existence of all phenomena; using the senses, the ego perceives that all phenomena exist “out there” separate from me,“in here.”
The Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky says, “Duality is the condition of our knowledge of the phenomenal (three dimensional) world; this is the instrument of our knowledge of phenomena. But when we come to the knowledge of the noumenal world (the world of many dimensions), this duality begins to hinder us, appears as an obstacle to knowledge” (Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, 265; emphasis in all quotes is from the original).
What do we mean by “knowledge”? The Hindu philosopher Sri Aurobindo writes that “knowledge of the ONE is Knowledge”: the only true knowledge, or ultimate Truth in the Eastern philosophies. This is knowledge that goes beyond duality: “Most people have only a superficial knowledge, which Aurobindo calls “the Ignorance.” It is a “separative knowledge,” which is limited to duality—seeing things as distinctly “other”—which means “there is no essential unity between them,” making reconciliation impossible (Aurobindo, 567).
Ouspensky tells us that “we must train our thoughts to the idea that separateness and inclusiveness are not opposed in the real world, but exist simultaneously without contradicting one another . . . Dualism is the chief ‘idol’; let us free ourselves from it” (Ouspensky, 266).
Unity can only be experienced in pure Mind; one consciousness: the All That Is. Even the statement “I am one with you” is erroneous, because it reflects an illusion. There is no self; there is no “I” that exists “in here” or a “you” that exists “out there.”
Experiencing ultimate Reality, which is nondual awareness (as opposed to conditioned reality or illusion), allows mind to realize its oneness with All That Is. Because there is only one universal Mind, we can only experience unity when we have embraced the duality as part of the One. Therefore it is futile to chase after a constructed unity on this level of consciousness—a forced unity that fails to recognize a duality in which the One is present.
In his essay “Plato; or The Philosopher,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana. Those writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it.” (Emerson, 425–26).
Buddhism, which grew out of the Hindu tradition, speaks of the duality of self and otheras merely a perspective. To me, I am “self.” To you, I am “other,” and vice versa. The example is used of the idea of friend or enemy—words that convey a perspective, a judgment, or a label that we put on each other. Today you are my friend; tomorrow you are my enemy. What changed? Nothing except my perception of you!
Emerson addresses this issue in his essay on Plato: “The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough and the furrow are of one stuff; and the stuff is such and so much that the variations of form are unimportant.” Emerson quotes Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita: “You are fit to apprehend that you are not distinct from me. That which I am, thou art, and that also is this world, with its gods and heroes and mankind. Men contemplate distinctions because they are stupefied with ignorance . . . The words I and mine constitute ignorance . . . The knowledge that this spirit, which is essentially one, is in one’s own and in all other bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the unity of things” (Emerson, 426).
Perhaps we fail to find oneness because we cannot acknowledge and accept our differences, looking instead for sameness to create oneness. But oneness must be seen as harmony among differences, much like playing a piano, where eighty-eight different keys, with eighty-eight different tones, when played in synchrony, create a beautiful harmony. The gnostic being, whom Aurobindo defines as one who lives from the Divine within, will accept and harmonize all differences:
Our mental rendering of oneness brings into it the rule of sameness; a complete oneness brought about by the mental reason drives towards a thoroughgoing standardization as its one effective means—only minor shades of differentiation would be allowed to operate: but the greatest richness of diversity in the self-expression of oneness would be the law of the gnostic life. In the gnostic consciousness difference would not lead to discord but to a spontaneous natural adaption, a sense of complimentary plenitude . . . For the difficulty in mind and life is created by ego. (Aurobindo, 1046–47)
Aurobindo notes that the law of the higher mind “is unity fulfilled in diversity.” This Higher Mind “sees everything from the standpoint of oneness and regards all things, even the greatest multiplicity and diversity, even what are to the Mind the strongest contradictions, in the light of that oneness, its actions proceed upon that basis.”
When we recognize the whole world and all living things “as a manifestation of Vishnu, who is identical with all things,” quotes Emerson from the Bhagavad Gita, “and is to be regarded by the wise as not differing from, but as the same as themselves,” we can realize the true oneness of all without any thought of sameness (Emerson, 426).
The Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton said that when this realization or recognition occurs, we don’t necessarily discover “a new unity.” What we discover is “an older unity . . . We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.” Merton calls on us to “recover our original unity” (Merton, 308).
But what is that original unity? Certainly we can see the differences in all of us as individuals, yet we are told that we are one, made in the image and likeness of God. Surely this does not refer to the physical level, where our differences are quite obvious, but to a level of spirit and spiritual consciousness or higher Mind.
At that point we can not only acknowledge and accept our differences but celebrate them. These differences do not require special laws of accommodation or recognition, because we have gained the ability to see the One in the Many, as the Many are in the One. We can then embrace our oneness with grace. Merton says. “Grace is not a strange, magical substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves; oneness with God.”
Sources
Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine. 3d ed. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2013.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Merton, Thomas. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1975.
Ouspensky, P.D. Tertium Organum. Great Britain, Aziloth Books, 2014 (first published in English in 1922).
Wilber, Ken. The Spectrum of Consciousness. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977.
Clare Goldsberry
Clare Goldsberry’s new book, The Illusion of Life and Death: Mind, Consciousness, and Eternal Being, is reviewed on page TK of this issue.