There is ultimately One as the source; therefore all that is genuinely manifested in existence is unique, irreplaceable, and eternal. But not eternal in its present manifestation, only in its original being, where it comes from.

This includes the ‘enlightened’.

No two awakened beings are identical.

No two not-yet-awakened beings are identical.

This follows from their necessarily unique part of the One individuality.

It’s in part for this reason that the ‘teachings’ and received experiences of the awakened are so variable. These cannot be the same. They can have the same core of truth, but it will necessarily be subtly different in its flavour, in its manifestation.

There are discernible similarities in all of the awakened, for they are all awakened to the same being, of which all are part. But if the similarities were to become identities — well then then one of those identities is false. It is either a simulacrum, intentional or otherwise, or simply a lie. A deception, a con.

The disparity in descriptions and understandings is evidence of the truth in action.

And another truth enacted is that no awakened being in existence is completed. Awakening is the beginning of the awareness of the full being, not its end point. There is always more to realise here, until the end of more, which is (apparently) bodily death. And each apparent being progresses in their own sequence.

Another obvious fact is that every awakened being in existence retains residual self, howsoever slight it may be.

A body is psychical self, a manifestation in psychic reality.

While in the awakened what we might describe as the centring in the ego-centre will have gone, there necessarily remains a trace of ego-sense. Without this the body could not survive as a body.

So with all of this as a given, a particular awakened being will fit or not-fit with a particular non-awakened being. This is not a question of judging, or right or wrong. It’s to do with a fit — for now.

There will be subtle resonances between beings, just as a note sounded on a piano can make a guitar or violin sing on the fundamental or even harmonic resonance.

Find being where there is resonance.

And as the wakening continues, the note may go higher, so the resonance — and the instrument — may change…

The Divine is like a butterfly. It is so easily startled, so delicate in its sensibility.

Have you ever attempted, or better, succeeded, in getting a butterfly to settle on your hand or arm? You had to stay very still, didn’t you? Any movement, even a sharp breath, would startle the creature away. If you are still enough, it might favour you with a landing, trust you with its life.

The Divine is most definitely not a butterfly (though the butterfly is indeed of the Divine) but there are some similarities.

The Divine is exquisitely courteous. It will not enter where it is not invited. It cannot enter if there is no space made for it. It will not enter unless there is stillness.

This is not because the Divine is weak.

It is because it is so potentially overwhelming that it now dare not enter where not invited, will not enter where there is any resistance, will not ever be other than love. It will not damage. Perhaps it has done this inadvertently when invoked unwisely — something gave rise to the word ‘awe’.

Awe: A feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder (OELD)

Awe: Awe is the feeling of respect and amazement that you have when you are faced with something wonderful and often rather frightening (Collins)

Awe: An emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime (Merriam-Webster)

What is the divine? What could it mean? Well, do we know what ‘divining’ is?

It became entirely apparent to the writer while still a child through experience that the ‘gods’ of religion were almost universally an entirely man-made projection that was essentially the human ego writ large in all its worst and best aspects.

That is not what this writer is pointing to with the word ‘divine’.

The clear understanding of the projective nature of ‘god’ indicated above led to a brief existence as an atheist, which lasted not more than a week, when someone pointed out the self-evident fact that atheism was a belief. So agnosticism became the description of the position held. This was to be so for many years.

However, little by little this position was eroded.

The experiences that led to this erosion are too unbelievable to be listed here, but that does not affect the fact of the experience. The general area that applies is that of the mystics.

Finally the writer is convinced that there is a principle – a source – a no-thing that is indescribable – behind the apparent existence, that in fact IS, and also that the apparent existence is actually that – apparent. It’s absolutely as real as human experience can get, but nonetheless in its most important essence irreal.

Nothing whatever can be said of such a principle, or source, or No-thing, for it does not exist, has no existence. Rather existence is within it. All that can be done is point to it. Humans point with fingers, paintings, music, dance, theories… and signs, or words.

It is recognised that this stated viewpoint might be mistaken for a christian or other religious viewpoint, or pantheism, or be regarded as a heresy. No offence is meant to such viewpoints (other than the latter)  but that is not where this author is placed.

Whatever ‘that’ is, that lies behind the fact of apparency, is the divine, and it is sometimes divined, just as a water diviner sometimes divines water.

Also as with water, the divine’s always there, somewhere, even if it’s not always divined.

The essence of the divine is absolute — unconditioned — love, and this, love, is the constructional material, the underlying base, which permits the apparency of all appearance and existence.

Love is exquisitely equipped to manifest everything as appearance, and provide the framework of experience; the experience of appearance is existence.

Sometimes we know it.

As already described, on one fine day it was seen that ‘reality’, whatever that may be — but certainly, the source of everything that is in appearance — is one, and whole. It’s whole, or integral.

Thus, everything in appearance adds up to the one whole, or Universe. In appearance of course that whole is discriminated – or dis-integrated – or refracted¹ – into apparently separate and distinct elements. But because there is one whole, it is seen that there can be no two discriminated elements that are identical. This is true in human experience: no two people, or animals, or plants, or days, or items are actually indistinguishable.

Humans attempt to manufacture in manufacturies items that are identical and indistinguishable – except for their serial number or sales ID. They aren’t. Nothing is identical to anything else…

But.

Any physicists reading this (hello, all one of you) will know that there are (apparently) indistinguishable elements in our (apparent) reality, even if they are not visible to the human eye. Sub-atomic ‘particles’ – electrons, protons, neutrons, for example – are indistinguishable from apparent others of their class.

The Princeton physicist Wheeler theorised light-heartedly (or apparently light-heartedly) that the problem of the identity of all such versions of one ‘particle’ – the electron – could readily be explained by there only existing one electron which travelled back and forth through time to appear at all possible positions that an electron could appear at, thus giving rise to the appearance. When travelling in one direction, the electron appears as itself, the fundamental unit of (arbitrarily) ‘negative’ electric charge. When travelling in the opposite direction in time, it appears as the positron, with the charge reversed to an arbitrary ‘positive’ (this is anti-matter).

Non- physicists might think this an absurd proposal (and would be horrified by much that is taken for granted in the physicists’ current model of the universe!) but there is nothing in physics to render it implausible: ‘time’ is not something that appears in fundamental equations except as a direction.

The main objection physicists raised to this proposal is that if it were true, then an equal number of forward travelling electrons and reverse travelling electrons, aka positrons, are needed to cancel each other out – and this is not observed, at least here and now.

However, I would propose that the reason we observe less positrons than electrons is because the viewpoint we have is apparently moving in a ‘forward’ direction in time, this causing the asymmetry observed and also the imbalance between apparently-observed quantities of matter (lots of it) and anti-matter (not much). Whether this is mathematically feasible is beyond my capacity to investigate, and so my proposal is assuredly absurd nonsense.

Interestingly Wheeler, who was deeply engaged in the development of the current view that physics holds, came up with another conventionally-‘bizarre’ proposal, the ‘Participatory Anthropic Principle’, a statement that the apparent world is created by the presence of the Observer. To which I can only say, ‘Yes’.

Implicitly…

Equally, anything that has ever apparently existed is a reflection/projection/refraction of something unique and permanent in the permanent reality that lies behind.

As such, nothing real — that is, in its uniqueness — that has ever existed can really die, as it is a part of the timeless reality…

Faced with the multiplicity of apparently-discrete objects, people, sensations — ‘the ten thousand things’ as Daoists have put it — how on Earth can it be maintained that reality is One?

It’s because it can be seen — is seen! — that there is just the One source, and that One is differentiated into the ‘ten thousand things’ by the actions of the senses.

Famously, Plato touched on this in his descriptions of how Idea was transmuted into Individual imperfect objects.

One analogy by which this somewhat difficult notion can be grasped is by considering the way that a prism breaks the one white light beam that enters it into many separate colours.

Which is truth? That there is one white light? Or multiple different-coloured light? Both are truth, they are the same thing, undifferentiated or differentiated aspects of the One whole. Interestingly, in principle (and quite recently, in practice) the multiple colours can be put back together to make the original white beam. And interestingly, and in practice — your own practice — the differentiated objects of perception can be perceived as being ultimately One.

Ubiquitous uniqueness

A non-obvious implication and consequence of the nature of the One is that everything perceived in existence is necessarily unique.

Consider another analogy: take a beautiful decorated vase, before and after it has inadvertently been dropped on the floor and smashed into ‘ten thousand things’.

Before it was one. Now it is many. The many still add up to the one, but putting it back together requires clear perception, skill, patience. Every part of the whole is different, by necessity, as there cannot be two parts of the one whole that are identical. Some parts may be very similar, but similar is not identical.

By analogy it can be seen that in existence, every thing that exists is necessarily, unimpeachably unique — for it comes from the differentiation of the One reality. Similarity there is: identicality there is not.

The construction and deconstruction of the physical universe…

via GIPHY

The realisation of the self…

via GIPHY

The mirror of life…

via GIPHY

The reflection in the sensory mirror…

via GIPHY

From here where I now am placed I see the problem with the whole of what we call human society and culture. That problem is that the whole thing is premised on a set of complete falsehoods; though hardly anybody is aware of this. Better, no-one!

The first great falsehood, of which people are more or less aware but of which they are not presently conscious, is that we are all quite apparently going to die. This means that whatever we accumulate in our lives is going to be left behind.

As I say, most people have some awareness of this but they don’t seem to allow this awareness to guide their behaviour in life. The limited animal aspiration to accumulate resources and dominate the local environment is transmuted in the ‘human’ being into an unlimited and knowing desire to accumulate without limit and dominate all. Driving it all, the fear of loss, and ultimately fear of death; a fear that animals apparently lack except when the threat is imminent—as they lack reflexive knowing.

The fundamental core belief that lies within such conceptions as ‘capitalism’ is that ‘more is better’. Of course more than nothing is most definitely better for those who are starving or have nowhere to live. But once you have the basic requirements of life sorted out, how much more do you need?

Is it perhaps the case, that if everybody only took what they needed, there would be enough for everybody to have what they needed?

The other more toxic reality that lies behind this and every other part of the posturing of human life is the second falsehood. This is the promotion of the self and its needs as being the central imperative of all human action. Of course, this also lies at the root of capitalist acquisition which is acquisition for the self. The problem here is, as remarkably few people ever find out, that the self is not real. Consequently all its apparent actions, aims, imperatives, and goals, are also completely unreal. One has to find this out for, err, oneself, of course…