So pick any story. Pick whatever suits your fancy and pretend you’re in it. You might as well, you’re doing it anyway, right now. So why not do it consciously? You’re an actor in a marvelous play scripted by Yourself! And as Krishna advised Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, play the part like any good actor would, to the best of your ability. Win the Oscar as the best rendition of “yourself,” the actor-self you are moment by moment creating in (and as) Who You Really Are—Bare Naked Awareness—which in turn is appearing as “you,” having “a life.” There is no separate one and no separate thing else. There is only Pure Subjectivity (and not even that).
By the way, the play, this life-manifestation, is an absolute miracle. It is pure joy. Its essence is Awareness, God, Who You Really Are. Above all, it is Love. Pay it forward.
STORIES OF ONENESS
Recently I was asked to talk to a group of ex-cons about Oneness, a subject I imagined they would have little interest in. I began with a measure of trepidation, facing, as it were, several men in various states of slouch, and when I introduced myself and said:
“So, can you tell me, what is it that you need to be you?”―there followed a long pause, pregnant with looks of disbelief, and then finally the snide remarks I was expecting:
“A six-pack of Bud,” one man said. “Yeah, a girlfriend who doesn’t nag me about where I’ve been,” said another, guffawing.
“I need this body,” I said, pointing to my chest. “And of course I need all the parts that make up this body, such as my torso, arms, hands, legs, and feet, and there’s also my internal organs: heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, guts, plus my circulatory and nervous systems. And, I imagine you need the same. So what else? What more do you need to be you?”
Another pause, and then finally an answer. “What those parts are made of,” a man said. “Cells.”
“Yes,” I said. “And cells are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms, and so on down to particles and quarks. So what you need is an incredible cast of characters, literally zillions and zillions of them, from your body as a whole to your internal organs and the cells that comprise them and on down to the countless molecules, atoms, and particles that in turn make up those cells, all of which function as one unit under the name you call yourself. What else do you need?”
“Things outside yourself,” another man said. “Like other people. Food. Water.”
“Yes. You need the things we say are ‘outside’ your body. You need humans and their farms and markets and distribution centers and all that goes into keeping us alive. But this just doesn’t happen by itself.”
“We need nature,” he said.
“Yes, we need the earth, its atmosphere and biosphere. We need air and rivers and oceans and animals and insects and plants. We need all of that. And the sun, the solar system, other planets, gravity. Where would be without gravity? Or the galaxy? You need all of those things, all in perfect working order. How long would you last if the sun went out? Where would you be if there were no galaxy, no universe?”
The room seemed less hostile. At least those who had spoken were now sitting up. I said, “You can’t rightfully say ‘me’ without including all of that—quarks to galaxy and beyond—because you need every single bit of it to be ‘you’ sitting in this room right now. So if you think of yourself as a separate individual who is alone and unique and completely one-off, is that really true? The next time you flaunt your ego thinking that what you see in the mirror is a singular and special ‘you,’ you might want to think about what you’re leaving out. And that includes other people, not to mention absolutely everything else.”
No one said a word, so I continued.
“Here’s another way to look at it,” I said. “I’ll paraphrase this from a chapter in a book written by a man who changed my outlook to what is now an inlook, which in turn changed my attitude and everything else in the world. It goes like this:
“Let’s say you’re driving on the interstate and you decide to pull off at the next exit and get a cup of coffee. You find a booth and notice on the menu that a cup of coffee costs $3.20, which seems like an outrageous price for a lousy cup of coffee, but where else are you going to get one? The waitress takes your order, despite your grumbling about the cost, and then as she’s walking away you begin to wonder how she ended up here working in this restaurant out in the middle of nowhere. All the thousands of possibilities that must have existed for her to be anywhere else right now, yet here she is in this place. Maybe she grew up on a farm around here, maybe her husband is from some town nearby, maybe she wanted her kids to go to a rural school—there could easily be a million little events and choices in her life that put her in this restaurant at this moment retrieving your cup of coffee.
“And then you think about the owner and all the responsibilities he has, the bills he pays, the daily burden of running this restaurant that is providing you with your coffee. And the building itself—all the materials that went into it, the construction company that built it and all their personnel, the designers and blueprints, the electrical, plumbing, and landscaping companies, all contributing to your immediate need, and each with their own million events and choices that had to be perfectly aligned so as to be essential to your present experience.
“But let’s not forget the coffee maker and everything it took to design and manufacture and market it, and all the people involved there, and of course the coffee itself—follow that back to the delivery truck and the driver and the distributer, and then to the company that imports the beans and grinds and packages the coffee. And then there’s the cargo ship and the shipping company that brings the beans from, say, Columbia, and the materials and construction of the ship itself, and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people involved going all the way back to the mining of the raw materials needed to build it. Then there is the coffee plantation and the owners and managers and workers, and of course the plants that produce the beans and the fertile soil they grow in and just the right amount of water needed, and we can’t leave out the land, the country, the continent, the earth itself and its atmosphere, the sun and solar system, the galaxy, the universe as a whole. When you come down to it, it really is mind-boggling to consider all that was involved to produce that precious cup of coffee just for you at this very moment in this very place. And you got all that for the incredible deal of only $3.20! As they used to say in my favorite deli in New York: ‘So what’s not to love?’”
I turned to the whiteboard and drew several concentric circles, labeling the space inside the inner circle “Feeling,” the space within the next circle “Tasting,” the space within the next “Touching,” the next “Smelling,” then “Hearing,” then “Seeing,” and finally, outside all the circles and reaching to the edge of the board, “Thinking/ Visualizing.”
To the group I said, “My question is, why do you normally consider that your body ends at the edge of the inside third ring? Why do the experiences of feeling, tasting, and touching strike you as happening inside the boundary of your body, while smelling, hearing, and seeing are mostly linked to things outside your body? And of course thinking and visualizing may run from quarks and particles to the farthest reaches of the universe and beyond, and include every possible fantastic variation. The point is, if you investigate, if you look inside yourself and tell the truth about how you really perceive anything, I think you’ll agree that all perceptions are experienced inside. All that you experience via your senses happens right where you are, moment by moment, and that includes everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, feel, and think. The key word here is experience. Your experience can’t happen anywhere but right where you are, right at the moment you experience it. It is not experienced somewhere else because you are not somewhere else, other than where you are! Any past experience you remember is a thought and not the actual experience, and the same is true of any imagined future experience.
“So not only can any actual experience happen right where you are but it can only ha
ppen right when you are, in the exact moment it happens, which we know as ‘Now.’ In short, experience is only ‘Here’ and only ‘Now.’ This leads me to the next question: How do you even know there is a ‘somewhere else?’ Considering that everything you experience you experience where you are, you could just as easily conclude that there is no outside world, despite what science says about how we as assumed objects relate with other assumed objects, a process that really only describes how objects connect and says nothing about how we actually experience anything. Really, your own experiential evidence should be the determining factor. I think it’s clear, based on my own present experience and not on what anyone else tells me to believe, that everything I experience I experience here, inside. That awareness of anything, no matter what it is, happens where I am, not ‘over there,’ including the experience of thoughts about so-called ‘other’ wheres or whens, or thoughts of all manner of things—people, places, and objects—the things that thoughts are attached to. And where is this ‘awareness’? I don’t know about you, but I have never seen someone else’s awareness. In fact, I have never seen awareness anywhere else. I see it only here, where I am. Actually, it is so ‘where I am’ that I cannot distinguish between ‘it’ and ‘I.’ All of the terms I have been using are interchangeable: ‘I,’ ‘Here,’ ‘Experience,’ and ‘Awareness.’ Moreover, it is impossible to conclude from this that there is anything separate from anything else, that there exists any sort of ‘duality.’ It is all inside. It is all within experience. In fact, it is experience—there is nothing other than experience—and that’s about as close as we can get to Oneness other than to say that there is nothing anywhere except perhaps for the appearance or the illusion of a space/time universe of separate parts, a world we make up, appearing inside awareness. An elaborate dream, if you will.”
I waited, and said, “How are we doing with this?”
“Deep,” I heard, and while most remained slumped in their chairs, the same few who had spoken seemed interested.
”If you follow nature or science shows on TV or in magazines, almost invariably these days you hear the word ‘interconnectedness’ or ‘interdependence.’ Mostly there will be an example of how two species benefit each other, how plants and insects, for instance, form a workable bargain of protection and sustenance, and there may be illustrations of the overall interdependence of a rainforest or the oceans. Actually, these are not separate and solitary cases of oneness; rather, they speak of the entirety of the universe as a whole. It—we—are not separate parts. That is to say, we are not ‘we.’ ‘We’ are ‘I.’”
“Like the butterfly effect,” one man blurted out. “A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon causes a thunderstorm in Iowa.”
“I don’t believe that stuff,” another man added.
I said, “Here’s a quote from an astronaut/scientist on a recent National Geographic show: ‘There is absolutely nothing on one side of the planet that is not connected to something on the other side of the planet.’” To that I added, “The connection may not be as dramatic as the butterfly image, but nevertheless there is a connection, whether or not it is obvious.”
“So what’s this got to do with us?”
“A lot,” I said. “When we think we’re separate, when we do what we do for ‘number one’ with the attitude that ‘I’m gettin’ mine and I’m gettin’ it first!’, we not only create problems for everyone around us, we end up where we’ve all ended up—in prison. And that isn’t the half of it.”
I said, “There’s an ancient Hindu metaphor called Indra’s Net which illuminates this principle well. Picture the universe as a gigantic net, and where each of the strands meet, there is a jewel. Each of these jewels reflects all the other jewels of the net, and every jewel represents, say, an object or a form of life. If you doubt that all the jewels are intimately interconnected, place a dot on one jewel, and because the jewels all reflect each other, they will all immediately display a dot. Applying that to human beings, when one jewel, say, acts selfishly or harms another, then all the other jewels are affected. You have only to turn on the nightly news to see the situation the world presently finds itself in, and to bring that same metaphor to a personal level, you can see how when you so much as think selfishly, how the world will respond to you. It’s the Farmer’s Creed: ‘What ye sow, so shall ye reap,’ and there we were in prison, reaping what we had sown. That, in a nutshell, is the action of Oneness, the principle of interrelatedness that is so intimate as to defy any notion of intrinsic individuality or separateness. ‘We’ are ‘I.’”
“Yeah, but what if someone else started the bad stuff and others have been reaping it ever since. That’s the way it’s been for me, and I don’t see no change coming.”
“The point is,” I said, “there isn’t anyone else doing anything because there’s only Oneness. So it’s up to you to be the One, and to act accordingly. When you love others, you are loving yourself because all there is, is you, as One. The mirroring effect of the jewels represents not zillions of individual jewels reflecting each other; rather, each jewel is every other jewel. I used the word ‘intimate’ when describing interrelatedness, but really, there are not two to be so. When you have two mirrors perfectly mirroring each other, are there then still two mirrors? On the surface, from a source outside the mirrors (which is impossible in the metaphor of Indra’s Net, and in fact, is impossible in reality, as the principle of Hadron’s Bootstrap in quantum physics points out), the answer may be ‘yes,’ but within the mirror images, there is no longer an answer because the question is no longer a question.
“I think we all know the result of not acting accordingly, of not recognizing Oneness. When we believe we are all separate beings living in a world of separate parts, there soon appears confrontation, brought on by our need to be happy, to make a living, to find our way in this labyrinth we call ‘a life.’ And invariably we assign responsibility, especially for the so-called ‘bad’ deeds, to those we think of as ‘others.’ Too often we do this so as to make it easier for ourselves; we feel better about ourselves when we can assign blame to someone else. And my belief is that the reason we feel bad about ourselves to begin with is because we bought into the lie of separateness when we were young and now find ourselves clueless about the One Source that we really are. In a word, we’re stuck, and we don’t even know it, and blame becomes the daily norm, gossip the common exchange, confrontation the lifestyle. You know as well as I do. In prison we saw this every day. Despite the few acts of charity, it was mostly dog-eat-dog, and although the sentiment may be socially cleaner on the outside, it’s basically the same game: ‘Do unto me as I do unto me.’”
“So what can we do? Seems to me, we’re the last people who could do anything about it.”
“No, I don’t believe that,” I said. “We may be the very ones to be the One we truly are. We ended up in prison because of what we did. As prisoners, our deeds were in our face every hour of every day. We were in our self-made pit, removed from the game, and that might have been more valuable than we realize. Byron Katie once said that she loved doing The Work (her method of opening to the Source) in prisons because prisoners were on the edge; they would go to great lengths, even kill their own children, to find God. So maybe we are perfectly qualified; maybe we’ve lashed out against the norm for reasons we haven’t yet considered. Most of us were backed into the worst of corners and thought that more of what we lacked—sex, drugs, and rock and roll—was the cure for our pain. Eventually we realize that the old methods don’t work, and to address the still-present yearning inside, we realize we can no longer stand on our old beliefs, while the majority of folks go about their separate business in their separate neighborhoods never considering who they really are nor changing what they have become comfortable with, despite the fact that they are living a lie.”
“Yeah, but how?” the same man said. “You don’t just flip a switch and you’re changed.”
“So maybe just think about wha
t was said today. Here’s an image that helped me remember early on. I got it from a book by Alan Watts on eastern wisdom: Picture a ship sailing across the ocean. Naturally it creates a wake behind it, like all ships do, right? So the ship causes the wake, or we can say the ship is ‘responsible’ for the wake. Now, you are the ship, and you are responsible for your wake. Your choices, your actions, cause the result of those actions. But when you blame someone else, what you’re saying is that the wake is causing the ship. ‘Someone else (the wake) started this crap, and I (the ship) am paying for it.’ So every time you want to blame someone (or something) for how you are doing or how you are feeling, remember that you’ve lost control of the ship, that as captain of yourself you have turned your power and authority over to someone else, and in so doing you are at the mercy of people or things you mistakenly believe are separate from yourself. In effect, you are saying that the wake is responsible for the ship. That’s how absurd it is to blame, and because we do this so often, it’s a great reminder that we have forgotten the Oneness that is our true nature.
“So I say, it’s a start. Or go to the library, read science books and magazines, read Eastern spirituality, try meditation and yoga, ask questions. Get interested in who or what you really are. Why come to the end of your life never having looked, never knowing or caring about what you are or what this universe is. I say do whatever it takes, be aware of what presents itself to you, what resonates. If you relax your mind, something will come along. Simply don’t prevent it. Examine your beliefs. Be open to anything that shows up. It will respond.”
Coming to Nothing and Finding Everything Page 7
