The Will to Percieve a New World

Wisdom is to know that all we perceive and conceive is not necessarily wholly true, that to a large extent our perceptions and conceptions are a result of what we wish to see and think about. It is clear, then, as Aldous Huxley points out below, that what we concentrate our intelligence upon is critical to our well-being, for our thoughts and perceptions shape our world.

"Some thoughts are practically unthinkable," Huxley notes, "except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived. Nor is this all: the incentive to develop the instruments of certain kinds of thinking is not always present."

"For long periods of history and prehistory," he points out, "it would seem that men and women, though perfectly capable of doing so, did not wish to pay attention to problems which their descendants found absorbingly interesting. For example," he points out, "there is no reason to suppose that between the thirteenth century and the twentieth, the human mind underwent any kind of evolutionary change, comparable to the change, let us say, in the physical structure of the horse's foot during an incomparably longer span of geological time. What happened," he observes, "was that men turned their attention from certain aspects of reality to certain other aspects. The result, among other things, was the development of the natural sciences."

"Our perceptions and understandings are directed, in large measure, by our will," Huxley notes. "We are aware of and we think about the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where there's a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come to the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flamethrowers - that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense and sustained"

[Aldous Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," p. 17]

Given the atrocities of war, famine and increasing environmental crises we have witnessed in the past hundred-odd years, one can only question why our perceptions and conceptions of the world we have created remain so static. While our scientific understanding of our world has increased a thousandfold and more, our understanding of the inner man, our motivations and collective consciousness seem to have changed but little. What one asks, will it take for us to reorient our collective perceptions and conceptions? We cannot, after all, as Einstein so plainly understood, solve our current existential challenges with the same level of thinking that created them.

What, therefore, do we will? A greater understanding of ourselves and our place in the evolutionary process of the universe, or the proliferation of ever greater consumption and domination over nature? Do we wish to come to "the unitive knowledge of the Godhead" or produce ever more efficient weapons to maintain the status quo bequeathed us by the horrors of the twentieth century? One knows where Huxley, Einstein and other great thinkers would weigh in on these questions. It seems clear that they would evince a will to an ever greater understanding of man and his place in both a new world and a newfound evolving cosmos.

Heroism in Religion and Philosophy

"Although a man has not studied a single system of philosophy, although he does not believe in any God, and never has believed although he has not prayed even once in his life, if the simple power of good actions has brought him to that state where he is ready to give up his life and all else for others, he has arrived at the same point to which the religious man will come through his prayers and the philosopher through his knowledge; and so you may find the philosopher, the worker, and the devotee, all meet at one point, that one point being self-abnegation. However much their systems of philosophy and religion may differ, all mankind stands in reverence and awe before the man who is ready to sacrifice himself for others."

-- Swami Vivikenanda --
("Teachings of Swami Vivikenanda," pp. 174-175.)

We live in times which call for heroic action - inwardly and outwardly heroic - and yet we live in times where religions seem to be in ever deeper conflict, and in which philosophy and science are held by many religionists to be irrelevant to their worldviews. What will it take, one wonders, for an ever smaller world to pull together? What will it take for whole masses of individuals to put the interests of others before their own narrow self-interests? Is self-abnegation  widely possible in a world that faces crisis?

"I think we are actually at a point in time that is very unique," observes spiritual teacher, Adyashanti. "Here we are, and it is very possible that in your and my lifespan we will actually experience the fulfillment of literally not being able to sustain certain things. We will run out of energy, we will run out of environment. We have weapons of  destruction that are so extreme that we can wipe ourselves out. It is very possible in the lifetime that we are living in, that we could actually come (to) see a conclusion, that non-sustainability will actually happen and we will have to deal with that. And I think we have been evolving towards that for a very, very, very long time. And, here we are."

"It is no wonder," Adyashanti observes, "that there is fanaticism breaking out in all sorts of religions and fundamentalists in all points-of-view, whether it is religions or philosophical (viewpoints). People are just dividing themselves. There are people that want to save the world, and people that want to destroy each other. They are all there. And it will be very interesting to see what happens. Because there is often at the 'point-of-no-return' - at the point of the most dramatic tensions in life and extremes -  (that) is the very place that dramatic change and transformation can happen."

"I don't think that it's anywhere guaranteed that the change and transformation will happen," he notes. "We don't know. But it is going to go one way or another, and it's not going to be very long from right now before it goes one way or another."

"We are running out of options other than to wake up," he warns. "It is starting to become, possibly, a biological necessity of survival. And when it gets to that point, it really starts to get people's attention."

"We may destroy ourselves if we cannot actually wake up to the fact, to the living experience, that we are really the same," he points out. "It is not good enough to have the philosophy that we are really the same, because that philosophy breaks down when push comes to shove."

When the fruits of different religions and philosophies break down, is that the point at which we realize that they, and we, are essentially the same?

Fr. Richard Rohr: "The Cosmic Christ"

"There is no such thing as 'merely natural,'" says Fr. Richard Rohr, a decidedly modern Franciscan friar featured in the attached video interview. "That is the meaning of the incarnation - that the physical world is, yes, the hiding place of God, but also the revelation place of God. It is only hidden for those who don't know how to see. There is nothing natural for those who have learned how to see. Everything is supernatural."

"Whenever," he says, "we are moving toward connection, communion - one author calls it 'cosmic allurement,' that everything in creation admires itself in the mirrors that are all around it - whenever you allow that 'allurement' to happen and you build bonds and bridges instead of boundaries, you are furthering the second coming of Christ. You are building up the body of Christ. Whenever you separate, hate, fear, deny, enclose yourself in a little self-pitying corner, you are actually backtracking on the glory of God. You are not revealing the mystery, you are in fact denying it."

"Here's where science is helping us so much today," says Fr. Rohr,"that the intuitions that religion always had are now being confirmed. If there is one God, there's one truth, and there's one reality. Religion and science have to end up saying the same thing, and that's happening now."

"The Cosmic Christ, which is the light that fills all things since the beginning of time," Fr. Rohr points out, "invites us into bigger worlds by love, by something bigger, more beautiful, more attractive, more seductive. And that's the function of beauty, that's the function of truth, and that's the function of all goodness."

The Universe, Relativity and the Present Moment: Ancient and Modern Perspectives

"Always think of the universe as one living organism, with a single substance and a single soul; and observe how all things are submitted to the single perceptivity of this one whole, all are moved by its single impulse, and all play their part in the causation of every event that happens. Remark the intimacy of the skein, the complexity of the web."

-- Marcus Aurelius --
("Meditations," IV:41)

Written nearly two thousand years ago, these comments on the non-dualistic nature of the universe by Marcus Aurelius - a Roman Emperor more famous for his book of "Meditations," than all his victories on the battlefield - seem remarkably modern.  Consider the following quote by Albert Einstein:

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Do not the comments of the Roman Empire's great "philosopher-king' and the father of the "New Physics" talk of the same reality, reminding us that we are separated from a holistic, non-dual universe only by our consciousness?

Einstein once wryly described relativity as being the same process by which holding one's hand on a hot stove for a few moments seems like hours, while hours spent talking to a  beautiful woman seems like minutes. For his part, Marcus Aurelius noted the following:

"Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses. This means that the longest life and shortest amount to the same thing. For the passing minute is every man's equal possession, but what has once gone is not ours. Our loss therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come - for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? So two things should be borne in mind. First, that all the cycles of creation from the beginning of time exhibit the same recurring pattern, so that it can make no difference whether you watch the identical spectacle for a hundred years, or for two hundred, or forever. Secondly, that when the longest and shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his."

Religion, Ecumenical Faith and Science: Eastern and Western Perspectives

"Religion must be studied on a broader basis than formerly. All narrow, limited fighting ideas of religion must go. All sect ideas and tribal or national ideas of religion must be given up. That each tribe or nation should have its own particular God, and think that every other is wrong, is a superstition that should belong to the past. All such ideas should be abandoned."

-- Swami Vivikenanda -- 

Written early in the last century, Swami Vivikenanda's advocacy of a universal tolerance for all religions is based on a recognition that, in essence, all religions contain the same impartial truths,  truths that are not inherently conflictive with other faiths or, indeed, with science.

"Religion," Vivkenanda points out, "is the manifestation of Divinity already in man. . . . (and) the proof of one religion depends on the truth of all the rest."

"For instance," he reasons, "if I have six fingers, and no one else has, you may well say that is abnormal. The same reasoning may be applied to the argument that only one religion is true and all others false. One religion only, like one set of six fingers in the world, would be unnatural. We see, therefore, that if one religion is true, all others must be true. There are differences in non-essentials, but in essentials they are all one."

[Vivikenanda, "Teachings of Swami Vivikenanda," (Advaita Ashrama), p. 237.]

In the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church, released in 1994, we see a similar, yet guarded, recognition of the ecumenical nature of religion expressed by what has historically been one of the most exclusionary of faiths. After acknowledging the special bonds with both Judaism and Islam, the revised Catechism acknowledges the following:

"The Church's bond with non-Christian religions is in the first place the common origin and end of the human race:

All nations form but one community. This is so because all stem from the one stock which God created to people the entire earth, and also because all share a common destiny, namely God. . . .

The Catholic Church recognizes in other religions that search, among shadows and images, for the God who is unknown yet near since he gives life and breath and all things and wants all men to be saved."

["Catechism of the Catholic Church'" paras. 839-842.]

And what about the relationship between religion and science? "Is religion," Vivikenanda asks, "to justify itself by the discoveries of reason, through which every other concrete science justifies itself? Are the same methods of investigation which we apply to sciences and knowledge outside, to be applied to the science of Religion?"

"In my opinion," Vivikenanda observes, "this must be so, and I am also of (the) opinion that the sooner it is done the better. If a religion is destroyed by such investigations, it was then all the time useless, unworthy superstition; and the sooner it goes the better. I am thoroughly convinced that its destruction would be the best thing that could happen. All that is dross will be taken off, no doubt, but the essential parts of religion will emerge triumphant out of the investigation. Not only will it be made scientific, as scientific, at least, as any of the conclusions of physics or chemistry, but will have greater strength, because physics or chemistry has no internal mandate to vouch for its truth, which religion has."

[Vivikenanda, "Teachings of Swami Vivikenanda," (Advaita Ashrama), pp. 237-238.]

For his part, roughly 100 years after Vivkenanda's time, Pope Benedict XVI has moved radically towards a resolution and reconciliation of religion and science. In addressing a Vatican conference into the origin of life in the universe (held on October 31, 2008), he made the following comments:

"(Q)uestions concerning the relationship between science’s reading of the world and the reading offered by Christian Revelation naturally arise. My predecessors Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II noted that there is no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences. Philosophy in its early stages had proposed images to explain the origin of the cosmos on the basis of one or more elements of the material world. This genesis was not seen as a creation, but rather a mutation or transformation; it involved a somewhat horizontal interpretation of the origin of the world. A decisive advance in understanding the origin of the cosmos was the consideration of being qua being and the concern of metaphysics with the most basic question of the first or transcendent origin of participated being. In order to develop and evolve, the world must first be, and thus have come from nothing into being. It must be created, in other words, by the first Being who is such by essence."

"To state that the foundation of the cosmos and its developments is the provident wisdom of the Creator is not to say that creation has only to do with the beginning of the history of the world and of life. It implies, rather, that the Creator founds these developments and supports them, underpins them and sustains them continuously. Thomas Aquinas taught that the notion of creation must transcend the horizontal origin of the unfolding of events, which is history, and consequently all our purely naturalistic ways of thinking and speaking about the evolution of the world. Thomas observed that creation is neither a movement nor a mutation. It is instead the foundational and continuing relationship that links the creature to the Creator, for he is the cause of every being and all becoming (cf. Summa Theologiae, I, q.45, a. 3)."

"To 'evolve' literally means 'to unroll a scroll,' that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose “writing” and meaning, we “read” according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos. Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is “legible”. It has an inbuilt “mathematics”. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a “cosmography” studying measurable phenomena but also in a “cosmology” discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos. We may not at first be able to see the harmony both of the whole and of the relations of the individual parts, or their relationship to the whole. Yet, there always remains a broad range of intelligible events, and the process is rational in that it reveals an order of evident correspondences and undeniable finalities: in the inorganic world, between microstructure and macrostructure; in the organic and animal world, between structure and function; and in the spiritual world, between knowledge of the truth and the aspiration to freedom. Experimental and philosophical inquiry gradually discovers these orders; it perceives them working to maintain themselves in being, defending themselves against imbalances, and overcoming obstacles. And thanks to the natural sciences we have greatly increased our understanding of the uniqueness of humanity’s place in the cosmos."

To reconcile one's religion with all "other" religions is the great task for every individual, while reconciling religion with science is the great task of all religionists and scientists alike.

Eric Butterworth: 'Discover the Power Within You'

If I were asked what my religious bearing was years ago, I would have declared myself an atheist. After all I had grown up in the West, and though my mother was a Christian Scientist, it was a decidedly scientific household. Not having much religious instruction myself, I had formulated a typical quasi-anthropomorphic view of a God "out there." And while I was told that God was "omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent" such words had little or no meaning to me, and I rejected (as I suppose many others have) the notion of some Old Testament-like patriarch who was invisible, and presumably, external to the universe. I had no knowledge that, as Jesus succinctly put it, "the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). In actual fact, then, I was agnostic, i.e., one who does not know or have first-hand experience of the divine.

If I were asked today what my religious bearing is, I would say that I am a Transcendental Realist, having experienced glimpses of a higher state of consciousness where the universe is atemporal and a unitive whole beyond the ordinary egoic state of self-consciousness.

In writing of such inner, religious experiences (phenomena discussed at length in William James' great work, "The Varieties of Religious Experience") Carl Jung observed: "The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality, and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. You might be led to that goal," Jung notes, "by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond mere rationalism."

As a decided scientific rationalist at the time of my first such glimpses, I was fortunate in coming to understand the nature of these experiences to have not only two older friends who were experienced and self-realized spiritual seekers to direct me on a voyage of self-discovery, but also to have a psychoanalyst who could attest to the veracity of such experiences and could contextualize them into what I already knew of consciousness from a scientific perspective. Were it not for their assistance, it would have been all too easy to dismiss these incidents as madness - divine madness, perhaps, but madness nonetheless.

As a voracious reader, I had dismissively read a modest amount about Christianity and portions of the Bible, just enough to try and debunk what committed religionists were talking about. Thus, I was fortunate, indeed, in having one of my more experienced friends lend me a book that discussed the religion of Jesus, rather than the religion about Jesus, as he tried to show me the significance of what I had experienced. And although today I am not a Christian (or, more accurately, although I am not exclusively Christian), I still find this book to be an invaluable aid in understanding myself and my fellow man.

Written in the 1960s by Eric Butterworth, a Unity minister, "Discover the Power Within You: A Guide to the Unexplored Depths Within" is a precursor to the many spiritual/self-help books that are available today, but one that puts Christianity into a perspective that is still relevant to a person with a deep appreciation of all that science has revealed and continues to reveal today.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Eric Butterworth
(1916-2003)

"Life is growth and unfoldment, and is lived from the inside out," Butterworth observes. "How few people really know this! The average person lives his life from the outside in. He frustrates his potential when he lets his level of consciousness be determined by what people say, what conditions appear to be, what he reads in the newspapers. He becomes little more than a barometer that registers the conditions of his world. Then he is caught up in the dilemma of whether to conform to the world around him or to spend his life resisting it."

"Jesus," he points out, "came declaring, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32). It really doesn't matter what happens around you or to you. These things are in the world, and you can overcome the world. All that really matters is what happens in you or your thoughts about conditions and people. And you can control your thoughts, for you are the master of your mind - or you can be."

"There is a belief," Butterworth observes, "deeply rooted in the collective consciousness of the human race that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" - you can't change human nature. Reject this for the great lie that it is," he urges.

"When you catch Jesus' concept of the Divinity of Man," Butterworth notes, "you see that you not only can change human nature, but this is whole object of the Christian teaching. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up" (John 3:14). And you are that son of man and you can transcend your basement experiences and come to live in the upper rooms of life."

"Jesus' message of the Kingdom is the message of wholeness," he points out. "We are forever seeing only part of life and concluding that the part is the whole. This is a great problem in formulating religious views. Shelly says that religion is the perception of the relation in which man stands to the universe. But that perception is an individual experience. Someone communicates his perception to another and we are on the way toward the creation of dogma. In time whole bodies of people accept a "perception" that is given to them secondhand. They might even insist that there is no individual perception, or think of such an awareness, or firsthand experience, as a "work of the devil.""

"The word 'religion' means to 'bind together'," Butterworth notes. "It is a relationship, an awareness of man's unity with the great creative force of God."

"The church has a vital place in the life of man," Butterworth concludes, "but not as a supermarket in which to pick up take-out orders of faith and prayer. The church," he declares, "must be a school in which the individual learns the Truth of his unity with God, of his own divine sonship, and of the Kingdom of Heaven within him. Like any place of learning the church must seek to make itself progressively unnecessary, to help people to become self-reliant. In other words, if the church is doing its job sincerely, it will be forever trying to put itself out of business."

[Eric Butterworth, "Discover the Power Within You," pp. 226-227]

Enlightenment: The Tao of Now

"(A)wakening to our original enlightened nature," suggests Robert Holden in the Huffington Post, "involves interrupting the ordinary flow of linear, language-based, thinking so that we can rediscover "the mind within the mind"."

"Focusing on external circumstances or teachings is not what triggers the moment of enlightenment," writes Holden, an author with a decidedly Taoist bent, "(r)ather, it is focusing on the absence of internal commentary. Because it is impossible to "think" without words," he notes, "this practice of stopping the flow of running commentary on our lives involves cultivating a mindset of no-thought (wu-nien) in an attempt to experience each moment as it is without silently talking to ourselves about it."

Holden puts forward the following recollections of nature as doorways into "a wordless space of wonder at the profound transparency of nature," in which, "overwhelmed by awe in the face of creation, the boundaries between self and world dissolve in a mystical union transcending conscious thought."

•  "A white pelican sails south across the darkening sky, heading deeper into the high desert marshlands."
  
• "The first warning drops splash dust on the washboard road as a flock of ibis flap madly against the north wind."
  
• "A yellow-headed blackbird throws its head back over its shoulder, singing ecstatically from its perch on a swaying cattail."
  
• "The sun blinks through thinning clouds, throwing off a triple rainbow like a casual afterthought."

Each haiku-like observation of the pervasive, yet largely unobserved, face of the world around us, Holden suggests, "offers the perfect opportunity for a higher integration of one's original nature with the eternal Way (Tao) that gives rise to everything from within."

Thoreau's Walden Pond

In "On Man & Nature," the great Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau observed: "I want to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, every-day phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversation of my neighbors, may inspire me, and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me."

"Between Heaven and Earth," says the Tao-Te-Ching, "there seems to be a bellows: It is empty, and yet it is inexhaustible; the more it works, the more comes out of it. No amount of words can fathom it; better look for it within you."

"Paradoxically," writes Holden, "awakening to the perennial truth leads experiencers to see absolute truth and conventional truth as one, not two. This is part of the experience of swallowing the whole of the river in one gulp, wherein all dualities are united within the individual. This grasp of the non-duality of reality and appearance is expressed in the analogy of the statue of a golden lion: its form is that of a lion but its substance is of gold. Because its nature is that of a golden lion, its lion-form cannot be separated from its gold-substance. This analogy hints at the experience of non-duality that lies at the heart of enlightenment, in which the boundaries between self and other, inner and outer, collapse."

"In eternity," observes Thoreau, "there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are here and now. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us."

"Man follows the ways of the Earth," says the Tao-Te-Ching. "The Earth follows the ways of Heaven. Heaven follows the ways of the Tao. Tao follows its own ways."

Nottingham and Krishnamurti: The Fractured Human Psyche

One of the most insightful and informed ministers active today is the Reverend Theodore (Ted) Nottingham of Indianapolis' Northwood Christian Church. In a video that directly addresses the human condition, Rev. Nottingham examines the duality and multiplicity of the human psyche in view of the world's great wisdom traditions.



"If you've had a bad dream," Nottingham explains, "if a thought goes through your head in the shower, your state changes. We are very fragile in that way. We are fractured. We are multiple. We are legion."

"The whole purpose of true teachings," he notes, "is to reunite us so that we can bring together the core of our true self, rise up out of that brokenness and enter the nobility of truly being creatures of free will, creatures in the image of their Creator. One of the blinders for us," he explains, "is that we have a strange psychological way of not seeing these contradictions."

"This is the condition of the human being," Nottingham observes. "This is everybody. It is a condition that many teachers have called 'asleep,' because we are so unaware, (because) our attention is so diverted and fragmented and there is nobody home to be present to our reality."

"There has to be a step back," he notes. "The mystics call it 'detachment,' a position of conscious presence that is not dragged around by what is going on, that does not have the rug pulled out from under it at any moment, and that is dependable both for God and for ourselves."

The ability to detach from outward phenomena is possible, Nottingham notes, but it "has to be created," through practice in mindfulness. "We don't come with that," he warns, "and life conspires to keep us from that place of centering. All the spiritual disciplines return to this. Meditation, prayer, all of these methods and habits and ways of life offered to us by the teachings lead us into a centeredness within, in a place of inner quiet, an inner sanctuary that is sealed off from the outside."

"In the world," Nottingham notes, "we are in exile. Spiritual beings lost in a world of materialism, disconnected from our source, no longer dependent as we should be on that which is greater than we are, thinking that we are independent, (we are) cut off."

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jiddu Krishnamurti
(1895-1986)

Another great spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, made the same observations and voiced the same warnings regarding the many split off 'selves' that can exist within the human psyche.

"We are many and not one," Krishamurti observes. "The one does not come into being till the many cease. The clamorous many are at war with each other day and night, and this war is the pain of life. We destroy one, but another rises in its place; and this seemingly endless process is our life. We try to impose the one on the many but the one soon becomes the many."

"Our problem," he observes, " is not how to hear the one voice but to understand the composition, the make-up, of the many which we are are." Yet, this is exceedingly difficult, he notes (as so many other teachers have), because the parts - each with its myriad of desires - cannot undertand the whole. Thus, like Nottingham, he concludes that it is in understanding desire itself, and detaching from one's desires, that one comes to wholeness.

 "The voice of the many is the voice of the one," Krishnamurti writes, "and the one voice assumes authority; but it is still the chattering of a voice. We are voices of the many, and we try to catch the still voice of the one. The one is the many if the many are silent to hear the voice of the one. . . .

"To be aware of the whole, the conflict of the many, there must be an understanding of desire," he notes. "There is only one activity of desire; though there are varying and conflicting demands and pursuits, they are all the outcome of desire."

"Desire may not be sublimated or suppressed," Krishnamurti cryptically observes, "it must be understood without him who understands. If the entity who understands is there," he warns, "then it is still the entity of desire."

Complete detachment from desire through the experiential realization of one's wholeness, or centeredness, without any fractures, seems to be what is required. To see one's desire with one's very being, devoid of the raucous narrations of the many smaller 'selves' we each possess, is the way that leads us out of the mind trap we have created. For, "(t)o understand without the experiencer is to be free of the one and the many," Krishnamurti notes.

"In the awareness of this whole process," he writes, "there is a silence which is not of the experiencer. In this silence only does understanding come into being."

[Krishnamurti: Commentaries on Living: First Series," pp. 37-38.]

"

"The mystics," Nottingham notes, "tell us that you must be emptied, so that you may be filled . Meaning that it is possible, by eliminating the many false 'selves' of the psyche, for us to become "transparent to the divine," as the great 20th-century Christian mystic Karlfried Graf von Durckneim put it.

Both Philosphers and Science Point to a Unity

In another post, I have written about how cutting-edge physics, metaphysics, psychology and philosophy all point to a certain unity (or "Unity") that exists beneath our ordinary egoic existence. Yet, it never fails to astound me how ancient philosophers and sages from the world's great wisdom traditions formulated the same conceptions and came to much the same conclusions thousands of years ago.

"Atomic" theory, or "atomism" was first formulated by the Vedic teachers of ancient Hinduism and was carried forward not only into the Advaita Vedanta, but also into Greek philosophy, in large part because Alexander the Great pushed his army all the way from Greece to the Gates of India.

My favourite ancient Western philosopher (along with Socrates, and his pupil, Plato) is the Roman Emperor and neo-Platonic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius. In his Meditations (at Book 6:25) Aurelius  writes:

"Think of the number of things, bodily and mental, that are going on at the same moment within each one of us; and then it will not surprise you that an infinitely greater number of things - everything, in fact, that comes to birth in this vast One-and-All we call the universe - can exist simultaneously therein."

For a meditation nearly two thousand years old, it is awe inspiring that Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (like "Indra's Many-Jewelled Net" in Hinduism) cover the same truths as the most modern metaphysical teachings (like Andrew Cohen's "Evolutionary Enlightenment"), as well as those of cutting edge physics (as in Bell's Theorem, which shows there is "entanglement" or the 'faster than light/influence at a distance' phenomena which haunted and frustrated Einstein for the balance of his career.)

Unity Through Variety: An Introduction to Sufism

Pir-o-Mirshud, Inayat Khan

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), one of the first Sufi's to bring the teachings of this most mystical school of Islam to the West, wrote a brilliant and concise treatise on the Sufi perspective. Entitled, 'A Sufi Message of Spiritual Liberation,' it cuts to the heart of spiritual teaching that appear to be universal to the world's great wisdom traditions.

The powerful opening of the text talks to the universality and omnipresence of God as a fact, as a force that works in, behind and beyond the universe, regardless of belief or faith:

"Beloved ones of God, you may belong to any race, cast, creed, or nation, still you are all impartially beloved by God. You may be a believer or an unbeliever in the supreme Being, but He cares not. His mercy and grace flow through all His powers, without distinction of friend or foe."

Furthering the non-sectarian, ecumenical and universal message of the Sufi tradition (albeit that Sufism is founded upon and grounded in Islam), Khan demonstrates the universality of the messages of the world's wisdom tradition, a universality that flows by extension from the introductory paragraph regarding the impartiality of God, an impartiality that goes beyond belief or non-belief.

The universal message is that the gate to the path to higher consciousness and an awareness of God's universality starts within our own being:

"The wise man by studying nature enters into the unity through its variety, and realizes the personality of God by sacrificing his own. 'He who knows himself knows Allah' (Sayings of Mohammed). 'The Kingdom of God is within you' (Bible). 'Self-knowledge is the real wisdom' (Vedanta)."

The complete text , originally published by the Theosophical Society, is available on the Internet Archive site (www.archive.org) in either .pdf or .doc formats, and is a wonderful and concise introduction to the Sufi teachings that Inayat Khan brought to the West.