Unity is Not Sameness

Posted on September 21, 2008 by Chris Attwood

We live in a world of apparent differences which in reality is unified, but that does not mean that everything we experience is the same.

It's as if the totality of I has chosen to enter into a portion of me and experience myself from the perspective of that part. As if my conscious awareness entered into a cell in the body and experienced the body from the perspective of that cell.

From the perspective of the cell, I interact with my surrounding cells, I eat and eliminate, I perform a function which impacts the functions of other cells around me and if I fail to perform my assigned function then imbalance and perhaps disease is created in the body.

From this cell's perspective, I am unaware of the whole functioning of the body and all the diiferent activities in the body appear to be out of my control. I may even feel like a victim of those activities.

But with the ability of self-awareness, the cell may come to expand its experience of its own nature. By diving deep within its own consciousness, the cell (in this analogy) could experience the state of awareness which is unidentified with anything, which is just pure awareness by itself, and which is common to all parts of the body.

Then the cell may begin to see its interaction with the cells around it as part of a larger process of life and living. In fact the cell may start to identify more with its connectedness to other parts of the body than to its separateness from them.

There could come a point that the cell so completely identifies with that which it has in common that its sense of separateness drops away altogether. At that point the cell's perception of what it considers to be itself is not just a cell, but the whole body.

Perhaps this is the same when the body, in this analaogy, is all that exists and the cell is our individual mind-body organism. The more completely we connect with the source of awareness, the experience of awareness itself, which is not identified with any particular mind-body, then the more the apparently individual mind-body connects with the state which is common to all experience.

As that awareness grows, "my" perception of "myself" as separate from that of which "I" appear to be a part drops away. I begin to see the value and importance of each apparent part of my experience. In fact, I begin to see that each apparent part--the beautiful, the "ugly", the sweet, the "bitter", the tasty, and that which is eliminated after the taste is gone--all are absolutely essential to the wholeness of the experience of this thing I call life.

It is its effectiveness in allowing the mind to settle down and experience that inner state of pure awareness and the resulting increasing experience of the connectedness of life which has made Transcendental Meditation® (www.tm.org) such an important and valuable part of life. It is like a direct doorway into unity.