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God, Spiritual Oneness & Separation
July 8, 2009 by Ray Baskerville
If it is that God and our true nature is One-ness, then why is it that it is not our living experience?
Indian spiritual philosophy addresses the God concept in a way that supports what I am saying. It sees God in two aspects – the manifest and the un-manifest. The un-manifest is the purest state of conscious, beyond description or comprehension Within it is all potential existence. The manifest aspect is this consciousness in expression as the entirety of manifestation. There are many similarities in the Taoist philosophy of yin and yang with yin as the un-manifest and yang as the manifest.
My perception of why Oneness or Unity isn’t our lived experience is this. In the process of entering into manifest existence as an individuated point of life within that existence, we experience separation in the transition from un-manifest to manifest. This ‘moment’ we could call the ‘birth’ of our soul. Why is this experience of separation necessary if in truth there is only One? The one word answer I see is ‘creation’. The purpose and design of the One in manifest existence, is the evolution and expansion of consciousness, or put another way, the endless creative manifesting of the One, in appearance and form.
A huge hindrance we have in embracing and understanding this is our conception of the One as God, is
when we have a conception of God as separate from us and static. Then the evolution and expansion of consciousness through manifest existence makes no sense. One way or another this is how the vast majority conceptualize God.
For the evolution and expansion of consciousness through manifest existence to make sense then God – the One as consciousness evolving, is not static and unchanging. As One, we are aspects of the One, manifest. Therefore our lives, indeed life itself, is inseparable from the evolution and expansion of consciousness through manifest existence.
In our process of taking form and entering manifest existence, many have by now lived hundreds, even thousands of lives, largely behind the veil of forgetting and under the illusion of separation. In these lives we have accumulated innumerable levels of pain and suffering from the belief of our separation. What of all our experience, remains unhealed, unresolved and incomplete is carried with us, and with it, all the beliefs and tendencies we have formed. In the East they term this accumulation Karmas, Samskaras and Vasanas, in the west we have more recently termed them the unconscious, or subconscious
An analogy I often use to describe this unresolved and unhealed past, is as a chaotic and complex tangle of intricately knotted ropes, ropes each made of chords, in turn made of strands, each frayed ragged and entangled with each other as to make an almost undistinguishable mess.
Different levels of our consciousness will hold different parts of this knotted tangle. Let us use the dynamic chakra system to represent these different levels. In many teachings and belief systems that utilise this model our spiritual process is represented as an upward movement from the lower to higher energy centers. My own experience is that the ‘tangle’ denies any neat order of progress in this manner, and weaves seemingly randomly and chaotically from one centre to another. The result is that different parts of our consciousness that seem unrelated can be knotted together in this way through the layering and patterning of the accumulation of these experiences that remain unresolved and unhealed.
In a nutshell we are so absorbed in dealing with and identified with this knotted tangle, that we do not experience the truth of One-ness. Instead this ‘knotting’ is how we experience ourselves and the life we live in the world, and it is. through the filters it creates that we see existence.
The forces that are held within our subconscious create the filters of our belief systems, our likes and dislike, our tendencies, even our abilities. In short everything within the personality self is a construct arising from this tangle that is our forgotten past. In the light of this it is easy to see why we do not experience ourselves and the world as essentially One. If we see that truth of Unity as the core of our being, our true nature then the influence and identification with the tangled knotting of our subconscious stands between us, as the ‘I’ we perceive ourselves to be and the experience of us as the undivided Oneness.
The spiritual process is then, as I see it an unwinding of the knots of separation consciousness, in Eastern spirituality this is often called purification. I see it as a process of healing, using the broadest application of the word as Living Liberation.
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yes this is tooooo deep lore, and if you really want to know truth, Meditation is the only way to do so, because there are many books from several authors available in market explaining on spirituality, i don’t think so all of them are Genuine, because self-realization is not an easy task, and at the same time not difficult too, but one who really knows it, won’t sell his ideas and knowledge, in fact people will go to him in order to attain knowledge.
Hi Alex
to be honest I’m not quite sure what your point is. I do agree that meditation is important, but the only way to know truth? I would have to disagree.
I also disagree that no genuine spiritual teacher would write books, however I do think that anyone who is genuinely enlightened would not describe themselves as such and that discrimination in accepting received knowledge is vital. Too many people speak truths that they do not live and embody.
Blessings
Ray