A Taste of the Other Shore

 No Separation

There was a great painter in China, many centuries ago, who came to the notice of the Emperor; he had a tremendous reputation for painting pictures that were incredibly realistic, almost like the thing itself. The Emperor called him to his court and said, “For my salon, I’d like a big painting on this wall.”

The painter said, “Fine, but on these conditions: nobody interrupts me, and nobody is allowed to look at the picture until it’s completely finished.”

So the painter sets up his apparatus and starts to paint. Days, weeks, months go by - several years go by! The Emperor, naturally, is getting impatient; he wants his picture, and he also wants his salon back. So he begins to send messages to the painter: “When is my painting going to be ready? You’ve been such a long time.”

The painter says, “Soon. Soon it will be ready.”

Finally, the day comes for the unveiling of the picture. The Emperor is sitting on his throne, the whole court is present, and the painting is there, covered by a drape.

The painter draws back the drape, and there it is: a typical Chinese landscape of rivers, mountains, paths, people working in the fields. It’s a great picture, fantastic; but the Emperor is annoyed because he’s had to wait such a long time. So he says, “Hmn, not bad, but it lacks a little realism. Somehow it looks rather artificial, contrived”.

The painter looks at him steadily, deeply, a long gaze. Then he shrugs his shoulders, takes up his cloak, walks towards the picture, walks into the picture, and disappears.

This is an exact metaphor for the spiritual realization: to walk into the reality that is all around you, and disappear.

There is essentially no difference between ourselves and the rest of reality; in truth there is no separation anywhere. It is the separation that each one of us has formed which has to be dissolved; it is this longing for a separate identity which has to be reversed. We have emerged from oneness into our separate identity, and the journey is to turn around, back towards, and into, oneness again.

Separation is a myth, but it takes on a very concrete form. A privileged point is set up by each person, from which a whole world is developed, a perspective on the rest of reality taken. Then we compare it to other perspectives and conflict with them; we argue for it, compromise with it - and all just a view of reality from the removed individual cosmos. It is like the hand having a view of the rest of the body, and when the rest of the body moves the hand, the hand interpreting it in terms of its own will, its desires, intentions, hopes.

This is an extremely difficult movement to make, from a separate identity back to a state of oneness. It involves a loss of what we are basing our lives upon, which we are deeply attached to, and that seems to be the raison d’etre of our existence. To let go of that and be an undefined component of an immense universe with billions of other components, this is the work of a Titan.

Putting it in terms of energy - which is fundamental to my work and my whole approach to life - we have the whole cosmos as one, vibrating in a certain way, and every living individual vibrating in a different way; and the job is to let go the separate vibration and allow the universal vibration to be in oneself, so that one becomes, one feels, anonymous.

But even if one sees that is the work, there is confusion, because any effort one makes to return to the original vibration is itself a separated vibration. To make an effort is to introduce a new unharmonious vibration in order to reach the vibration of universal harmony. So it is a very ticklish job for the Titan.

It is possible through energy meditations such as my own Bodyflow to move into the energy level of reality and feel a sense of space, of no boundaries. This is the achievement of the final triumph, but on one level only. When one comes out of the energy space, the mind works in its old ways, the heart reacts as it did before, the body retains its tensions and its strains; the whole self is still rooted in its own cosmos. Through the energy space one can get

a taste of the uniform serenity which comes through merging with what is all around us; but this has to be realized on all levels.

A meditation such as Bodyflow indicates the principle, but it is not the essence. That principle has to become true on every level: mind, body, emotions, energy. The very vibration of all our individual cells has to be returned to the true vibration.

J. Krishnamurti, a great universal teacher, writing about an experience of what he understood at the time, in his early twenties, was a state of enlightenment, says:

I realized I had to harmonize all my bodies with the Buddhic plane.

His consciousness was open, he felt in touch with the great masters on the Buddhic plane, the master plane, and in this state he realized that he had to harmonize on all levels with this Buddhic plane.

The movement to union has to be on every possible level; only then is there the disappearance of the self and its reappearance as an element of the cosmos. That is not just a pure sense of essence; in the final event, everything reverts to being exactly as it appears to the ordinary human being, but with this big difference - one also has the union in essence. That is the magic of the journey.

Here is a quotation from Swami Purna, an Eastern teacher working in the West:

Science has merely confirmed that particles cannot be distinguished from the space surrounding them. Therefore, to explain fully any phenomenon, one must explain all phenomena.

He is saying that science is finding that particles only exist when one looks for them. When one doesn’t look for them they are not there as separate things; there is no distinction between a particle and the cosmos the particle is in; everything is involved with everything else, always. And so, Swami Purna says, we may focus on any phenomenon, but in fact we can’t explain much about it unless we explain everything.

This means, for a seeker, that at the same time as one continues to be aware of this individual existence in which one finds oneself, one has always to be aware of the totality to which one is going to return at the end of the journey.

The totality is what matters for the seeker; it is not just an ancillary thing to bear in mind while one gets on with one’s life. It may be right for an in-between person - between the secular and the divine - to say, “Yes, I know there is more to life than this, but I have my family and my career, I have my ambitions; I know this is not all, but still, I will make these my priority.” That is perfectly alright, there have to be in-between people so that the drama goes on. But for a true seeker this totality becomes primary.

Another Eastern teacher, Vimala Thakar, writes:

The challenge is to be aware of the totality, to be aware of one’s organic relationship with the totality, and to live in the midst of the complexity of life with that simple awareness.

To be aware of the totality and of one’s organic relationship with the totality - not just one’s conscious relationship, or one’s knowledge of its existence - is a physical thing, it is not just a consciousness thing.

Satori is a consciousness thing, but union with the cosmos is an organic thing. Satori is the empty circle, where everything disappears, where everything is there and yet nothing in particular is there. But that is not the end. After enlightenment one has to make another step and become perfectly unenlightened.

To be perfectly unenlightened is to be absolutely ordinary again. But ordinary people are not absolutely ordinary; they are separately ordinary, cut off and ordinary, distorted and ordinary, or ordinarily distorted. To be absolutely ordinary is to be ordinary in the way that a tree is ordinary, the way a flower, a cloud, a river are ordinary; simply there in one’s rightful place in the natural existence of cosmic life. That is the goal.

To get there we have to go through the empty circle, through the emptiness. We have to be enlightened before we can be unenlightened, because perfect unenlightenment includes the realizations and the union one finds in the oneness of enlightenment, where everything vanishes and there is just essence.

Without that, certainly rivers are rivers and mountains are mountains, but a river is a river over there and a mountain is a mountain over there, and one is oneself, here; everything is still separate. But in the final realization that things are just as they are, one is totally with them in an organic way and not just through the consciousness. The realization is that the One is not just one energy, one intelligence, one consciousness, but is also one body, one organic body. And then we are as ordinary as the trees, the flowers, the birds, the streams, and want for nothing more.

A Christian theologian named Alan Keightley writes:

It is not today either a respectable or a popular notion that to be aware of simple reality is ecstasy.

This is not respectable or popular, because for a Christian it breaks down the separation between God and man: only from God in Christ can one receive salvation. But if one can find ecstasy through union with ordinary reality, then where are prayer, devotion, self-sacrifice? Where is bowing down to the Lord, and where are the priests?

So it is not popular, but it is a fact, that in returning to ordinary unenlightened reality, the very flavour of life itself is ecstasy.

Here is J. Krishnamurti again:

A sense of immense and measureless strength. Not the strength that will or desire has put together, but the strength that is in a river, in a mountain, in a tree. It is man when every form of desire and will have completely ceased. It has no value, no profit for a human being, but without it, the human being is not; nor the tree.

There is a sense of immense and measureless strength, because one is united again with the organic reality of livingness; not the great power of ‘I will’ or I ‘want’, not the power of ‘I can’, which can be wiped away by defeat, frustration, lack of co-operation, sickness - but the immense and measureless strength that is in a stream, in a mountain, in the thrust of life itself, which has been running through the cosmos for around sixteen billion years, giving birth to uncountable stars and cosmic activities. To be connected again to that strength, as it is appropriate to human beings - the quality of original, primal power, available in one, playing in one, living through one - this is the ordinary, natural state.

To find that and reunite with it one has to return to the cosmos, and to return to the cosmos one has to let go of oneself. We have to enter the moment, however that happens to be for us. It will not be just a harmonious beat of the cosmos, because one is travelling towards that and is not there yet. Pain, anguish, frustration, anger, hurt, hopelessness, disaster - these are all energies, and one has to enter them, and remember that all around us is the totality of which we are a part and yet have become separated from.

The absolute, undeniable, discoverable truth is that there is no separation between any living thing and all that is life, all that exists. To become separated is to be in pain, in perpetual suffering on one level or another, because unity is our source, our destiny. Both the original source and the final destiny are the same: a unity with that which we are and always have been, but have lost because we have each spun off into a separate cosmos. We are spin-offs, and therefore we have lost our roots. We have all lost our roots.

Those roots are not in our super-consciousness, they are not in the depths of our beautiful hearts - though we like to think they are sometimes - and they are not in our understanding or our intelligence. Those roots are in the organic reality of life itself in all its manifestations, and all those manifestations are really just one and the same. One can identify so many different aspects, so many different manifestations - all unique, all specific; but in the event, it is the same for all.

Anything less than the completion of that journey is a failure; not from the point of view of our human nature, but from the point of view of our final destiny.

That is the ultimate work: a reunion with the organic reality of all living things, a disappearance of the separate self, and a joining of the one dance of all cosmic life in our own perfect, unique, individual style.

That style will still be there. Every tree is different, every leaf, every snow flake - what then to say about something as organically complex and manifold as the human species? Of course that style will be delightfully original, while still being part of the one; not distinct, but hand-in-glove.

From “One”, 1997.