Is There One or Many? Yes!
Saturday, 19 June 2010 14:50
I received the following question via email:
I am reading, for the second time, "Living from the Heart" and still do not understand something about aware space. I understand that who I really am is aware space and not my body, mind and personality. But when there is another person here, they most likely know me as a body, mind and personality. When I am with another person I also am relating to their body mind and personality because that is in my awareness. It seems very contradictory. Can you explain it better? Thank you.
Here is how I responded:
Sorry to take so long to get back to you.
Your question is a very good one. It possibly boils down to the question: is there one awareness or many? And the answer is yes! There is one awareness acting and appearing as many.
The mind does not understand when two apparently opposite things are both true, but it turns out that oneness and multiplicity are not really opposites. They are different qualities or expressions of one thing. The simplest example is your own hand. It has many fingers and yet is also one thing. The many fingers are one expression or aspect of your hand, but the oneness of the hand as a whole is another quality or dimension of the same thing. This metaphor is explored more fully in the article on this site about advaita and oneness available here.
We can experience the obvious uniqueness of our own individual perspective as you described, and we can also directly experience the deeper truth of oneness. Like all deeper truths the experience of oneness is more subtle and yet also more universal or ever present. This makes it more challenging to directly experience oneness, in part because it is such a subtle thing to experience, and yet also in part because oneness is always here in every moment, and so we tend to overlook it. This is similar to the way we do not often consciously notice the air we breathe because we are so used to it that we have learned to take it for granted.
So you can experience that you have an individual body, mind and personality and you can even enjoy the appearance of other unique people with their own perspective. But this does not need to contradict the sense you also have that you are ultimately aware space. The source of awareness is truly infinite in its potential. It creates everything that exists, and one thing it seems to love to create is this experience of individuality. I would also invite you to read the fairy tale at the end of my free ebook, Beyond No Self, which you can read online here or alternatively you can download the PDF ebook here. The ebook ends with a fanciful story about how oneness manages to appear as many, and offers a perspective that suggests every apparent individual is also infinite in potential. That is the great thing about infinity: every part of infinity can also be infinite!
I hope this is helpful.
0 Comments