The human mind has infinite capacity. Our actions can range, on the one hand, from being inconsiderate to others, producing weapons, engaging in criminal activities, or waging war to, on the other hand, being considerate, seeing others as no higher or lower than ourselves, engaging in ethical conduct, and working for peace. We can prioritize division, fight for a company, party, nation, or harden our views on border disputes. We can focus equally on going beyond borders, working on climate and other environmental issues, and world peace. Our attention to borders could be through working with organizations such as Doctors Without Borders or by helping refugees.
Diversity is what characterizes us all. We can define ourselves by our gender, race, nationality, religion, sexual preference, family, organizations, possessions, profession, ideology, political inclination, locality, hobby, what we want to do in life, our physical conditions—the list goes on. It is essential to recognize and honor the diversity of us all and act accordingly. However, if we merely abide in our differences, we become narrow-minded and shortsighted.
Poetry can make us patriotic or ethnocentric, but it can also liberate us from our perception of the world as divided. On the other hand, in your creative imagination, the infinite capacity of the mind manifests as you become a bird, a frog, or an angel. You can make flowers bloom, create an oasis, or let a mountain walk. You can be far away in the distance, in the past, or in the future. You can be inclusive of time, whole of space.
Contemplation or meditation brings us to the deepest part of our consciousness where we humans are not divided—we are one mind. Larry Dossey suggests in his groundbreaking book One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters, “All minds are already connected nonlocally as a unitary whole.” Unfortunately, not many of us are aware of it. Yet we are one mind through the collective consciousness.
The lives of people are also intricately connected—intimately or remotely. If we were to look at ourselves from a faraway star, we would see we are certainly all-connected as one living system. After all, we all begin as just a few number of cells in our earliest stages of life. Thus, we are one life.
This experience of oneness is a part of different spiritual traditions, particularly mysticism. Certainly in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, this perspective is the essential part of teachings. This view of nonseparation may be called the nonduality that transcends all differentiations and sees all things as one.
For example, the Heart Sutra, the most widely recited scripture in Mahayana Buddhism, presents the teaching of freedom from all differentiations that come from our normal perception and discernment. The sutra encourages us to see all things as empty of divisions and without boundary (which is the Buddhist notion of what “emptiness” means). In my book The Heart Sutra, I suggest that what is commonly called nonduality actually means nonplurality and should instead be called “singularity.”
I talked about my apprehension about the word “nonduality” at a Science and Nonduality Conference in California. At any rate, it is notable that a number of scientists are looking at “nonduality” as a way to experience ultimate reality. For example, Robert Wolfe asserts in his book, Science of the Sages: Scientists Encountering Nonduality from Quantum Physics to Cosmology to Consciousness, “Whether one looks out at the mysteries of a vast cosmos or narrows the view to the counterintuitive behavior of a subatomic particle, I would not be alone in maintaining that nonduality is the basic principle that explains the Whole.”
If we climb on a deep mountain or walk in a large field, we realize that we are an extra-tiny part of the vast planet and that nature belongs to none of us. Instead, we belong to an incredible world. We are all one world.
The realization of oneness does not mean we should ignore or belittle our normal perceptions and discernment of things that are diverse. The difference between long and short, momentary and timeless, right and wrong, life and death, are crucial in our daily lives. All things have boundaries, and if we ignore them, we may be gravely mistaken or unethical. Oneness and manyness are equally essential to our daily lives.
If we see all lives and the entire world as one, we can be open to experiencing other people—including so-called “enemies”—as not separate from ourselves. We will see people in the future as important as ourselves. We will conceive of other species and nonsentient beings as not separate from us.
Consciously or unconsciously, many of us who work for the environment and for peace are conducting our personal and social actions based on this “one life, one world” paradigm. That means the conversation on this theme needs to be expanded and elaborated.