ALL OF EXISTENCE IS GOD,
INCLUDING THE ONE THAT RECOGNIZES THAT.
Have you ever noticed that when you explore the truth of one thing, you run into the truth of everything? In the conceptual mind this seems like a mystical insight, and sometimes it is—truth can come to us as a revelation. But it is also true, at least to a lesser degree, if we bring our intelligence and conceptual mind to bear upon how interconnectedness is a living fact. This is not a clever idea, it is not a spiritual idea, and it is not even a spiritual thing, but it is the way existence is. Just as there is no such thing as a tree without its environment, there is no human being without the rest of existence. Our abstract definition of what a body is does not include the earth, the sky, the wind, the rain, and the oxygen, but if we deprive ourselves of any of those things, we will not exist. Take the sun away, and you will not exist. Take oxygen away, even for only a few minutes, and we will be gone, not only because we need oxygen, but also because we are oxygen.
I know that for some people this is difficult to understand even on a conceptual level, because we are taught to think of each thing as separate from all the other things. But without all the elements of this earth, there is no human being. The earth manifests itself as a human being, and the human being is the earth. Furthermore, there is no earth without the galaxy. I recently learned that scientists have discovered we have about ten times more galaxies in the cosmos than previously thought; they now estimate there to be a trillion galaxies. A trillion. To cross the Milky Way would take untold light-years, and there are a trillion of these things. It is overwhelming how massive, how expansive, and how wondrous the cosmos is. That is awe-inspiring when you let it sink in.
It takes all those universes to create one you, because without them, you would not be. Without this cosmos, there would be no human being. Our thought breaks the world into pieces, and that is fine. That is not a criticism of thought, because that is all thought can do: it must break the world into pieces, and then it can reassemble those pieces like a computer does. Although remember that computers did not exist until there was a mind that could conceptually tear the world apart, configure it in different and unique ways, and create a new piece of technology called a computer with which to reassemble the pieces.
We do this with language, with concepts, and with ideas.
The ability to conceptualize, have ideas, and see how they impose a separation upon existence that is not inherent to existence has a utilitarian purpose, but that does not mean that the way concepts break the world into pieces and describe the pieces as independently existing is true about existence itself. Everything is interconnected, even if we tend to think of the world as a bunch of separate things.
We are not only interconnected, though interconnectedness is the best way to describe the experience of seeing how our concept of things, our idea of things, and our definition of things interconnect with one another. Going even deeper than that, we can say that things do not interconnect with one another—they are one another. That is the deeper understanding, yet it is still a surface comprehension of unity. This truth is in plain sight; we do not need extraordinary intelligence to see it. We live so much in the world of concepts that we forget that they are dividing something apart that is indivisible, that our concepts are in disagreement with the actual direct perception of things, and that we have come so far into the conceptual realm that we stop experiencing and perceiving things directly. This is a big part of what enlightenment is: the ability to perceive directly, without looking through a lens of concepts or ideas. Awakening is when we finally experience our being without the interface of any conceptual understanding. What we wake up from is the conceptual world.
Do not worry. Once you wake up from this, it is not like you lose language or you cannot use concepts anymore. Instead, you may begin to live and perceive from a different state of being and a different state of consciousness than one that is defined through conceptual understanding. This is what spiritual inquiry is for—we use ideas and questions like “What am I?” or “Who am I?” and start to see that if we take any single concept or group of concepts, we do not find any self in them. We might instead realize that the truth of our being is not defined by any concept, and if we do see that, we will have an awakening, which feels like we woke up from a dream. That is because we did! We woke up from the living dream of perceiving everything through the conceptual mind.
This conceptual mind is a storyteller. Our description of anything is a narrative; it is not exactly the way things are in direct perception or direct experience. It is good to explore the nature of ideas and concepts, the structure of language, and what effect language has upon our minds and upon the way we perceive and experience life. Until we can see that, we are perceiving and experiencing life through the whole host of concepts and ideas that we have, and there is little hope of waking up and of perceiving the reality of you or anybody or anything else beyond concepts or ideas. But waking up does not mean you do not have ideas, and it does not mean you cannot employ them for creative and practical purposes; it means that your sense of reality is no longer held hostage to them. This is how spiritual teachings guide us into the unknown.
Many different esoteric teachings and religions talk about the great unknown, and as seekers we often try to think of it as being like a place, perhaps an interior place, called “The Unknown,” because we think we are referring to nothing more than an idea. That is an incomplete understanding: the unknown is a way of describing the direct experience of each instant instead of through the indirect, distorting mechanism of thought. When we are not experiencing and perceiving each moment through the distorting lens of thought, we are having a direct experience of what is. Then and only then do we experience absolute unity and absolute oneness—the whole world is one’s own being and all of existence is God, including the one who recognizes that.
The most rational and powerful place to start is with yourself. Perceive the moment and yourself outside of any concept, outside of any idea, outside of story, outside of memory, and outside of narrative. When you do, all the distortions can stop, and with them “you”—the “you” who has been defined in memory and concepts and ideas—stop too. For some people, this is frightening to contemplate, because their “self” is the only self they have ever known, and they believe it is the only self there ever is. If it is all imagined, then when we stop imagining it, it is not there. However, whatever we are is still here, but no longer defined or experienced through mind, concepts, and ideas.
The challenge of any inner form of spiritual work is not perceiving through the mind, concepts, ideas, memory, beliefs, or opinion. All that takes thought, and we exist whether there is thought or not. Remember, the reality of anything is not the idea we have of anything—including yourself, including the world, including others, and including God. The idea that you have of any of those things is not what they are; it is an idea. What are any of those, what are you, your neighbor, your friend, what is the world, what is existence, without reference to a single thought? If you keep looking for a complementary thought, you will be confused, but if you let it go, you will come into (at least for a moment) a place where it is all unknown. You will not know who you are anymore, and you will not know who your friend is or your neighbor is. You will not know what the world is, because you are not looking for the mind to give you a conceptual representation of any of those things. You have arrived at something more than a representation—at something real.
The real is not to be found in a representation, but it is to be found directly—immediately before thought. Then we can employ thought all we want, because thought can be what it is: a tool. Every one of the words on this page stands for something that is not the word, and it is the same with thoughts. Some thoughts represent things—a thought tree represents a tree, and a thought person represents a human being—but a human being is not the thought person any more than a tree is the thought tree. When we start to suspend the mind, we see that thought may be useful—even creative at times—but it is not going to show us what anything truly is. Then we have the potential to directly perceive existence and our being. That is where awakening can occur.
Even when we have awakened, we must be careful not to start believing the thoughts we have about our awakening. Here it gets tricky. Some people awaken and start thinking, Well, I am awakened; therefore what I think is true. That is a truly ridiculous statement. Some thoughts may be more exact representations of reality than others, and all thoughts are not equally untrue. Some are closer to the truth, some are further away, some have nothing to do with it, and some do not even represent anything except other thoughts. So, lest we continue to live until our last breath in what amounts to a conceptual, abstract world—a world that is representative rather than real—we must break out of that. When we do, it feels extraordinary, like, Aha! I may have a history, I may have those thoughts, I may have representations, and I may have images of the past and the present moment, but those are not what I am. They do not define me. They can never be big enough to capture the reality of anything. It is said the thought water is not going to quench your thirst, no matter how sophisticated your understanding of that thought is.
The thought is not the thing that it represents. Try to get that right down to your core, right down to the marrow in your bones and into the blood that flows through your veins: the thought is not the thing. Then embrace that intermediary step of unknowing things, and as you enter the unknown, you’ll see it is not a place; it is the living reality of things underneath the idea of the unknown. The point is not to spend the rest of your life saying, “I do not know” to everything; it is to step out of the known and directly perceive. You do this by entering the lived reality of not knowing, which takes you out of the known, out of the idea and to the reality of you, of anything, and of anyone. It’s a place where words are useful tools, but you are no longer trapped by them.