Oneness, separation and awakening

Don’t take this blog post seriously - it’s just me speculating out loud about a more universal context for awakening experiences.

So imagine:

You are the universe / everything that is / infinite mind / God / the Tao (take your pick).

You wonder about your potential.

To find out, you create levels or layers of yourself.

You finally explode into physical form in the singularity that will eventually be known as the ‘Big Bang’.

Every level is a manifestation of your being and awareness.

At the densest level there is enough consciousness to experience, but this level is so dense that the life forms you manifest come to experience themselves as separate entities that are alone and unsure about where they came from.

You (still oneness) are aware of that experience.

Some of these life forms notice that, when they look inside themselves, they can catch glimpses of their origin.

In other words, you created a mirror and looked at yourself.

Now you are one and also not one.

Now what?

In this view, the awakening process can be seen as movement in the direction of oneness.

“Although all dualities come from the One,

do not be attached even to this One.”

This quote is from the poem ‘Hsin Hsin Ming’ by Seng T’san, who lived in the sixth century and was the third Chinese patriarch of Zen. The poem blends Buddhist and Taoist teachings. The whole poem can be found at https://zenmoments.org/hsin-hsin-ming-the-great-way/

Bibliography

Blyth, R. H. (1960). Zen and Zen classics, Volume 1, From the Upanishads to Huineng. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press.

Key words

awakening, enlightenment, oneness, individuality, duality, divinity, everything, God, Tao,

Image

Great Malvern as seen from the Waitrose supermarket car park. 

Great Malvern is on the side of a hill so on some misty days you can walk downhill and not see a thing, or walk uphill into sunlight.