Johan Ibrahim Adrián

How To Master The Principle of Oneness ​ ​ "Out of discord comes the fairest harmony." ​ - Heraclitus To understand Oneness, you must first recognize and internalize duality, and this might not be an evident part of your reality until you stop to think about it and realize how deeply it defines everything you (think you) are. Where do you start tracing the line that divides you from the others? How do you reconcile the apparently objective existence of material objects and your very real subjective and individual interpretation of reality? How do you interpret the ontological reality of being “you”? You may not have noticed it at a conscious level, but every time you say “I,” you negate the others by direct opposition: “I” is that which is not “you”. Therefore, you are you ( notice how convoluted the trap of language has already become), as long as you are not “I”. We define our reality through language, and it’s language itself that gives birth to the very experience of becoming humans. “In the beginning was the verb” resounds differently if you consider it from this perspective. In the immortal words of Lao Tse: “When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad. Being and non-being create each other.” Language saves us from the void of psychological confinement and even physical isolation, but then immediately becomes the starting point for duality. ​ If one wishes to master this Principle of Oneness, one must understand the road humanity has walked up to this point. We need to create an all-encompassing approach that understands the way to “The One” in all its implications while, at the same time, opening our minds to possibilities beyond the orthodox constraints of traditional Western religions and interpretations. If there is one “Ultimate Truth,” then we can be sure of finding its bits and pieces scattered all around different doctrines and interpretations of both the spiritual and the material worlds. What is Oneness? Oneness is a rich and inevitably diverse concept, with several different meanings and interpretations in various cultures and disciplines. It expresses the idea of fundamental unity, wholeness, and interconnectedness of all things. It implies that behind the apparent diversity and multiplicity of the world and its people, there is a fundamental unity that connects all things. But is Oneness something a person can “achieve” or “obtain”? Your answer basically depends on your understanding and level of application of the interdependence of all things. You see, classically, we have dealt with three main visions regarding the interdependence of different identities: the monist, the dualist, and the non-dualist visions. The Monist Vision talks about one great unitary myth, a single and monolithic thought that excludes and denies all differences and reduces existence to a set of plain and analogous beings lacking any nuances. We can see it as a rather totalitarian explanation of identity and reality in which “I am me, you are me, everything is me, everything must be as I say.” It is the part trying to impose over the whole. Monism also can see interdependence in an authoritarian way: “There is no me or you, there’s only the common cause, the relationship, The Sum. In this view, it’s the whole that tries to impose over the parts, denying them and repressing them in the process. It’s not very difficult to see how this approach has led humanity toward totalitarian ideologies and regimes in several human spheres of nationalism, religion, politics, and even personal relationships. This is a vision destined to conflict because it’s bound to enter into direct competition with other monist visions that differ from itself. It’s a mindset incapable of managing differences and used to active coercion and power abuse. By this point, you should have understood that this is not a sustainable way to achieve Oneness or unity. Enter the second approach, the Dualist Vision. Dualism is so ingrained in our Western minds that it’s almost the root of our complete thought process. It inevitably leaks over every concept and model of the world we have created and followed through the centuries. Dualism is based on direct oppositions, or, more accurately, inversions of the concepts that shape our approach to reality: it refers to the ultimate myth of “Good” versus “Evil”, “right” versus “wrong”, matter versus spirit, and the complete irreconcilability of the opposites. Duality is, in short, the cult of difference, the origin of the fear of “what I’m not” or “what I do not understand”, the triumph of radical oppositionism as a categorizing principle of our psyche.​ Oneness is not even achievable through classical dualism, as it divides all aspects of reality into opposing categories, starting with the categorizing individuals themselves: it’s a big wall between “us” and “them”, an unsalvageable trench that screams there is no place for unity or even interrelation and leads humanity toward segregation and differentiation. In the dualist vision, interdependence is interpreted as “I am me, you are you, therefore there is an oppositional relationship between the two of us.” Interdependence, seen like this, can lead to situations of exploitation, tension, conflict, and even war between opposites. That’s how we arrive at the third and final variant: The Non-dualist Vision. To understand this vision, we can compare it to the first ones we talked about. As the Monist Vision tries to reduce the two (the difference) to one by the use of brute force and negation, and The Dualist Vision is incapable of obtaining harmony as it gets stuck in the differences, The Non-Dualist vision embraces that difference in a unity not imposed but recognized and accepted (and even sought) by all parties who identify themselves as non-dual. Instead of separating the one and the two, non-dualism solves the question with the non-two. ​ Now we can see that, in this vision, Independence means “I am me, you are you, and we are us, at the same time, in an indivisible way”. Now, interdependence is seen as Ubuntu, the ancient Swahili word often translated as “I am what I am because of who we all are. This means that the separation between different things and beings is not real or is a result of our limited perception. This view stresses the underlying unity of existence, saying that all things are fundamentally interconnected and have a common essence. ​ This path to Oneness doesn’t mean that one thing needs the other to be; instead, it means that “You are me and I am you without the need for any of us to stop being ourselves.” This logic not only includes the monistic and dualistic vision of the whole, the Absolute, or even that which some may call “God”, but it includes and transcends them. This has long been the vision accepted by Eastern practices such as Advaita Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism. Walking The Path to Oneness The path to Oneness has been intuited by many cultures throughout history, not just on the Eastern side of the world. At the very beginning of the Archaic Age, the Hellenic Culture gave us some of its last bits of knowledge amidst the ongoing erasure of traditions perpetrated by the adoption of the new Christian faith in the form of their Orphic Hymns. In them, the great poet and singer Orpheus taught a new religion that talked about the immortality of the human soul and its journey after death. In these hymns, we can find the Hellenic mind bending toward the recognition of The Principle of Oneness: “He is the One begotten by Himself, from whom all things proceed and in them He acts. No mortal sees it, but He sees it all.” If you think about it, this isn’t but a sort of anthropomorphized expansion of the notorious maxim from the Upanishads, “Tat Tvam Asi” or “You are that,” which condenses the relationship between the individual and the Absolute. A relationship that tells us all the separation between us (and even between us and that) is an illusion. All variations of being are but different points in the same universal scale. Again, language seems insufficient when trying to convey a clear representation of this “One” or “Absolute”, so we can argue that the terms “Oneness”, “Self”, “Absolute”, and “Being” are to be understood interchangeably as we found them scattered through several practices around our world and history. We can find another notorious example going back to the Greeks, where we find the great philosopher Parmenides, probably the first Western thinker to philosophically express a non-dual vision of all that is. For Parmenides, Being and existence are one and the same. Being is everything that Is, and everything that Is is Being. There has never been nor can there be anything that is not Being, since the existence of “non-existence” is a contradiction in itself. What “is” and what “is not” are always concepts relative to the forms of manifestation, but never to Being itself. But the idea of a non-dual vision seems to be a monumental contradiction in itself, the ultimate paradox. It is the final metaphor, the ultimate symbol at the edge of language, the metaphor that goes beyond metaphors. Because the non-dual is not a vision or a map, no matter how wide, deep, or accurate it may be. The non-dual is, simply, everything that exists. ​ ​ The human mind cannot reach true knowledge or understanding of the non-dual through language, since language is only a small part of that whole, and its very structure, as we saw in the beginning when we quoted Lao Tse's Words from the Tao Te Ching, is based on duality. This implies that every human attempt to consciously explain the Absolute is, as we have seen through this journey, doomed to be an incomplete one, a mere local snapshot of an unfathomable, infinite picture. Religiously and spiritually, embracing The Principle of Oneness can be seen as the path toward a deep spiritual experience, reaching a state of being in which one goes beyond the boundaries of individual consciousness and sees the interconnectedness of all creation. This experience is often described as a feeling of unity, love, and profound peace. You may have heard it as “awakening.” That’s even what we are saying when we refer to The Buddha, whose real name was Siddharta Gautama. “Buddha” is actually a title meaning “The Enlightened One” or “The Awakened One.” The practice of Zen meditation (which is said to have driven the Buddha to his final awakening), coming from a Buddhist variant that appeared in the fifth century BCE, can provide great help in this regard. Through the practice of Zen meditation, for example, many individuals can get to the bottom of their own identity, and their true nature as conscious beings, and discover for themselves that, beyond the apparent difference in identities, we all form part of the same Non-dual Reality. Realizing the interdependence of all things and beings under the scheme of a non-dual reality and truly opening and dissecting our own sense of “self” is one path to embracing the Principle of Oneness. On the other hand, if you aim toward the material side of reality, Oneness is sometimes used scientifically to describe the fundamental unity of the material universe and its governing laws, suggesting that all matter, energy, and space-time are ultimately interconnected and follow a single set of rules. This view agrees with the idea that the universe is not a collection of separate objects, but rather a unified, interdependent whole. Even when mainstream science hasn’t made any actual definitive connections with the spiritual views of Oneness, we can clearly see how it has naturally followed the path traced by the aforementioned visions, and it’s currently heading toward a growing need for unification (which is only another word for Oneness). Physics tries to create a theory of everything, an explanation of material existence based on a “unified field” that gives birth to everything we can know and perceive, including both material reality and consciousness. Finally, artistically and creatively, the Principle of Oneness is also seen as a source of inspiration and a way of expressing the profound interconnectedness of all things. Artists and creatives often explore the concept of Oneness through their work, trying to convey a sense of unity, harmony, and shared humanity in their creations. Poetry, cinema, painting, and the rest of the arts tend to take the introspection route, advancing beyond the superficial reality of things (and being itself) as they try to capture “the truth”, the reality “behind the veil”, the essence of what makes us sentient as we ride the waves of being. The concept of Oneness has a profound impact on our understanding of ourselves, our place in the universe, the place of the universe itself in existence, and our relationship with others. It challenges us to rethink our assumptions about separation and division and encourages us to recognize the underlying unity that connects all things. Ultimately, Oneness reminds us that we are all interconnected and that our actions have the potential to affect the whole of existence. Everything we do, however, as parts of the mystery trying to explain itself, gives us only a fraction of the puzzle. What exists cannot be fully known by any knower, since the knower is, in fact, only a part of the whole. Conclusion: Oneness and The Cosmos ​ Applying the Principle of Oneness at a global scale could lead to a material and experimental verification of truths intuited by many disciplines past their more dualist beginnings. Since the dawn of the twentieth century to this day, many modern scientists seem to have started to converge toward the recognition of the Principle of Oneness as they delve into the mysteries of nature and the universe. Sir Julian Huxley (British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist) once said that “evolution is nothing but matter becoming conscious”. It’s worth noting that even to this day it doesn’t seem to be a definitive explanation for the emergence of consciousness, but this view of it being the result of a process that encompasses the whole of nature has gained a lot of traction since Nikola Tesla declared: “My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.” Isn’t just that what Oneness is all about? “Penetrating the secrets of the core”. If you care to follow the interchangeability of words we proposed when we talked about the limitations of language, you can easily identify that “core” with the so-called “Absolute”, “Truth”, or “Enlightenment” we have been chasing as the underlying reality behind The Principle of Oneness. The English physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson wrote: “The more I explore the universe and the details of its design, the more proof I find that it must have somehow expected that we were coming.” This idea has been scientifically called the “anthropic principle,” and may show one of the closest conclusions of modern scientific thought to a non-dual philosophy of existence. The anthropic principle states that the human being can understand the universe that he is a part of (and even exists in it) because the nature and structure of the universe itself are designed for this to happen. Our cosmos, our solar system, our planet, and even the smallest physical constants that govern the laws of physics have many coincidences and factors that seem very specific and “fine-tuned” to allow our existence. They seem to have appeared in a mysteriously precise and adjusted way to create the conditions that would let intelligent life and higher consciousness come up in the future of its evolution: If any of the basic physical conditions or constants had changed even a little bit, life as we know it would not have been possible. So the question arises: isn’t it possible that the universe has been following the Principle of Oneness all along? If that’s the case, we, as inseparable bits of this ever-expanding fabric of reality, have not only the possibility but also the responsibility of following along and starting to walk The Path of convergence between the parts and the whole. We must go back to the words of Lao Tsu and stop trying to name The Tao for “the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao”.Instead, mastering The Principle of Oneness should consist of mastering every practice that drives us toward our true selves, the personal mystery that hides below all our ideologies, thoughts, and beliefs that we can identify as our “true self”. This “journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step,” and it could lead us to the ultimate understanding of every “I”, every “you”, and every inextricably intertwined “us” as a (perhaps) sacred, and interdependent bit of information comprising consciousness, Oneness, the universe, and ultimately everything that Is.