The wisdom teachers of history have been right all along: We can’t solve our most persistent problems or gain liberation from suffering as long as we stay in the same frame of mind that generated our trouble in the first place.
That frame of mind, the teachers tell us, perceives Reality through the lens of cómponence – my word, not theirs. It’s actually a neologism (a “new word”), as far as I can tell. The accent on the first syllable is intended to distinguish it in speech from the plural of “component,” referring to a part or piece in some larger array of parts.
As a noun, cómponence describes reality in terms of what it’s made of – the countless components that sit and swirl about, colliding or skirting each other on their various trajectories through space-time.
Western science has made cómponence the central dogma of its theoretical paradigm. Each thing, whether atom, organism, planet, or galaxy, is a part of some larger organization of similar things, all coexisting in a system. But also, each thing is itself a system or composition of smaller things. The cosmos can conceivably be analyzed into smaller and smaller units, right down to those quirky quarks deep inside the atom. Keep splitting things apart and you’ll find more things inside.
This culturally conditioned habit of perceiving Reality exclusively through the lens of cómponence is where our problems and suffering really lie, according to the wisdom teachers.
My diagram situates the cómponent realm within a larger frame that will help us gain liberation from many of its traps and troubles. Let’s keep our attention on this “middle realm” for a bit longer, using politics as our filter on the lens. American politics happens to be highly polarized at the moment, with Republicans and Democrats – but currently more on the Republican side – seeking to uproot and destroy their political opponents.
The very concept of an “opponent” only has meaning inside a theoretical paradigm of cómponence.
Here we have two (or more) things standing apart from each other, a Republican and a Democrat, each centered in an identity claiming “for” some things and “against” others. Yes, each of them can be analyzed in terms of class, gender, age, character, personality, temperament, race, biology, chemistry, and physics – the many components they contain and what science might invoke to explain what kinds of things they are.
Once upon a time, “Republican” and “Democrat” were understood as two opposing identities that represented two distinct political philosophies, two distinct sets of beliefs and values concerning how a free society should be governed. Their opposition was enjoined in the spirit of debate, negotiation, and compromise for the good of the commonwealth and “a more perfect union” – not a zero-sum combat for unilateral defeat and annihilation, as what it has devolved into lately.
When our minds are locked into cómponence, the competition between Republicans and Democrats can occlude our vision of their possible cooperation, even though cooperation among separate identities is perfectly aligned with the worldview of cómponence.
More realistically, that’s likely what the founders of American democracy had in mind to begin with: a productive competition of opposing views and values, on a political playing field governed by the rules of cooperation.
Just as with American politics, the oppositional dynamic in cómponence can quickly devolve into a campaign of mutual annihilation. This is partly because the separate identities involved are themselves somewhat unstable constellations of personality components. Each Republican or Democrat is in some degree motivated out of insecurity, craving, ambition, conviction and ignórance (willful ignorance) to defend and gain a win for their position.
Beating the other and driving them off-stage – preferably into extinction, since it would make things easier going forward – quickly becomes their raison d’être (reason for being).
The wisdom teachers would not necessarily argue that cómponence – or in terms more consistent with their message, the realm of separation and duality – is bad or wrong, or even that it’s an illusion, although a few traditions take that tack. At the very least they would assert that cómponence is not an exhaustive account of Reality.
For one thing, there is at the root of all things something that is no thing. Variously named No Thing or nothingness, the grounding mystery of Being or being-itself, this is the principle of essence – again, not a thing but the power of being (Greek esse) in all things. Out of its mystery, Being differentiates into beings to become the cómponent realm of “ten thousand things” (as the ancient Chinese wisdom tradition speaks of it).
Everything in existence is the manifestation of this essence, which is something Western science also confirms, although its commitment to the theoretical paradigm of cómponence has historically prevented it from crossing the threshold into what can’t be named or known.
Quantum physics has intrigued and confounded us with its paradoxes of particles and waves, forms and fields, complementarity and uncertainty, “something” which is no thing that is somehow the ground of all things. Nonetheless, science being science, it cannot restrain the compulsion to dig deeper into this ground in search of more things inside.
This addition of essence to the objective realm of cómponence is still not yet a comprehensive account of Reality, according to the wisdom teachings. Seeing our Republican and Democrat each as a manifestation of a grounding mystery that lies deep within, and far below, the identities they obsess over confirms that at some level they are not really separate – or even all that different.
Behind their party masks and political uniforms, they are both human manifestations of Being.
But we need to see them both as participating in something greater as well – not merely something larger (a scale of cómponence), but a higher wholeness that includes them in its More. We’re talking about the 1+1=3 dynamic of consilience, the exponential process of two or more things becoming One, where the case change indicates a leap to a higher order of communion and complexity.
Our concepts of “community” and “universe” carry this notion of consilience that inexplicably transforms the many into One. The many on their own spontaneously come together as One.
As human beings possessed of spiritual intelligence, it’s almost certain that the founders of American democracy had this consilient idea of higher wholeness in the back of their minds as they envisioned “a more perfect union.” A healthy democracy thrives on the diversity of its citizens, including their energetic debates over how best to co-create and manage a nation that can include everyone.
Tracts of Revolution 