Check this out. Everything around you includes you in its higher wholeness, and what is within you grounds you in deeper oneness. Harmony and communion are the special terms designating these distinct dimensions of Reality – around and including you, within and grounding you.
The concept of harmony requires you to be centered in yourself. It’s from your center that you can connect and interact with other centered beings. Just as the harmony of an orchestra is only possible as each individual instrument contributes its own sound to the symphony, harmony as a concept of wisdom spirituality acknowledges the critical importance of being yourself as you participate in the higher wholeness that includes you.
Communion is a deep-within concept rather than an all-around one. The com- (with) still centers you in yourself, but the -union is where distinctions begin to dissolve away. To speak of it in terms of oneness instead of wholeness is to put the accent on a more essential Reality, like that of an ocean beneath the waves, rising into their myriad forms and receiving them back again.
In wisdom spirituality, communion refers not to your relationship with something else (another “wave”) but rather to the “ocean” of Being that rises into the person you are – material, organic, sentient, self-conscious (egoic) – and receives you back again in each moment of your existence.
So if you are included in higher wholeness and grounded in deeper oneness, why are the experiences of harmony and communion so vanishingly rare and seemingly impossible to sustain?
The answer is not that there is something wrong with you, or even that you are all that unusual. If we should pin the reason on the psychological fact of your ego-centered identity, we need to be careful not to make ego into an enemy. Neither good nor bad in itself, your ego is a necessary achievement in your development as a person with freedom and agency.
Working to suppress the ego, to hogtie or otherwise limit its critical function of centering and managing your personality and behavior, ends up pushing normal development into disorders of various kinds.
If you occasionally (or frequently, even chronically) feel separated from the harmony and communion of Reality, what you need is not deliverance but understanding. Indeed, a major theme in wisdom spirituality is focused on seeing – really seeing, with insight – the truth of your situation; taking your view from the position of “standing under” it.
The illustration above plays on the sound-alike phonemes “eye” and “I” (ego) in order to bring this truth into focus. The open eye inserts a division in Reality between above and below, which translates for the self-conscious ego into what’s “around me” and what’s “within myself.” It should be obvious that without the eye/”I”, these distinctions wouldn’t exist and there would only be What Is – with no angle of perspective or context of vision.
The split in Reality between “around me” and “within myself” is actually a delusion of your self-conscious ego. Remove that eye/”I” from the field, and the distinctions of around and within immediately disappear. Without a separate center of self-conscious personal identity (ego), there is no “me” from which point everything not-me can be regarded as surrounding (and including) “me.” Just as obvious, without an “I” to take in the subjective line of view, consciousness is without a position from which it might contemplate the grounding mystery within (manifesting as) “my self.”
It is given this dual vision of your ego – out and around to the harmony of higher wholeness, down and within to the communion of deeper oneness – that we are justified in calling it a “necessary delusion.”
The worldwide spiritual wisdom traditions collectively known as Sophia Perennis or the Perennial Philosophy have long maintained that your separate center of self-conscious personal identity is a critical stage in the fuller journey of human evolution. If ego’s developmental achievement has introduced the risk – or rather, the likelihood – of humans experiencing insecurity, alienation, loneliness, and estrangement, the remedy of what the religions call “salvation” will not come about by ego-annihilation or supernatural rescue.
Only as the delusion of your separateness is understood, and then used as a platform from which consciousness can drop-and-dive into deeper oneness, or leap-and-fly into higher wholeness, is your true healing (salvus) even possible. It’s neither in deliverance nor renunciation that human fulfillment and the liberated life are to be found, but only as your ego is sufficiently fit to facilitate the inward drop and outward leap of consciousness.
The power of delusion is ended in the very moment of understanding.
This dual vision and strategy in the practice of spirituality form the major plotline (Greek mythos) of Sophia Perennis. Its wisdom and guidance have helped many millions of people around the world just like you, and over many centuries.
The truth of its teaching is nothing esoteric, if by that we are referring to the secret knowledge of an elite illuminati dressed in robes and chanting liturgies by the glow of candlelight. But neither is it summed up and cataloged in the orthodoxies of popular religion, where right belief is sold (quite literally) as the ticket to heaven.
There is no need to join a religion or believe in a god. The purpose and goal of spirituality, if it can even be said to have a purpose and goal, is to fully awaken to the magnificent mystery of being alive.
With a deep refreshing inhale, gather your focus to a self-conscious center – but don’t grab on. Feel the lifeforce rise in your body; let your senses touch the infinite horizon of all things. From your center of “I,” exhale and let awareness drop away, sliding gently into the communion of deeper oneness.
Down here in the grounding mystery of Being, the surface distinctions of your identity have completely dissolved away and there is only This.
Words lose their definition, thoughts unwind, and “the thinker” is perfectly still.
Take in another slow, deep breath. Now place your intention in the toe-hold of the present moment and let awareness rise up, out, and beyond the “I,” as if on wings, into the harmony of higher wholeness. Up here in the universal order of beings, you are included and belong – not for who you are or what you bring, but just because that is the Way (Tao in Chinese).
How about that? The long journey to becoming somebody special, with all its twists, turns, and setbacks, has harbored the inner aim of helping you eventually get over yourself.
Are you ready?
Tracts of Revolution 