Let’s try this again.
You are a wave on the ocean of Being. Its essential mystery is rising into manifestation as you in this very moment. As it rises and becomes conscious in you, what you see looking around is a vast web of participation among countless other waves. By the principle of manifestation, the deeper oneness of oceanic mystery surfaces and “shows up” in each wave. And by the principle of participation, you coexist with all the other waves, interacting in a dynamic system of higher wholeness.
If those distinctions make sense to you – manifesting a deeper oneness, participating in higher wholeness – then you have grasped a crucial insight, really the crucial insight of spiritual wisdom. Everything else you may learn from the variety of world wisdom traditions will be provincial developments around this timeless shining truth.
There is a ground within you and a grandeur all around you. You stand on the threshold where these two dimensions of Reality meet.
More accurately, we should say that you – and every other wave on the ocean – is this threshold, for there is no “within” outside of any given wave.
Descending in awareness to the deeper oneness within yourself is known as grounding. Ascending in awareness to the higher wholeness all around and including you is called belonging. Grounding and belonging are two widely cultivated disciplines, or practices, of spirituality. Each practice opens a path – what the religions call the way of salvation: an inward path to solitude and an outward path to communion.
(Over time, many religions lost this throughline of human salvation, getting distracted by the prospect of surviving death and escaping a world regarded as fallen.)
Just as manifestation and participation are complementary principles, so are grounding and belonging complementary practices, and solitude and communion complementary pathways of spirituality – like the Yin and Yang of the eternal Tao that cannot be named. This system of principles, practices, and pathways serves as the framework of spiritual life and wisdom.
Regardless of what you believe about god and immortality – or whether you believe in such things at all – spirituality is your cultivated experience of life, of being alive, of simply being.
The illustration above displays with matching colored text these principles, practices, and pathways in their complementary pairs on either side of the threshold between the Reality within you (deeper oneness) and around you (higher wholeness). Positioned at its center and on the threshold is your ego – your locus of self-conscious identity, the “I” who occupies a particular vantage-point and does its best at managing the desires and demands of becoming somebody special.
If the crucial insight and shining truth of spiritual wisdom (characterized earlier) does not make sense to you, the likely reason is that you are so wrapped up in the ambition and anxiety of becoming somebody special, that you don’t have the mental bandwidth to take in much else besides.
We could – and I have, countless times! – go into the weeds of insecurity, attachment, ambition, and conviction where the neurotic ego spirals into itself. This spiral of anxiety and frustration toward an exhausted state of depression does not lead inward or within, to that dimension of deeper oneness accessed only through the spiritual practice of grounding. No, this neurotic spiral constricts and causes awareness to seize up, rather than facilitating its dropping open to the inner mystery of being-itself.
Because society is more or less the coordinated business of neurotic egos dividing into tribal sects and waging war on each other in the names of their respective idols of authority, the social system sponsoring your pursuit of identity is a major contributor to your suffering. This is due to the fact that becoming somebody special requires your full and unquestioned belief in duality (me or you, us versus them, this against that), as well as in the ultimacy of personality.
By that latter term is meant a worldview, ideology, and morality that regards personality as the highest aim and final goal of consciousness and life itself.
Theistic religion showcases the ultimacy of personality in its mythopoetic constructs of the many gods who walk through the holy scriptures, live in sacred temples, and watch from high heaven, trading protection and prosperity for the obedience and devotion of their devotees.
As carefully pointed out by the worldwide traditions of wisdom spirituality, this is the illusion each of us must break through, as we are grasped by the crucial insight and wake up to its shining truth. Indeed, you see everything as duality and through the colored lens of personality because that’s the only way your ego can apprehend and process experience.
Ego is, after all, the executive center of your unique (i.e., separate) personal identity. It stands alone, apart from everything not-me.
The remaining pair of terms in the illustration should now make perfect sense. Your lens of ego consciousness perceives only duality, but Reality in its deeper oneness is nondual (Sanskrit advaita, “not two”). Ego sees things through the filter of personality (memories, preferences, roles and beliefs), but Reality in its higher wholeness is transpersonal. Now, there have been entire philosophies built upon one or the other of these ideas, and often you may find one subsumed to the other, or the two ironically set in opposition and forcing a choice for one over the other.
It seems that the ego just can’t drop the game and get over itself.
On the vertical axis of our illustration is a figure-8, with its two loops in the dimensions of nondual deeper oneness and transpersonal higher wholeness. Darker and lighter orange-colored arrows indicate the direction of flow.
- Darker, more distinct: From manifestation to participation, the self-conscious ego emerges, differentiates, and relates to the Reality around it. The “peak experience” that awaits is a rapture of belonging: the ecstatic (self-transcending) experience of inclusion in higher wholeness.
- Lighter, less defined: As the bonds of connection – one with another – continue to grow stronger, a downward pull into communion and inner solitude lead to an egolytic (ego-dissolving) experience of grounding. Here experience is not ecstatic but rather kenotic, from the Greek word for self-emptying.
You are a wave on the ocean of Being. Which way now?
Tracts of Revolution 