Until I was somewhere in my sixties, I lived in a world where almost nothing was sacred. There were a few things that seemed to me were obviously, absolutely sacred, but they were far outnumbered by what didn’t seem sacred. That seemed obvious to me, too. It’s funny how what seems obviously true at one point in your life seems just as obviously false at another point in your life.
The reason for that shift in insight is that I saw something that had always been true, but that I was only seeing for the first time. Seeing that truth completely changed the world as I saw it.
My earlier worldview was a reminder that we live in a world of appearances, and when we take those appearances too seriously, or too literally, we get ourselves in trouble.
For example, the appearance, and I’ve come to see it’s only an appearance, that you and I are separate individuals with little or nothing in common. It seemed self-evident for my entire life, one of the things that seemed as true as gravity, until I was willing to see beyond it. That was when I was able to see that the energy that animates me is the same energy that animates you. Not similar, the same. One single animating energy: conscious awareness.
In other words, whoever you are, you and I share the same being with everyone else and everything else. In fact, there is no “everything else.” We are simply different aspects of the same consciousness, or different perspectives of that single consciousness. The universe is one thing, not countless separate, different things.
And, the amazing part is, it’s all made of consciousness, the same single consciousness that you and I are made of.
The divisions we’ve created, you/me, here/there/now/then, this/that, attempt to take the single, unlimited intelligence of the universe and carve it into digestible pieces. But these are arbitrary divisions, created by thought, existing nowhere other than in our thoughts.
Humans have a need to try to take the incomprehensible, and translate it into something understandable. In the case I’m talking about, understanding the nature of the universe and our place in it, it can’t be done in the way we’ve tried without reducing it to something it’s not.
The metaphor I’m about to use is an example of this limited consciousness. Imagine you have a physical, paper map of the world. We understand that there are limitations to this map, that it’s a representation of a reality too big to be contained in a two-dimensional paper map.
The degree of complexity that lives in what we’re trying to understand isn’t well served by believing that a map can possibly contain all the information we need to comprehend it fully.
Who would ever believe a paper map was anything other than the most basic representation of what it was meant to portray?
Because you and I appear to be separate selves, with no real connection, we believe that appearance. Yes, on one level, we’re self-contained individuals, but that’s just the appearance, just the superficial reality. An appearance made more real by the limitations of our own minds, because the physical form we assume as humans limits the unlimited consciousness of the universe. So, when we try to understand it in concrete terms, we can’t. There are no concrete terms that could ever contain unlimited consciousness.
Here’s where we can reintroduce the question we started with: If it’s all one, and if we’re all one, how can anyone or anything be other than sacred?
I wasn’t kidding when I said seeing this has changed, and continues to change my life for the better the more deeply I see into it.
Just imagine what it’s like to live in a world where everything is sacred, and remember, that’s where you really live.
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