Radical Oneness: The One Body

The universe is in a conspiracy to wake you up to the One. However, because your entire ​​upbringing, experience, conditioning and evidence, point to the Two, this conspiracy can

appear as hostile and an attack. And it certainly can be: the experience feels like an attack on you, your separated self, mindset, ideas, patterns and understanding. To say "I'm attached" to these things is a gross understatement-- "I" (my ego, what I identify as me) am these things I’m attached to. How can the assault on my separated self be experienced as anything but hostile?

Trust is the entry point into creating peace within “the great attack.” Because I identify with these things— whether they be my ideas, my beliefs, my likes, my preferences, my body— does not mean they are the true me. Can I see the real me? Will I see the real me? By real me, I refer to the undivided me, the non-separated me, the whole me that is everything.

This discussion is difficult because it quickly can dissolve into what the Zen practitioners called Koan. The attempt to parse what can’t be parsed, which leaves you standing at the doorstep of rationality. We are one. We are two. We are both one and two. We are neither one and two. These Koan were created in order to help people to get it, to see that while they experience themselves as separate, they are actually not separate at all. They are the One Body.

But I digress. I’m discussing being attacked, and trust. The chiseling at your ego by phenomena of the universe is the function of the universe. That is actually its purpose: for It to realize itself, and you are the tool to accomplish that, you realizing yourself is It realizing Itself. You seeing oneness is its expression and purpose (your expression and purpose) and is the universe coming into being. Thusness. You are in fact the reason why the universe exists.

So the next koan is: you are completely insignificant and wholly irrelevant. And that is what the universe is showing you when it attacks your puny, limiting beliefs, the ones you hold so dear, the ones you are so attached to that you think they are you. The universe literally exists for and because of you, and yet you are utterly insignificant.

Amazing!

I’ll leave the koan to the Zenists, and suggest action. What gets to be done is setting aside the conditioning so the attacks can become more and more gentle. Letting go of “our stuff” is an adaptation. Just like putting on our stuff was an adaptation. One key is the embrace of trust on a level that is unprecedented. Religious folk call it faith, but to be clear, I’m not talking about belief in something. I’m talking about a conjuring via your own power and intention to be in a creation of an experience of letting go so that you can get out of the way and see the One Body as your body.

And really that’s the challenge. You can’t see the One Body as yours if you are attached to the ideas of what you are. This limited skin-bag and its conditioned attachments and responses are the very things interfering with realization of the One Body. So they must be removed, by hook or by crook, and the universe is taking care of them, one by one. Trust it, it’s happening.