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All One
In the beginning, there was Existence alone --
One only, without a second.
It, the One, thought to itself:
"Let Me be many, let Me grow forth."
Thus, out of Itself, it projected the universe,
and having projected the universe out of Itself,
It entered into every being.
All that is has its self in It alone.
Of all things It is the subtle essence.
It is the truth. It is the Self.
And you are That.
-- Chandogya Upanishad
This is an excerpt from Shared Transformation newsletter issue #44/45 (Divine Encounters),
orginally published March 2000. Part I of this article is an expanded version of a message I originally posted
to several Internet Kundalini lists. Part II is an essay by Sylvia Hancock, and Part III is some of my closing
thoughts on this subject.
Part I
by El Collie
I caught a very interesting program on TLC the other night called "Life After Death." During a segment
on rare, hellish NDEs, there was a depiction of the God/Self/Source experience I had 32 years ago. The narrator
began this portion by intoning: "Darkness, Void, Vacuum, Loneliness, Absence, Nothingness, Nonexistence. .
."
Nancy Evans Bush described a near-death-experience that happened to her 35 years ago. A voice or awareness informed
her: "You never existed, you will never exist. You're not real. Nothing you ever knew existed. Nor does anyone
you think you ever knew, nor your life, nor where you live. You made it all up." She goes on to say, "This
meant that not only did I not exist, but the baby and her year old sister [her children] didn't exist. Your mother,
your husband, nobody you know exists. You're not real, and nothing you know is real."
She concludes: "I found it instant holocaust." Yet she was compelled to deal with this awakening for
the rest of her life, and slowly came to terms with it: "There is a gift in these experiences. Now, it's not
a gift we want to get, but if we're stubborn and hang in there, we work through a lot of issues. We come to discover
our religious faith in incredibly deep ways that we couldn't if we just dazzled around on the happy level. So what
I'm trying to do is go beyond the idea that pain = bad = punishment = hell = eternity = despair. Because the alternative
to despair I think is joy, which is different than happiness. But the paradoxical nature of this is that in order
to get to real joy, we have to be able to accept suffering as part of us. And I know that sounds bizarre. But I
didn't make up the rules. . . and it just seems to work that way."
The spiritual journey can veer into various levels of ego-loss in which our sense of self-identity is momentarily
or permanently altered. The Eastern religions in particular extol the dissolution of ego -- the release of our
sense of "me" as a separate and rigid "somebody" in the world. These traditions regard ego-transcendence
as essential to spiritual liberation and enlightenment. Most of us have experienced some degree of ego-loss, often
as a self-expansion or self-eclipsing in the presence of something awesomely vast or beautiful: the spectacular
wonders of nature, the encompassing joy of love, or through powerful inner experiences of sublime, mystical states
of consciousness. I've had episodes of grace when, as if something suddenly changed the channel on my perception,
I've been shifted into states of euphoric bliss. Everything became a sweetly flowing effortlessness in which I
felt carried along as ephemerally as a summer breeze.
This, and other more common ego-suspension experiences mentioned above, are very different in their psychological
impact than the stark confrontation with the illusory nature of existence which Nancy Bush and I encountered. The
positive experiences have a melting-quality whereby ego-boundaries are blurred and we feel ourselves to be One
with life. By contrast, being divested of all previous notions of self is a great shock to the psyche. At this
deepest level, not only one's sense of individuality but one's total sense of reality implodes. One's entire perceptual
orientation is turned upside down and inside out.
In his classic compendium, The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley disclosed that "direct awareness
of the 'eternally complete consciousness,' which is the ground of the material world, is a possibility occasionally
actualized by some human beings at almost any stage of their own personal development, from childhood to old age,
and at any period of the race's history." Spontaneous awakenings have apparently been known throughout history;
the Vedantists, according to William James, acknowledged that "one may stumble into superconsciousness sporadically,
without the previous discipline." (from The Varieties of Religious Experience)
Awakening to the "eternally complete consciousness" isn't about being in the presence of the One or feeling
union with God, both of which assume the existence of two entities, self and Divine. In this experience, one's
personal identity is obliterated. Nothing exists but self-aware Consciousness that knows itself to be the single
and whole reality subsuming all space and time. The collapse of the phenomenal world (which doesn't instantly vanish
from view, but is seen to be a stupendous "trick" of the One Mind) is disemboweling to the psyche. This
was the most harrowing, soul-shattering, and simultaneously the most illuminating and transcendent experience of
my life. For me, the unbearable thing was not that El Collie had vanished; my self-deletion was akin to removing
a costume. The problem was that what remained was a single Consciousness which existed in absolute aloneness.
The "eternally complete consciousness," a. k. a. God/Goddess/Self is the Infinite One proclaimed by mystics
from every tradition. Direct knowing of the One Consciousness dissolves the self who would be the "knower."
There is no one standing apart from the One to bear it witness when awakening occurs. Rather, the individual self
is understood to be an illusion of a separate identity. All duality ceases to have meaning; there is no opposition
or division anywhere. In the deepest sense, no one can awaken to this truth. Becoming Self-Realized is the experience
of knowing there never was and never will be anyone to become enlightened, and that nothing but Consciousness IT-Self
is eternally real. Mystics throughout the ages have struggled to convey this apparently logic-defying Reality which
seems to be saying that nobody is there when satori/samadhi occurs. But that is just it -- there is no body, there
is only the One Eternal Self, the true Self who we all are. In this highest sense, we do not each have a distinct
and separate Atman/Self. Rather, we are individuations, creative expressions of a Single Being. Throughout my life
this knowledge has followed me as a reminder that nothing in this world is entirely as it seems, particularly not
my own ego-self.
Whoever wrote the script for the TV program obviously found it inconceivable that Nancy Bush had a genuine revelation of Self/Source, so the narrator inserted the explanation that Nancy's story exemplified one of the hell experiences that Stanislav Grof says is the product of a terrible childhood. Wrong on every count. Grof actually discusses the type of awakening Nancy experienced on a tape called "The Cosmic Game." On this tape, Grof distinguishes between experiencing deities and divine personages (Buddha, Jesus, Shiva, Kuan Yin, Divine Light, etc. ) and experiencing the core God/Self -- the I-AM of pure consciousness. Many of the people who have this core experience (which a friend of mine calls "God-in-the-Void") seem to be exhilarated by the absolute freedom of realizing that everything and everyone is an illusion. But some -- like Nancy, me, and others I've met who are more love-and-relationship oriented -- are devastated by the eternal aloneness of Self/God. And I've run across a number of people who have had this experience but buried it in rationalizations afterwards because they couldn't bear to carry the knowledge of eternal emptiness in which nothing/nobody really exists.
The few people I've personally met who awakened to the "you don't exist, nothing is real, nobody you love
is real" Source/Self have been mentally and emotionally eviscerated by the experience. Yet for me, while still
in the egoless God/Self state, there was also a spontaneous shift into the joy that Nancy later discovered was
the second half of the equation. So I didn't spend years working through "issues" to get to that completion.
My joy came during the experience of God/Self's ecstatic love for all creation -- even while acutely aware that
all creation is maya, dreamstuff, nothingness.
So I came "back" from it both reverberating with love and shattered by the knowledge of God/Self's solitary
predicament. Reconciling God/Self knowledge with just about any other facet of existence was a humongous challenge.
For a very long time, although I continued to function normally on the surface, I was in a twilight world where
nothing, including myself, seemed to have any substance. I pretended not to know what I knew, and I was ever in
search of an illumined soul who might somehow help me bear the weight of my secret knowledge.
There was always an element of absurdity in the attempt to find someone who understood. I was ever aware that "I"
in the encapsulated form of a human El Collie was a hollow shell, a clever pretense that Consciousness used to
deliberately disguise itself. I knew why the disguise was necessary, while at the same time, I knew there was nothing
which could be hidden and no one to hide from. I had the acute sense that I was a transparent vessel through which
God plaintively sought relief from being God. I found myself filled with tender envy for those who believed in
a God who was "other" -- a deity they could adore from a distance, sweetly enfolded in a relationship
of child to Father or lover to Beloved. The God that had exposed IT-Self to me could neither be approached nor
escaped from.
Trying to come to terms with my lasting sense that nothing was real, I went on a rampage of reading all the religious
and occult literature of every sect and creed I could find in hopes that I might come across some piece of wisdom
that would rescue me from the immensity of what I knew. I found what I had experienced being described over and
over again, couched in myriad symbols and semantics.
Most of the authors of the spiritual texts who described the God/Self realization were exultant and bubbling with
promises of eternal bliss. Almost nowhere was there acknowledgment of the devastating part of the experience. I
did, here and there, come across a poignant admonition that the spiritual path was a voyage into ego-annihilation,
and anyone who could should run from it. Yet the irony was clear: the only ones able to understand what was being
warned against were those who were already too far into the journey to turn back.
I had repeated episodes of going fully into God/Self consciousness over several years. After the initial shock,
it was never again so harrowing. Even so, having this realization so early in life, before I had come across all
the hoopla in the religions about it, seemed for a long time like a strange kind of cheat: I was finished before
I had in earnestness begun. I knew too much but I didn't know what to do about it except to play dumb and carry
on with my mundane life.
Although most people seem to think that the God/Self awakening is the culmination of the spiritual journey, Irina
Tweedie said that while in other yoga systems, God realization is the ultimate goal, in the Sufi system in which
she was being trained, it was "only the beginning. . . the first step" (from Daughter of Fire).
This seemed even more so in my case than hers, for her Kundalini awakened years before she reached this awareness,
while my own Kundalini was apparently dormant at the time of my realization. It was certainly was not the end of
the journey for me; my life is testimony to that.
The Hindus describe the qualities of the God/Self as Sat, Chit, and Ananda, which translate as Being, Awareness
and Bliss. The first two fit my experience; the third, bliss, seems too small a word for the quasar-intensity love
which I experienced as the Creator's adoration for everything in existence. This Oneness experience differs from
the blossoming of the seventh chakra. The spectacular union with the divine which occurs at this seventh center
is still an I/Thou relationship, a sense of being rhapsodically united with God. In this awareness, one knows oneself
to be of and in God, to be an emanation of everlasting Divine Light. The realization that "God and I are One"
at this level is very different from God-realization at the eighth plane.
At the seventh chakra level, as Dr. R. P. Kaushik says, "Your consciousness of your achievement, your height,
your status is not gone. This feeling that you are the greatest yogi, or the greatest mystic, or a great personality,
does not go" (from The Ultimate Transformation). By contrast, the revelations of the eighth level negate
the very concept of there being any levels at all. One is thrust into a position of utter humility by default.
Contrary to myth, individuals who have awakened to their God/Self are not immediately recognizable to others as
somehow special or spiritually radiant. Ramana Maharshi spontaneously realized his God/Self when he was a sixteen-year-old
schoolboy, but neither his family nor anyone at his school recognized the change in him. It was not until many
years later, when he began to teach, that his illumined status was widely acknowledged.
The experiential realization that the singular, seamless, cosmic consciousness (aka "Absolute Mind",
"God" or "the Godhead") and one's eternal self are one and the same does not confer permanent
omniscience or omnipotence, nor does it guarantee spiritual clarity. Individuals who are mentally ungrounded may
blur the spheres of the One and the Many. I know several people who spun into psychosis after this awakening because
they couldn't handle the implications. I know a woman who couldn't allow herself to accept that ultimately nothing
but consciousness exists, so she twisted it into believing that she was God which everyone else secretly knew.
She convinced herself that everyone hated her, since she was solely responsible for all the woes of the world.
As harrowing as her egocentric delusion was (she would scream and weep with grief and guilt and horror for weeks
on end), it was less painful to her than accepting that at the level where she is God, there is nothing but God.
. . and no "others" to hate her or to love her. That there was no one in existence to love her was the
absolute worst, as she had an insatiable need to feel adored by other people. I felt more grief in the discovery
that the people and creatures (animals, nature, etc. ) I love were all illusions than in finding out that there
isn't really an El nor is there anyone else to give a rat's ass about me (not even a rat, ha!).
The initial part of the experience is hellish for those I know who have had it (me included). Being absorbed into
God isn't the same level as being embraced by God's Light -- the ecstatically beautiful experience of Lover and
Beloved. Instead, it's like falling into a Black Hole where everything is sucked into nothingness except a Single
Consciousness which is the one thing that exists. And you are It. There is an overwhelming loneliness and despair
that comes with the awareness (which is also a tremendous sense of "remembering") that everything else
-- all creation -- is a stupendous hallucination, a multidimensional holographic movie where the script writer,
the producer, the director, all the actors, all the scenery and props -- it's all just One Being imagining it and
pretending that it's real.
Years after I had this experience I came across a Hassidic Jewish teaching that God needs man as much as man needs
God, and this is definitely true. God needs creation as much as creation needs God, just as all of us need each
other. We were created to be a loving universal family and to be beloved children of God forever. Yet the paradox
is that although we have been "created" as eternal souls, we have never left the mind of God and in that
sense we don't really exist, we're just God-thoughts. In some of the Eastern religions, they don't speak of God
(or Goddess), but of "Self" because there is a level where there isn't anything to be drawn into the
Light, there is just One mind dreaming the universe.
People imagine that non-duality means perfect bliss, yet my experience of non-duality was a paradoxical fusion
of all opposites: ecstasy/agony, joy/sorrow, existence/nonexistence, form/formlessness, abundance/desolation. .
. Non-duality isn't the absence of things we don't like, but the presence of everything on all-levels and no-levels
simultaneously. All One equals alone equals all-one equals alone equals all-one in a never-ending cosmic spiral-loop.
I had a realization that joy and suffering aren't opposites, but balancing sides of a sort of yin/yang seesaw which
can't be separated -- eliminate either side and the cosmic seesaw is broken, the whole momentum is lost. Once I
experienced divine suffering of the profound, agonized Aloneness of God/Self and discovered that from that original
pain came the capacity for perfect Love which regards everything as precious, I knew that all creation carried
an echo of that suffering/love/joy. Love is supreme; it is the sacred life-giver of the universe. I don't think
it matters much what level of revelation/epiphany/awakening we've had -- if we don't get that love is the key,
we're still blind. And if we get just that much, we're blessed.
Part II
by Sylvia Hancock
I often think when we try to explain what we mean by the void that not only do words fail us, but it is hard to
know what is real and what is unreal. Isn't it a Buddhist prayer that says "lead me from the unreal to the
real"?
As far as I can understand any of it, the void where the sense of the one who is totally alone and responsible
for all manifestation, is the blackness which to me is synonymous with the blackness of the dark areas of space.
The light is the manifestation or the beginning thoughts of the darkness. This would make the stars part of that
early manifestation, and the patterns they form, for example the zodiac, may even in some geometrical or other
way represent the thinking of the void. It may be a kind of blueprint for the later material manifestation.
I have experienced the black areas of space and the total awareness, and feelings of being alone. I also have encountered
a 'being of light' that looked like a star but behind the light manifestation it had a face made up of the black
voidness of space. I appeared to enter that star, and then passed out (I wanted to say blacked out -- may have
been a more appropriate expression here). That did lead me to speculate the stars are simply manifestations of
the blackness of space. This was a revelation to me, because before this I had tended to think of stars as being
part of the creation principle who were impressing a kind of pattern on the black space out there. This experience
led me to think the opposite, that the black space is the real thinking mechanism and the light of the stars the
result.
As far as the void and the sense of aloneness is concerned, if we relate this to God, or as near as we can get
to God with these brains of ours, it makes sense that when God said "let there be light." God thought
in a particular way that created starlight. If we as part of His/Her creation are like God in every way, then the
same is true of us, we also create to avoid the aloneness and isolation. Most of us have experienced creative moments
in which while being physically alone, we have felt at one with the universe because of something we were creating.
Another thought was expressed that if we are only one, are we responsible for everything? Well I suppose if you
want to get really depressed you could think of it like that. I prefer to think of the humorous, or the joyful
side of things. I think it was Joseph Campbell who expressed it this way: The universe looks like a great thought
in which the creator dreamed up various creatures who in their turn are also dreaming up states of being and so
on ad infinitum (not an exact quote). If this is true, I prefer to think I'm one of the dreamers somewhere near
the bottom of the pyramid rather than at the top. Otherwise I would find the loneliness and responsibility too
much.
Of course it begs the question, if God dreamed this universe up, how many others did God also dream up, and does
God regret this universe, find it amusing or what? And was there any other purpose, such as a learning curve for
the creatures dreamed up, or was the whole thing simply to alleviate loneliness? I prefer to think that each dream
creature is a means for the dreamer to learn something and each of us, wherever we are on the dream pyramid, is
part of the universal mind and everything we experience adds to that single knowingness or all-knowledge of the
void.
Part III
by El Collie
The knowledge of the One God, One Consciousness -- the primordial and eternal Intelligence which is the sustaining
force and power of existence -- is enshrined by every major religion. "The records left by those who have
known, " wrote Aldous Huxley, "make it abundantly clear that all of them, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Hebrew,
Taoist, Christian or Mohammedan, were attempting to describe the same essentially indescribable Fact." (from
the Introduction to Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita). The essence of awakening to the God/Self is the same for
everyone, as evinced by countless firsthand spiritual accounts which uncannily overlap in their descriptions of
this sacred territory. Yet the meaning individuals derive from their awakening is colored by their personal background
and ability to understand what they have been shown. While no one can perceive or know the whole picture, we are
all vantage points of God/Goddess describing the picture back to Itself. This is why there are widely divergent
views between different religions (for example, the chasm between the Buddhist and Judaic conceptions of divinity)
and why there are innumerable splinter-sects and schisms within the same traditions.
I had no idea at the time of my realization that so many others throughout history had experienced this same awakening.
Even if I had known, the last thing I wanted or needed to do after my enlightenment was to proclaim myself any
kind of advanced soul. This would have been in contradiction to the realization itself, since it had been made
wholly clear to me that at the ultimate level, there was no one in existence but the One, and that even God-asleep-to-God
in so many "dream" forms of multiplicity was by divine design. There was no one else for me to attempt
to awaken. "On seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than,
or superior to, others for having done so," Alan Watts aptly put it. "In every direction there is just
the one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek." (from The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who
You Are)
The God I experienced had not set up the universe as a labyrinthine game of solitaire, the sole purpose of which
was to find the way back to the starting point and win. The game, if one would call it that, is infinite, and both
poles are necessary: self as individual and Self as Cosmic Source; world as Self-creation and world as everlasting
mystery; yin and yang in eternal embrace. "One has to live in the two extremes; like the snake, up and down,
right and left," wrote Jung. "One cannot take the road of life without taking both sides of it because
one side alone would lead to a standstill; if one wants to live one must endure the opposites because the way is
two-fold." (from The Visions Seminar)
My awakening bore more resemblance to the Zen depictions ("Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water;
after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water") than to the celebrated yogic Self-Realized superhero playing
paranormal stuntman blissfully ever after. Supernatural powers were available to me in my God-Realized state, but
they held no allure. (I use the term "supernatural powers" with reservation. From the view of the God/Self,
neither "supernatural" nor "power" is relevant. Rather, there is unlimited creativity, in which
anything imagined is easily and effortlessly produced. At the God/Self level, all manifest existence is demonstration
of this creative process and perceived as simultaneously "miraculous" and "nothing special.")
Nor was there anything the world offered that drew me back except the possibility of relationship. It was only
here, in the sphere of sweet duality, that I could experience communion with other selves.
This was not necessarily a failing on my part. "Most yogis who went up to this level came down and rested
in the heart center," Kaushik told his students. "Only in that center can you stay in a state of relationship
to the rest of the world, as other human beings -- not high, distant, withdrawn from the rest of humanity. Though
you have gone to the highest, yet you come down and rest in the heart center." (from The Ultimate Transformation)
I now regard my early enlightenment as a gift of a different order than what it is generally touted to be. It spared
me years of searching for the Secret of the Universe. I wasn't driven, as my lust to understand everything would
have otherwise compelled me, to follow the yellow brick road in a desperate desire to meet the Wizard (or to torment
myself with doubts over the Wizard's existence). For me, that was all gotten out of the way from the start, so
I could spend the remainder of my life learning to “rest in the heart center”.
"The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when
any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window," said Aziz Nasafi. "According
to the kind and size of the window, less or more light enters the world." This single "spirit" is
the Self/Source addressed by the Katha Upanishad: "Smaller than the smallest, greater than the greatest, this
Self forever dwells within the hearts of all." The same spirit/Self/God is, as Joan Borysenko writes (in The
Fire in the Soul), "present in all things, all experiences."
Spiritual awakening seems to be a process whereby we each in our own way become aware of our Source/Self while,
by evolving through each one of us, God also becomes aware of Itself and learns through its own creations: every
one of us. In Borysenko's words, "The Universe knows itself and expands itself through me."