5.4 What is the inherent unity of all things?

 

Meditate on the nature of an ordinary event. Two people meet, sit down to talk and eat, embrace briefly and leave. What is the reality of this occurrence?

To the unenlightened person, this situation is unclear, requiring much more background before its significance can be understood. Who are these people? What is their purpose in meeting? Is it by design or by chance? What is their relationship? Is their purpose business or pleasure, lawful or clandestine? The questions can go on indefinitely – it is a truism of mind in its unenlightened form that you can never really know another person.

 

Mind in its unenlightened state experiences only separateness and illusion. Hampered by the basic inability to understand the true nature of ordinary experience, the unenlightened person compounds the difficulties by constructing a view of reality based on individual experience. That is to say, ignorant of what is really happening at any given moment, the unenlightened person relies on opinions – which often masquerade as objective facts – to understand reality.

 

Opinions are the curse of the unenlightened. Opinions are a dead-weight dragging the unenlightened deeper and deeper into the illusion of separate and independent existence. The enlightened person has no inherent need of opinions.

 

To the enlightened person, this ordinary situation is quite clear, requiring no more background before its significance can be understood. In reality, the situation is exactly as it is. Two people meet, sit down to talk and eat, embrace briefly and leave.

 

If the enlightened mind needs to know any background information that knowledge arises effortlessly. If any action is required, that action takes place spontaneously and effortlessly. From the inner point of view of enlightened experience, everything occurs spontaneously and effortlessly.

 

Mind in its enlightened state experiences with clarity and unity. All things are known in their true form as being merely objective manifestations of that. The only true difference between the unenlightened and the enlightened person is that the former is ignorant of the true nature of reality and the latter is not.

 

The enlightened person deals only with what is, as it occurs. Knowing the evolutionary nature of karma, accepting and understanding the events of life as the workings of karma, the enlightened person – established in clarity – sees, experiences and knows only that. Clear, wise and filled with delight, the transcendentally realised mind knows conditioned existence in its true nature as all-embracing mind.

 

Able to function in the everyday world – to love, to work, to build and to heal – the enlightened person sees no real differences, no true separation. Knowing your own mind is that, you walk in the world seeing others and the world as that. Motivated by unbounded compassion for the world’s ignorance and suffering, your life is dedicated to helping others onto and along the path.

 

What is the meditation to effect realization of the inherent unity of this and that?

 

Everything is in its place. On both the individual and the transcendental levels, your mind has been disciplined and prepared. You are ready to understand through direct intuitive experience the inherent unity of conditioned existence and immanent, transcendent mind.

 

In your progress along the path, you will have already glimpsed the final stage of enlightenment in brief flashes. You will have briefly and intermittently experienced a stillness and peace transcending and embracing all else. Practice of this meditation will stabilise your consciousness in the state of enduring freedom termed the final stage of enlightenment.

 

With mind in its transcendentally awakened and still state, witness this, intuitively experiencing and accepting it as that. Simultaneously meditate one-pointedly, repeating over and over in your mind: everything is as it should be. Continue with your ordinary life without interruption, analysis or interference.

 

This one-pointed meditation transmutes any lingering uncertainties into the experience of transcendent unity. All of this is intuitively known in its true form as the inherently unified manifestation of that. All separateness and individuality is directly known as an illusion, born of ignorance and masking the true nature of reality.

 

This ultimate experience of serenity and peace, transcending all conditions, is impossible to convey in words. It is likened to a vast ocean, utterly still. ‘It is indescribable by use of speech and is not an object of the mind.’ [Evans-Wentz W. Y.; Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967, page 150.]

 

To the religiously inclined, enlightenment is experienced as unity with God. Re-united in the love of God, the truth about the world is known and experienced directly. The terrible and illusory cycle of life and death is transcended in direct experience of the world as divine.

 

To the secular mind, enlightenment is experienced as a state of unconditioned awareness. Conditioned existence is witnessed, experienced and participated in with clarity, wisdom and delight, from a perspective of absolute subjectivity, transcending karma, space and time and all the other conditions. This is known with intuitive directness as illusory, being only relatively real and lacking in the absolute reality inherent in that.