The ultimate oneness of all life is a proposition put forth by many religions and spiritual philosophies. An apprehension or experience of the interconnectedness of all life is equated with the state of enlightenment. In a state of enlightenment, one has a direct experience of the unity that exists among self and other people, the self and plants, the self and animals and even self and inanimate objects. One sees the self in other and the other in self. One is no longer bound by the illusion of separation and definition, and instead sees only a vast, unitary sea of energy which is the true reality. In ecstatic states of enlightenment, one may even directly experience oneself and everything else as infinite light. Let’s discover the differences between oneness and wholeness.
Turning the Other Cheek
We may associate this state of enlightenment with Christ-consciousness or unconditional love. If the ultimate truth of this Universe is that we are not separate beings and things, but instead parts of one, single body, then this means that one part cannot harm another part without harming itself as well. If you and I are one, then your pain is my pain, and my suffering is your suffering.
It is from this perspective that we have received teachings about non-resistance, including “Love Thy Enemy”, or “Forgive them; they know not what they do”, or “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other cheek as well”. Even in direct confrontation with a predator, the enlightened person recognizes that the apparent enemy is only a part of himself. Within this perspective, the enlightened person can neither hate nor retaliate; instead he responds with love.
Because enlightenment or Christ consciousness are held as ideals by spiritual seekers, many have made the ability to be “one” with anything their central practice. They make their central pursuit a state of purely positive focus in which they can maintain the awareness of all things bonded in eternal love and light.
Unconditional love
It is a very rare person, however, who is capable of doing this in any and every situation. How many of us can maintain unconditional love for the person holding a gun to our head? How many of us can maintain positive focus while we watch news about starving children or war?
For many people, a spiritual practice which prioritizes maintaining a state of oneness with everyone and everything will devolve into a practice of blocking out those aspects of reality which directly challenge the perspective of perfect unity. The shadow side of positive focus or unconditional love practices is spiritual by-passing— that is, a refusal to contend with any negative emotion or situation.
Spiritual by-passers will repress any negative emotion and ignore the facts of the reality right in front of them. In their pursuit of a permanently unconditionally loving state, they have made it unacceptable to judge any person or situation as bad, wrong or unacceptable. They cultivate the ability to endure and cope with even the most harmful situations and people because they are unwilling to acknowledge anything negative.
In so doing, those who have made this state of oneness their priority have made an enemy of wholeness. Put another way, those who have made love their sole focus have disowned its complement: wisdom. Wisdom without love results in brutality, but love without wisdom results in foolishness— and often great harm. True enlightenment is a state not only of love but also of awareness.
The Sensory Alchemy: Exploring Hypersensitivity and its Spiritual Dimensions
Holding Polarities: Oneness vs Wholeness
Positive focus is a tool for specific circumstances, not a methodology for an entire way of living. An over-emphasis on positive focus leads to imbalance and polarization; one loses access to awareness and therefore awakening because the perspective can no longer accommodate negative.
Enlightenment is not possible from this perspective since, after all, if one is excluding everything which opposes an easy state of oneness, one is not actually in a state of oneness or unconditional love at all. Polarizing oneself in this way is a state of extreme denial and resistance.
In a state of true enlightenment, one is able to accommodate polarities. For instance, while it is true that we are all one at the highest level of reality— each of us being only sparks in the one light of Source energy— on the three dimensional level of this earthly existence, we are indeed separate beings. While it is true that at this highest level of reality, you are eternal and infinite, on this level of reality, it is true that you were born and that you will die.
And in the same way, while your eternal soul is never judged nor condemned as “bad” or “immoral” by the Source energy of which it is a part, on this earthly level of reality there most certainly are “bad” and “immoral” actions— and it is both loving and wise to recognize these as such.
What, then, does the practice of unconditional love look like on this earthly plane?
What does it mean to love thy enemy, if the enemy is indeed perpetrating great injustice? And what does it mean to turn the other cheek?
This practice involves stretching the consciousness to accommodate the polarities that exist within a multi-dimensional Universe. To Love does not necessarily mean to like; to say that all is Perfect is not to say that all is necessarily good. To say that all is One at the highest level does not mean denying the injustice of one person harming another on this level of reality.
We must learn to be inclusive to the greater whole in order to create integration within ourselves and the universe. It is only when we come into this inclusive state of consciousness wherein we can accommodate polarities that we can be inspired to right action. An inclusive consciousness that accommodates polarities leads us to the awareness that coping with things is not a virtue. Often it is denial, or coping with things that shouldn’t be coped with. Sometimes its not taking action that needs to be taken. Sometimes what is really called for is to accept that something is there and then to change it.
Once your consciousness that accommodate polarities let the next question be “should this be coped with” ?
Are you into oneness or wholeness?
Numerology: Ascending Your Numeric Destiny
The post What Are The Differences Between Oneness and Wholeness? appeared first on askAstrology.
