Tag Archives: quiet

Unicity

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We are like waves in the ocean—ever-changing, inseparable movements of a seamless indivisible whole, and every wave includes the whole ocean. This one bottomless moment is ever-changing in appearance while never departing from the ever-present immediacy of here-now. The appearances vanish automatically as soon as they appear—they self-liberate as some traditions say—and there is peace in the simple immediacy of being alive, just as we are.

Thought poses as “me” and claims to be the thinker-chooser-doer, but no such entity can actually be found. Our thoughts, behaviors and apparent choices arise as movements of the whole. When we take it all personally and believe that we are small and separate and in control of our lives, feelings of deficiency, anxiety, guilt, blame, confusion and dissatisfaction inevitably follow.

Liberation from this kind of suffering can never happen in the future. It can only happen now, in the simple recognition that absolutely nothing needs to happen or not happen. Both the apparent suffering and the one who longs to be free are ephemeral appearances with no actual substance. All there is in every passing wave of experience, however it may appear, is the seamless indivisible ocean…

Realizing the choiceless and impersonal nature of everything that happens frees us from guilt, blame, false pride, and many other painful and destructive feelings that arise when we believe that we are separate and in control of our lives, and that everyone else is in control of their lives, and that we all could and should be doing a much better job. Recognizing the impersonal nature of everything gives us compassion for ourselves and everyone else when we fall short of our ideals.

We could say that the whole movie of waking life, including the central character we identify as “me,” is very much like a nighttime dream, and in a dream, the dream character is not writing or directing the show. The dream character doesn’t even really exist. The entire dream world is a movement of the dreaming consciousness, and none of the apparent objects or events exist outside of the dream. Or, alternatively, we could say that everything that happens is the result of infinite, interdependent causes and conditions. But any way we describe, map or formulate the living actuality is only a map or a description…

Unicity is eternal, which means timeless, ever-present, NOW. It is infinite, which means all-inclusive, boundless, limitless, HERE. This NOW-HERE is all there is. Have you noticed? There is no way to step outside of this. It cannot be objectified, although any words we use to point to it do seem to do just that, so we have to use words lightly. We habitually want something to grasp, something to hold onto, but in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense freedom…

Joan Tollifson, Liberation Here-Now

What we are, as waves on the ocean – or in Spinoza’s terms, modes of the one substance, God – is no more than the flickering of wavelets, a brief appearances that is gone, all but traceless across open water. And yet the wavelets are water; they are not other than the ocean itself; they don’t come from water, they are water.

Finally, the heart opens in the quiet. There is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go. To sit still is all we have ever needed: to sit still in the one place, which is now.

But as Tollifson goes on:

I’m never suggesting that we can or should ignore or dismiss the everyday relative dimension of reality. It’s real enough. But when we know it for what it is, it can be experienced in a different way, with much less suffering and more ease. And in the bigger picture, every mistake and every apparent imperfection is perfectly placed. There’s no way to get it wrong. There’s no “me” separate from the whole.

And this is never what we think it is, because thought conceptually divides, abstracts and freezes what is actually indivisible, immediate, and never the same way for even an instant. And yet, even thinking, conceptualizing, abstracting and dividing are also nothing other than unicity showing up as apparent thinking, conceptualizing, abstracting and dividing. The map is not the territory it represents, and yet, mapping is something the territory is doing. All there is in every passing wave of experience, however it may appear, is the seamless indivisible ocean.

What a huge relief!

Troubled times

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We live in troubled times, more troubled than many of us can remember. To be honest, though, a great deal of our lives are lived in times like these. My own generation lived through a Cold War that all too often threatened to heat up into nuclear conflict, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the Viet Nam War, the UK miners’ strike (and its brutal repression) of the 1980s, the Falklands War, 9/11 – the list goes on. Our parents lived through – and many of them, Susan’s and mine included, fought in – the Second World War. Of that appalling period of history, reminiscent in so many ways of our own, CS Lewis wrote at the time:

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes…

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the [one] who takes [their] long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

The Weight of Glory, pp.48, 61

Awareness of impermanence, the recognition that our lives are led in a dissolving world of ceaseless change, is not a doctrine of despair but of realism; and in that realism, hope. Somehow our very grief becomes, in extremis, a channel of grace. Sharon Salzberg:

At times, pain can reach such a powerful level that it can be devastating. In spiritual life, we might call it the dark night of the soul. In interpersonal life, we call it grief, and this intense emotional experience does not limit itself to the loss of someone who has died. It can occur as the experience of nearly any kind of deep loss.

To accept the love that is the motor of grief is to accept the role of mourners, of givers-of-thanks for what is being lost, bearers of unbearable hope. Death always follows life; but new life follows death. (Even in Chernobyl, the natural world is thriving as never before.)

To accept what is, it is necessary to know what is, now. This means attention, questioning, investigation. It means practice.

When we feel separate, small and encapsulated, the ungraspable nature of the living reality makes us feel insecure and out of control. And because reality sometimes contains enormous pain and suffering, we are easily prone to adopting ideas and beliefs that seem to provide security, control, explanations and so on. But belief is always shadowed by doubt. And the truth is, we are clueless. We cannot see the whole.

But we don’t need to! When trying to get a grip falls away, it is actually a huge relief!

Joan Tollifson, The Essentials (Substack)

Human culture is not “an inexcusable frivolity on the part of creatures loaded with such awful responsibilities as we.” (Lewis, ibid.) If we have one job in times like this, it is to be bearers, through our careful grief, of love, of grace, of light even, into this present darkness.