On Oneness –Accepting the obvious –Part 2

We all intuitively know about this oneness. However, our identification with our own body, mind and intellect creates a strong and distinct feeling of “me and everything else that is not me”. And this me is so so so small and tiny that it extends only upto the boundary of our own body.

So we identify with this small part of Our whole and struggle through this life, being tossed up and down in the waves of joys and sorrows. However, when we slowly expand our sense of identification with All That Is, then our individual ego disappears and we become our True Self –the glorious infinite and absolute.

All this is fine, but it seems very wild to even begin to imagine us as something other than this body. The attachment to the body is so strong that even though we can intellectually and to some extent intuitively understand that we all are one, we cannot but shake off the feeling of I ness and my ness that is associated with the body.

The Masters, in all their kindness, give us so many examples to help us comprehend this Truth of Oneness, so that on reflecting upon it again and again, we lose this small identity with the body and gain our true identity with that of All That Is.

Here are some examples for us to reflect upon.

1.  Parts of the body and the body as a whole: Our hands, legs, head, eyes, nose -all these have their own functions to perform. They are as different from each other as they can be. However, they all are but of ONE body.
2. Waves and ocean - Every wave in the ocean rises, peaks and falls -it has a birth and death. From the standpoint of the wave, it is a separate entity having its own life cycle. But from the standpoint of the ocean, it has no separate existence other than the ocean itself. The wave is  nothing other than the ocean -infact, it is the ocean itself
3. Gold in ornaments: The metal gold is the same in an earring or a necklace or a bangle. it is the same gold whether it is in Africa or Asia or Antarctica. The pieces of jewelry may be distinct, separate and different from each other in their design and functionality -but once melted, it comes down to nothing but gold.
4. Electricity and electrical equipment: Electricity is the same everywhere. But its expression/manifestation depends on the equipment that I plug into the socket. It expresses as light, when I plug in a bulb, as air, when I connect a fan, it grinds when I plug in a grinder and vacuums when I plug in a vacuum cleaner. This does not mean that the electricity is different - only its expression differs based on the properties of the equipment.
5. Same building blocks: From the point of view of physics, all matter is constituted of the same building blocks -protons, electrons and neutrons. Breaking them further down, we have the elementary particles and eventually, the line between matter and energy gets so blurred that quantum physics is not able to say where one ends and the other begins. The entire universe is composed of this same building blocks.

During my initial Vedanta classes, when my Acharya used to say that the Masters see all as one and that there is no distinction for them, I used to wonder how their world will look like. I could not comprehend this statement at all. I pictured as if everything will be one big black mass for them without any distinction of shapes, forms and colours. To top it, I used to wonder how can they function in this world if they cannot see all the things as separate from each other -how will they navigate? Won't they bump into a tree or a chair or any other object due to their vision of oneness?

Well, let me just say that I finally understood what my Acharya meant. The vision of oneness is that, even though we appear as separate and individual existences, each with our own personality, likes, dislikes and so on -at the most basic level, we are all part of one whole. The Life Principle in me is the same Life Principle in everything else around me. 

Just like how I can clearly understand and accept that my hands, legs, eyes etc are a part of me, similarly, "I" am but a part of this whole creation. Just like how a hurt in one part of my body affects the whole body, similarly, the pain of another is a pain of mine too. Joy of another is a joy for me too. 

We will see what are the implications of this vision of Oneness and how it can change our lives when we attempt to truly accept, understand and live by this vision, in our next post.

PS: The examples given above are from our scriptures like Upanishads and also from discourses of  Gurudev Swami Chinmayanada. They are not my own examples.