On my walk this morning, I got thinking about ALL as a concept for a religion of a kind, although that word, religion, has such a lot of baggage around it. But I mean a faith, a practice, a way of seeing the world, a personal vision… I started with Ken Wilber, of course, as I’ve been so keen on the Magic level of Second Tier awareness. So I thought the I/We/It of ALL might be the way to go, and then extended it beautifully to Me/Us/ALL of Us.
There are two worlds to consider, the manifest and the unmanifest. The first, what we consider our real tangible world, is the Me/Us/All of Us that we come to know through our lives here on earth. We grow in consciousness from being entirely focused on me, to understanding that our survival and happiness is dependent on others, and eventually we see a larger world that includes all of us interdependently: the people, the planet, the universe, however vastly we can see.
We make our maps three dimensional by extending space through time, beginning again with our current family, then extending into the past to grandparents, previous generations, and the development of human societies through time. We can also project time into the future as we watch our grandchildren grow and imagine their families and future generations as the human species continues to evolve.
This is the manifest world, a space-time continuum, a shape-shifting hologram that changes depending on who is looking. This is the doing world, the active world, the suffering world, the learning world. It is the one we look AT.
What about the unmanifest world? It is the being world, timeless, spaceless, ALL. We can’t look AT it and see it. We must shift our perspective to look AS it. It exists only by seeing AS Me/Us/ALL of Us.
When I see AS Me, I can of course see me in the manifest world, my body in space and time. But there is so much more here! Here are ALL the ineffable qualities of the mind, the inner world we intuit, often called the Soul or Spirit. In the unmanifest world, I see my single soul traveling into and out of manifest life, to be reborn and die as many times as it takes to complete my learning journey. I AM ME. It is necessary to include I AM because although I am choosing to focus on ME, I AM ALL here as well, ALL around and through without separation.
When we see AS Us, again we can see the manifest world around Us, but here are all the souls through time and space, the unmanifest collective. We are not entirely undifferentiated though. As we do in different cultures, here we cluster in groups that journey together. Have you ever felt that you already know someone you’ve just met? Or experienced déjà vu? Or had the sense that a certain someone was a “soul” mate? When we look AS Us, we see that we meet the same few people through our lifetimes, they track along with us. They are our teachers and we are theirs. They will play different roles in our manifest lives, at one time a mother, at another a friend or foe, depending on what we and they need to learn. I AM US.
When I see AS ALL of Us in the unmanifest world, I come to the point of it ALL. It is love, that is ALL. So simple. ALL is love. Love wrapped around sorrow for the manifest world. ALL is both/and, the love holding the sorrow in compassion, the sorrow grateful for the love, both intertwined, interconnected, interbeing. I AM ALL of Us. Here there is no separation of the manifest and unmanifest worlds, there is no separation between Me and Us and All of Us. We are ALL and ALL is Us. And ALL is love. I AM here. Here I AM.
A beginning — there is much more to unpack.
Circles in the Square