Individual Being: Levels of Oneness 4

Inner Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

Inner Work

For the week of June 26, 2017

Individual Being

Oneness does begin at home, starting with wholeness of body and proceeding through One Heart and One Mind. A more encompassing oneness at home includes all three: body, heart, and mind. This may seem daunting. After all, thoughts are so different from emotions, which are so different from sensations. While they are all related, they occupy separate domains, parts of the chaos out of which we attempt build a coherent life.

How can we integrate these disparate centers? We can imagine doing so through a hyper-vigilance that notes every perception, which center it comes from, and how it relates to the other centers. That sounds and would be exhausting. A more fundamental issue with that approach is that it sets our thoughts the task of integrating our body, heart, and mind. But our thoughts operate on the same level as the rest and cannot succeed in bringing or holding it all together. We need to go a little deeper to discover a broad tent, in which all of our diverse parts can find and share a home.

Consciousness is the all-encompassing screen on which every kind of perception appears, including thoughts and emotions. In our emotions, consciousness manifests as peace, the background of all emotion. In our mind, consciousness manifests as cognizant stillness, the perceptive context beneath all thoughts and mental images. The problem is our obsession with the endless stories spun by our mind and heart, like Scheherazade of the Thousand and One (Tales of Arabian) Nights, except in our case it is more like a million and one tales. Can we relax in front of all that, temporarily letting go of our fixation on the content of our thoughts and emotions? Can we instead sit back in the context of consciousness, which can see the passing show as a show, as a set of processes, as a superficial part of the reality rather than the whole of it? If so, we enter the large, all-inclusive tent of consciousness.

Here, everything has a place, everything is welcome. Regardless of what appears on the surface of our mind, heart, and body, we remain ensconced in the peace and cognizant stillness below the surface. In that place, body, heart, and mind are one. All the perceptions arising from them are seen in the one consciousness. We notice a thought. We notice an emotion. We notice a sensation. All noticing takes place in and through consciousness, which in this way subsumes body, heart, and mind into its oneness, its seamless unity.

Indeed consciousness is indivisible. It is the same in you as it is in me. It is a cognizant field of unbounded wholeness. When we relax into consciousness, into the quiet behind our thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions, we relax into ourselves. We do not chase perceptions, we let them come to us. We return to our home of simple being. We can be. The wholeness of consciousness is our own wholeness. We enter our individual being, our personal wholeness. We feel complete, content, aware, and at peace.

For this week, please practice entering the oneness of your individual being.