Thoughts On Unity: wholeness and the end of suffering

Thoughts on Unity

wholeness and the end of suffering

by

Todd Lorentz

Vedanta Publishing

Edmonton, Canada

Thoughts On Unity:

wholeness and the end of suffering

Copyright © 2018 Todd Lorentz

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-9877782-5-3

First eBook Edition, November 2021

Published by Vedanta Publishing

Edmonton, Canada

www.VedantaPublishing.com

This book is dedicated to

Benjamin Creme.

I am deeply grateful to have

had the opportunity to receive

so much from his humour, his

wisdom and his encouragement.

The creation of this book on unity began as a project in autumn of 2016 and for more than a year I worked on bringing many of the ideas that I had accumulated over the years together with a wide range of thoughts that I had developed for myself. The incredible importance of unity only revealed itself to me more fully once I had the opportunity to gather all of these thoughts into one coherent format. It has been an engaging and provocative book to write and I hope that it will help to generate a new appreciation for the significance and consequence of unity.

There were many along the way who gave of their time, labour and support to make this work come together. Thanks should go to the staff and owners of our community gathering place, the Juniper Bistro, for their support and encouragement. I would also like to thank Olga for her help in designing the cover. More than anyone, though, I would like to thank Heather for her eternal willingness to help with transcription and proofreading, her assistance through the endless editing process and for being a sounding board for my many thoughts and ideas. Her selflessness and dedication are evidence of the divinity in us all.

Todd Lorentz

Edmonton, February 2018

Table of Contents

Introduction

Wholeness and the Nature of Reality

The Origins of Separation

The Illusion of Separation

The Illusion of Identity

Dis-unity and Suffering

Unity and Language

Unity and Individuality

The Economics of Unity: Sharing

Unity: The Way Forward for Humanity

Unity and the End of Suffering

Introduction

Humanity is divine, and every human being in that family is One through the medium of that divinity. It is a bold claim when viewed through the lens of everyday material living. Yet countless teachers throughout the ages have made this very same pronouncement. Even more tenuous seems the claim when one measures the ocean of suffering within which humanity swims, looking for even the slightest glimmer of relief from its endless struggle. Poverty and scarcity consume the hope of many while famine, war, hunger, disease, displacement and fear destroy the very fabric of trust and goodwill. Greed, corruption, injustice and competition stand out as common practice within the political, economic and religious institutions of the world. How is one to reconcile this dichotomy?

Mystics and sages have repeatedly stepped forward from within the ranks of humankind to proclaim the high stature and divine gifts which are the privilege of every woman and man to express. Throughout the ages, and against our apparent determination to the contrary, we have managed to achieve ever higher expressions of divinity in the form of creativity, civility and invention. Each divine attribute, achieved and then added to the complex of human expression, has come at enormous cost to those courageous enough to meet the challenge and has sometimes even led to the destruction of entire civilisations. From the ashes of each society rises the phoenix of ever greater liberation; out of ignorance we discover higher measures of justice, broader understandings of human capacity and more profound capacities for self-awareness. The evolution of consciousness through the human form is beset with challenges – fraught with pain and suffering. Yet, that burgeoning consciousness inspires and informs each new civilisation toward an ever greater reformation and salvation of mankind.

There is no return for humanity to the origins of evolution. Nor is there any clear understanding of our ultimate goal or destination. Humanity has stumbled forward relentlessly in the dark, gathering whatever small bits of advice it can along the road from those few Great Souls who have penetrated the darkness and shed light upon the Way for others to follow. Those Illumined Minds have paved smoother the rocky path which is our collective journey and have bestowed a route promising the end of suffering for those who would study those signs and apply themselves toward quickening their own pace.

A number of teachings from antiquity have shown a multitude of ways to bring the man or woman to evolution’s bright conclusion. If one can catch a glimpse of the larger story, vast differences of approach can be seen to fuse and merge into a divine symphony of common purpose and goal.

I have always been provoked by the faint, yet palpable, sense of unity in the world. I have come to learn that this fascination is not uncommon and I’ve had the good fortune to meet many people who share in this familiar intuition. Despite this, my daily experience has been saturated by the perceptions of an objectively material world existence and that we function as separate and distinct individuals in the material world. Every one of my senses, which largely govern the way I experience the world, works to undermine my subjective sense of unity and inclusiveness at every breath. I have wanted to dive more deeply into that vast space of ‘belongingness’, yet I am often prohibited from entering fully into that reality by the monotonous distractions which infiltrate the mind at every turn – conditioned as it is by its reflexive identification with the outer objective world. This challenging circumstance has led me on a prolonged journey of investigation to understand the relationship between the objective and subjective world, and to study the advice and teachings from various mystical, philosophical and religious traditions. I have hoped to better understand why these two worlds, the subjective and the objective, can often yield such diverse and sometimes incompatible presentations of reality. Moreover, I have sought to understand how this relates to the experience we call suffering and how the great sages of the past have managed to penetrate and overcome that deep mystery.

The many views that I have had the opportunity to examine have exemplified the idea of nonduality as a fundamental condition of the universe. Nonduality is the view that there is not two. That is, while we appear to live in a world that is full of various independent objects and beings, nonduality is the view that there is no true separation between subjects and objects. There is no independently existing entity called you and me, although you and me certainly appear to exist as two distinct beings. We are really better described as two distinct expressions of one underlying consciousness of Being. The common analogy of this is the image of the ocean with many white caps or waves on the surface. You can see each individual wave in each its own unique form and expression but underneath the surface they are all part of the same one ocean. There is no way to separate the ‘waves’ from the ‘ocean’. In short, the world (or ocean) is One. We each make a separate and distinct appearance in the world but underneath, in the field of consciousness, we are all part of the same waters of divine life.

This led me to think for many years on the relationship between this underlying unity of Being and how we manifest our lives singularly and separately in the material world. While our activities appear so individual, and individually motivated, we can’t really separate that from the ocean of life any more than the wave can separate itself from the body of water from which it arises. And yet, the mass of humanity functions in the world today ‘as if’ there was no real connection to one another, nature or to the divine life that lies behind all of existence. As I pondered upon the effect that this schism has in our lives I began to see how essential the need was to not only recover that sense of unity but how critical it was to establish unity as a central demonstration in every aspect of living. It begs the question, if our fundamental nature is Oneness then how can we expect to flourish in any meaningful way without the basic expression of that unity in our daily lives? I look out at the world in its present state of endless wars, widespread hunger and poverty, mass refugee movements, collapse of entire ecosystems and the toxic economic gulf which exists between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ – brought about by systems of competition, greed and selfishness – and it becomes clear to me how precarious life on our planet becomes when we abandon the principles of unity as a manifestation of what defines us.

These chapters comprise a few of my thoughts on unity and the fundamental role that it has in our lives. The challenges ahead of us seem great and, yet, we should know that building a world based on unity is one of the most natural things that we could do. It is in our nature to do this. It also requires that we begin to deconstruct the rationales and silly aphorisms that have been used to convince us that our best way forward is to continue through isolation, alienation, separation, competition and self-promotion. Instead, the route of unity leads us to sharing, cooperation, justice, synthesis, brotherhood and Love. I have hope that my thoughts here on the significance of unity can find a dominant place in your life as well.

Wholeness and the

Nature of Reality

The notion of an ultimate nondual reality has been around as long as we have recorded the thoughts and beliefs of civilised humanity. Stretching far back in history, and continuing forward into the various religious and spiritual perspectives today, we see beliefs grounded in the wholistic union between the spiritual and the material worlds. The primary expression of this perspective is called pantheism, where all existence is considered to be a literal manifestation of God. God does not exist outside of creation but, instead, is inherent in every atom of the cosmos. The world is God. Everything from nature to the forces that govern the cosmos – and including humans as well – is an expression of the manifested body of God. The adherents of this view are found throughout history from the early Hindu and Buddhist writers, through many of the Greek philosophers, across virtually all of the mystery traditions (Elusian, Hermetic, Gnostic, Sufi, Kabbalah and more) and even including more modern western thinkers as Spinoza and Einstein. The list is extensive.

In a turn of thinking, the pantheistic view evolved in a way that made God not only present in creation but also existent beyond the limitations of time and space. Described as panentheism, creation is imbued with God’s life as the prime driver while, at the same time, God remains mysteriously outside of creation and unencumbered by the world’s imperfections. On Its own plane God could be seen as remaining perfect and unencumbered. Creation became more of an emanation of the divine rather than the actual manifestation of God Itself. This view also played an important role in the development of many eastern and western religions, was adopted amongst various sects in some of the mystery traditions, and also provided an explanatory role for some western philosophers, such as Hegel and Whitehead, in bridging the gap between the empirical and religious worlds. However, this separation between God and its creation raises some problems in that it implies a relationship of necessity which works in both directions. That is, one can say that the world needs God in order for it to be created. However, it must also be reasoned that God needs the world in order to instantiate or authenticate Its existence. In simpler terms, the existence of God depends upon the existence of the world, and vise versa. Not only does this generate an internal contradiction (a tautology) but it contradicts mainstream Christian and Islamic theism and the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). In those modern theistic views, God is thoroughly independent of its creation and exists whether or not the world exists. Likewise, God is free to create this and any other world out of nothing (if God Wills it to be so).

Regardless of one’s conclusion as to