I was asked the following question:
I am currently in Afghanistan and the knowledge that you speak of is very touching. But this place brings it out of me. There is so much pain and suffering here. People die everyday of the common cold. Children are starving and neglected. I can feel it. It takes it out of me. Mentally and physically drains me. How is this my reality? I cannot be in a unified field with these people yet I’m connected. I guess I am asking, “ How can we always be one if there are always going to be those few that make you have doubts? Those few, in my case, that drain you with their pain and suffering. How can this be my reality?”
To which I respond:
Your question displays your beautiful honesty. I respect that about you.
Until you are awake to the level of Unity Consciousness, you cannot function from that level. You are looking too superficially at the notion of oneness. Trying to experience true oneness from the perspective of (on the level of) duality is denial at best, mood making most often, and in the final analysis is futile. True unity slips into your life in an almost unidentifiable manner… as they say, ‘like a thief in the night.’ Proper meditation is your most powerful tool.
Your preconceived notions of the experience of oneness keep you looking for it where it is not. You can know all about the taste of a strawberry, but if you have never tasted one, when you finally do you would likely say, “I am an authority on strawberries and I can assure you this is not a strawberry.”
Do not try to make your experiences conform to your notion of what they should be. That is just trying to impose a sort of trance state upon yourself. When you finally awaken to the transcendent, it will become so obvious to you… you will wonder how you could have ever missed it. All of the knowledge you have gained will shift to align with the actual experience. This is what is meant by “Knowledge is structured in consciousness.” You may use the same words to describe it, but those same words will take on a whole new meaning.
True knowledge is an experience, not an intellectual understanding.
This question makes me think of another question:
How can there be health in the body when there is disease?
And yet there is. It is the existing health and wholeness in the body that we must nourish and strengthen to overcome the disease. And yet I must still inhabit the diseased part of my body in order to heal it… blood flow and oxygen is necessary for cell repair. How to bring health to the suffering while neither becoming nor avoiding it?
This is a challenge for me in the face of chaos or suffering I witness. As I child, I was exposed to and immersed in great poverty, social disparity, and political injustices in multiple cultures. My parents spoke openly about the state of the world in these terms, and I was haunted by the violence and injustices at large, always trying to understand it.
Beneath people’s suffering or prosperity on the surface, I am one with their humanity. Sometimes I feel that as a natural experience, but sometimes I reach for that understanding when what I experience is division or repulsion from others. Why do I try to see our oneness? I “know” it is a more “mature” and “spiritual” way to act. At least, that’s what my conditioning says. But I see how I have reached for this conditioning and reinforced it myself because I want to escape the pain, anger, and confusion I experience in the duality.
What does it look like to allow the level of duality and separation from others to exist, while witnessing great suffering?