=1 "On the royal road to oneness"

On the royal road to oneness

Three thousand million years ago when life first appeared on earth, it started to divide itself into little cells, each one a strictly separate being, or so it seemed. No superficial observer studying life at that time would have been able to foresee that that which was still separate would soon be multicellular. Then when multicellular life appeared, its individuals would have seemed to any casual observer intent only on devouring each other, procreating, and dying – each one in its isolated separateness – and all meaningless. Yet life started to build endless new organs and capacities – legs to move about, arms to take hold of things, eyes and ears to see and hear – winning those capabilities for all life on earth, not only for little passing individuals but for all the coming species.

We humans think our brains belong exclusively to us, and call ourselves homo sapiens, which someday we may really be when we finally realise that our brainwork is for all the coming species in a thousand different shapes, all sapiens. We believe that we are conquering space and perhaps new planets for our own small selves, and don’t see that we are simply life’s instrumentation to conquer new worlds for life. While our minds, our thought powers are still logically primitive, through us life has already started to build supermind: an integrated mind for all life, a unitary awareness which will force mankind to live as a single living being in the same way as the first cells in some original mudpond combined to form a single higher multicellular being.

If there ever was a zero time, a beginning for the whole universe, as our astronomers seem to believe, then there will also be an omega time, an ultimate growing together into the oneness of a true universe. Because the whole universe is not a heteroclite collection of things and beings, planets and galaxies, but a common process in which every particle by combining with others through the ages enters not only into higher complexities of play but also into higher and higher states of awareness of the whole; a process of evolving which though visible and evident even in the material world can only be what we call spiritual in its essence and aim. Thus finally all strivings of life and all its endeavors of organisation, as well as the religious, philosophic, scientific and cultural longings of the mind to understand and to participate, are, secretly at first but then more and more manifestly spiritual, consciously and openly turned towards the oneness.

Perhaps in the long evolution of man’s mind we will have, again and again, to leave the primitive stages of oneness, the paradises which we inherited from our animal ancestors on their various levels of evolution, to find higher levels of integration. Thus our critical faculties grow together with an expanding awareness of our oneness with the world around us.

Our greatest enemy for this particular step before us is our personal and tribal egoism, our greed. But our greatest friend is the universe around us, which offers itself as our obedient slave provided we have once and for all subdued our little animality, our natural aggressiveness, our atavistic fear that everybody and everything is against us, and the idea that we have to kill in order to prosper, to possess in order to enjoy.

Slowly we are turning matter, life, and mind into obedient instruments; no longer are they our demanding masters. Always at first we have needed considerable instrumentation for our conquests, a great investment of matter or of life energy for a given result; but then always, also, as we understand better the laws of nature and are able to refine our technology, less and less expenditure of material and energy has been required.

The final stage will arrive when we know the laws of oneness so well that we can will the stones, the mountains, the planets, the suns and the galaxies to move, and they will move.

Our bodies will be fully obedient, and immortal as long as we desire to remain in them. Our minds also will be obedient, so that we can concentrate for hours or days on the same problem – or have silence when we desire to commune with the oneness around us and above us and within us.

As there is no foreseeable end to the evolution of our awareness, there is no end either to the possibilities of our instrumentation and therefore to our power to transform ourselves and the world around us.

The key and the justification of our omniscience and omnipotence will be our vision, our consciousness, our awareness of the oneness of things.