Everything Goes Together

It Can't Be Pulled Apart

We see and hear many things every day on the news that can easily stir up feelings of anxiety or anger, along with judgmental thoughts about how horrible this or that is and how it “should” be different. While it doesn’t diminish the painful and often horrific nature of some of what is happening or the sadness and concern that may arise at times, the realization of inseparable wholeness—otherwise known as nonduality—can make much of this far less upsetting than it otherwise would be. So I’d like to share a few examples of how me might look at things from a non-dual perspective.

For starters, someone recently sent me this video of Dr. Brian Klaas, author of Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. He’s a professor of Global Politics with a focus on democracy, authoritarianism and political violence, along with an interest in contingency, chaos theory, evolutionary biology, the philosophy of science and social science, and complex systems. I found the entire video quite interesting, but I'm sharing it here because of the story Klaas tells that begins just a few minutes in about a horrific event on which his very existence depended. I really recommend hearing that story:

Klaas’s story is a wonderful real life example of the truth conveyed in the famous Old Chinese Farmer Story, a parable apparently of Taoist origins that I’ve shared many times before, told here by Alan Watts:

Klaas’s story also reminds me of something in Peter Brown’s early book, Dirty Enlightenment: The Inherent Perfection of Imperfection:

Participant: I like your analogy of the ripples in a pond—you set something into motion, and you have good intentions, but you can’t know ALL the effects that will follow on your actions

Peter: Of course. Say you’re walking by a stream and see an innocent child who’s drowning, so you run in and save its life. But that child might turn out to be the great grandfather of a horrible tyrant who’s going to cause the deaths and torture of millions of people. How can you know?

Participant: So do you suggest we shouldn’t save the child?

Peter: No, not at all. I’m suggesting that whether or not you save the child has more to do with how the energy of reality that is appearing as YOU is functioning at the moment you pass the stream, than with whether or not there’s an objective situation that you can know anything about. In other words, you WILL do what you WOULD do in those circumstances, including whatever stories you’re telling yourself about why you’re doing it. And what you WOULD do is subject to constant revision as the energy flow that constitutes your being constantly develops from one moment to the next.

—Peter Brown, Dirty Enlightenment, p 89 (Note: I added the words “Participant” and “Peter” for clarity about who is speaking).

As Peter makes clear, understanding the nondual wholeness and choiceless nature of reality doesn’t mean action and response don’t happen. It means we act and respond in the only way possible given our conditioning up to that moment and the infinite causes and conditions of the entire universe at that moment from which we are inseparable.

As the Old Chinese Farmer story and Brian Klaas’s story both show us, we can never really separate what we consider bad or undesirable from what we consider good or desirable. And, of course, everyone will have different ideas of what is good or bad, desirable or undesirable. To most of us, the polio vaccine is a wonderful thing. But to the polio virus, it is genocide. As the Buddhists understood long ago, life feeds on life, and we cannot live without killing. Just by wiping our forehead or breathing, we have killed millions of microorganisms.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the constant barrage of news and information pouring in non-stop from our 24 hour news cycle and on social media. It may seem that the world is scarier than ever before. But the world has always had wars, famines, plagues, hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, dictators, genocides, revolutions, counter-revolutions, and conflicts of all kinds, and human beings have always been vulnerable. It’s true that we didn’t always have weapons of mass destruction (or 24 hour news), but it wasn’t always a global world either—for a villager centuries ago (without any news media), a war or a plague might easily destroy their entire known world. I imagine it probably felt very much the same.

When we see the wholeness of everything, it eases the anxiety of that vulnerability, for we know that the whole is unborn and undying, endlessly dying and birthing in every instant, endlessly changing shape, and yet always being this one bottomless moment that never moves away from right here, right now. We see that horrible things can have beautiful outcomes, and that beautiful things can lead to horrible ones. We see that apparent polarities cannot be pulled apart. We can’t have up without down. And we see that no one (not me, not you, not God, not any world leader) is in control. We are all doing the only possible. Nothing could be other in this moment than exactly how it is.

Again, that doesn’t mean it won’t all change in the next moment or that we can’t or shouldn’t express our opinions, join a protest, pray, tremble in fear, boil with anger, or feel or do whatever else life moves each of us to feel or do. It all happens by itself, choicelessly. The little me who seems to be thinking our thoughts and making our choices is an illusion. Really seeing that doesn’t make us into robots. It removes the illusion of the one who fears being a robot, pushed around by forces apparently outside of it. It reveals instead that we are inseparable from the whole, just as every wave is inseparable from the ocean. There is no separate self apart from the whole to have or not have free will.

Of course, we still appear to make choices. But as Wayne Liquorman pointed out years ago in his beautiful example of the boat ride at Disneyland, our steering wheel is not connected. And that’s not bad news. It’s a huge relief when we really see it. It frees us from blame and guilt and brings forth compassion for everyone, ourselves included, being just as we are. It brings an acceptance of life as it is, including our own actions or inactions.

We’re no longer chasing an imaginary ideal. We’re simply here, as we are, doing what we do. Yes, that may include various plans and aspirations, but we understand that these plans and aspirations, like all our urges, desires, impulses, interests, preferences, abilities, thoughts, emotions and actions, are a movement of the whole universe, and that our actions and the outcome of those actions may not be what we intend. We’re at peace with the apparent imperfections, and as the subtitle of Peter’s book says, we can see and appreciate the inherent perfection of imperfection. This is “the peace that passeth all understanding,” the peace that is at peace with not feeling peaceful, the peace of being this moment, just as it is, the peace of being what we cannot not be.

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Love to all…