Where All Things Are One

The ancient Chinese called the wholeness we have been talking about, the Tao - the center where all things are One. We seldom see this wholeness because our awareness is centered on the diversity of the life forms around us. We look upon each thing as separate from ourselves and from every other thing.

Today there is emerging a science of wholeness and many scientists and philosophers join with theosophists in recognizing that the limitations of our consciousness cause us to see the world outside us as separate from our interior world. In fact they are finding what the wisdom tradition has always asserted - the observer and the observed, the seer and the seen, are in reality one.

Albert Einstein clearly expressed his own conviction in this matter:

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feel­ings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness".

The illustration above will help us understand the nature of this illu­sion of consciousness.
The life in everything emanates as a ray from the One Source - the Divine Unity. As the radiations move outwards they interlock less and less until, at the darker ring, each separates and finishes at a point clearly dis­tinct from its neighbor. This point is the consciousness, which you and I use, in everyday life.

It is focused almost entirely on this world of separativeness, but as all mystics have testified, we can turn inwards and center on our true Spiritual Self, which is always one with the Divine Source.

In the diagram, all the rays are linked together by virtue of the One Source, from which they emanate, illustrating the cosmic truth that every­thing in the universe is interconnected.

What happens to one thing affects everything else. As the poet, Francis Thompson, expresses it: "All things by immortal power Near and far, hiddenly To each other linked are Thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling of a star".