There are moments when the weight of the world’s suffering presses in with unusual force. We watch conflicts deepen, communities fracture along lines of belief and identity, and sense the distance between what we know is possible for human beings and what we see actually taking place. Something in us responds with grief, or anger, or an urgent desire to act.
But beneath the urgency, a deeper question persists. Are our responses reaching the source of the problem, or only its symptoms? The familiar answers, however sincere and however necessary, have a way of coming undone. New conflicts replace old ones. New fractures appear where old ones were apparently healed. The root has not yet been touched. In this essay we explore what that root is, and what it means to act from it.
The great sorrow and conflict that so many people in the world today experience is an inevitable consequence of the division of reality into self and other.
And as long as this paradigm of separation is the foundation on which our world culture is built, the sorrow and the conflict will continue, in spite of our best efforts to bring both to an end.
Sorrow and conflict cannot be brought to an end by making adjustments within the paradigm which gives rise to them. No amount of working with this sorrow and conflict from within the paradigm of separation will have any lasting effect on it. Temporary ceasefires are alliances between fragile minds. Lasting peace must be based on something that lasts, and on something that is common to all people.
There is a concern, sometimes raised, that an understanding of this kind – one that points to the illusory nature of the apparently separate self – leads people to disengage from the world and its problems. In fact, it is the other way around. The dangerous belief is not the recognition of our shared being. It is the unquestioned assumption that our senses give us an accurate view of reality. What is taking place in the world today flows directly from that assumption. It gives us a paradigm of separation, and sorrow and conflict are its natural result.
This understanding does not deny the world or diminish our responsibility within it. On the contrary – it upgrades the world. It invites us to see it as it truly is, rather than as it appears through the lens of sense perception alone. Non-duality is not a retreat from reality. It is humanity’s only real hope of understanding it.
While we should of course make every attempt to arrive at short-term solutions, there will be no lasting change, no permanent peace until it is grounded in an understanding that precedes and transcends our different ideas, beliefs, values and ideologies.
Every attempt to unite humanity on the basis of shared beliefs, values or ideologies ultimately founders upon the very assumption of separation from which those beliefs arose. If there is ever to be lasting peace in the world, it can only emerge from an understanding that precedes all belief, all ideology, and all cultural identity. It must arise from a recognition that is independent of temporary ideas and inherited positions. In other words, it can only arise from the one experience that is common to all people, prior to thought and belief: the simple fact of being, the recognition that we share our being.
This does not mean withdrawing from the world or pretending its troubles do not exist. It means showing up differently.
When my first teacher, Dr Francis Roles, first met Shantananda Saraswati – then the Shankaracharya of the north of India – he said that he was like a man carrying a candle in the wind. The wind moved, but the candle did not flicker. We are like that. The mind, the body, the world move and change – but our being does not move or change. The candle does not flicker.
Your being has never been touched by experience. It has never been hurt, changed or tarnished. Your being shines now with the same pristine clarity and peace as it did on the day you were born, as it will do on the day you die, and as it is for eternity.
When this recognition informs our lives, peace ceases to be an ideal negotiated between competing interests and becomes the natural expression of our shared being. In such an understanding, harm to another is recognised as harm to oneself, and care for the whole arises as its inevitable consequence.
All faculties that were previously used in service of the fears, desires and anxieties of the separate self are now used in service of love and understanding. Peace, joy, love, kindness, and creativity – that is the way infinite being expresses itself in us and through us, and flows through us out into the world.
You may express this love and understanding in some way in the world, or you may not, in which case you will be a beacon of peace and love shining quietly but brightly in your community. Never speaking of these matters unless you are asked, but continually communicating this peace and love non-verbally. And people will like being close to you because they catch this peace from you.
You are not called to like everybody. Liking or disliking someone is due to your and their conditioning. And it is natural for the mind to have conditioned preferences. However, you are called to love everyone. Love is the recognition of our shared being; it has nothing to do with whether you like or dislike somebody. Just as the space in all buildings is the same space, the being in all beings is the same being. The recognition that you share your being with everyone is the experience of love.
There is only one being, the same in everyone and everything, prior to and independent of any thought, feeling or action. It is this being that we are called to recognise in everyone, irrespective of how they act or think. And that recognition is not indifference to harm. It does not come with a sweet smile in the face of injustice. A very firm response, even a fierce one, may sometimes be necessary. But it does not arise from hatred. It arises from love.
Each of us bears a responsibility to let this understanding inform our lives and actions, and to allow it to find expression, in our own way, in the world.
At a recent retreat, Hillary, a Muslim activist from New York, asked me directly how, in the face of real injustice and harm to others, she could find love in her heart for those causing it. This is the exchange that followed.
Next week: the conclusion of this series, and an invitation. I will be sharing something new – a response to the very question that runs through all of this: if peace is already our nature, and no practice or technique can deliver us to something we already are, what is there to do?
