This week we’re reviewing pages 93–95, completing Chapter 9, ‘The Outward-Facing Path’. This essay brings the exploration to its completion, following the movement from the recognition of awareness as our essential nature to the living expression of that recognition in relationship, perception and action. A single, indivisible reality is revealed, knowing itself inwardly as ‘I am’ and appearing outwardly as the world.*
When this reality is recognised without division, it is lived as peace in the depths of our own experience, as love in our relations with others, and as beauty in our encounter with the world. The essay unfolds this understanding step by step, showing how the amness we know as ourselves and the isness we recognise in all things are expressions of one shared being, and how this recognition carries the power to heal the sense of separation that shapes personal suffering and collective conflict.
*(The page numbers indicated here each week refer to the original publication of the physical book – they may vary slightly from more recent versions, owing to the publisher’s design modifications.)
The Human Experience of Our Shared Reality
We have traced the arc of understanding from ‘I am something’, through ‘I am nothing’, to ‘I am everything’. We have explored how the Vedantic path of discrimination reveals awareness as the formless witness of all experience, and how the Tantric path of inclusion recognises that same awareness as the very substance of all that appears. We now turn to the way this understanding is felt, expressed and lived at the human level.
This dissolution of separation is known at the human level as love in relation to others and beauty in relation to objects.
Love is not primarily an emotion that arises between two people. It is the recognition that the apparent boundary between yourself and another has no reality at the deepest level. Our characters and personalities differ; they are distinct, individual and separate, yet the essential being that lies beneath them is shared. In other words, love is not a relationship, although it may be expressed through relationship. It is the collapse of relationship, the fading of the felt sense of separation between self and other. It is the dissolution of two and the revelation of one.
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