bread of life

When a trippy hippy says “All is One” the natural response is to roll your eyes. Yet there is no other way to say it. The universal message of a breakthrough mystical experience on psychedelics is just this: the world of separation and division is actually an illusion and the ultimate truth of reality and the ultimate meaning of life is contained in the fact that All is One.

But then what to do with this knowledge? When you come down from your high, that One seems to be very many separate people and things indeed. Soon the vision of the One is just a distant memory and ordinary everyday reality is just “one damn thing after another”. Either you just forget about it, or you keep the knowledge in your heart as a precious secret, jealously guarded against the scoffing and mockery of unbelieving cynics and skeptics.

Some people have a full-blown experience of this mysterious Unity of Being or Is-ness, which they might describe using more philosophical or religious language, depending on their background. Others will have only heard about it second-hand through the reports of mystics and more traditional religious channels, and will take it on trust (call it “faith”) even if what they actually believe is a little hazy.

Talk of the One is a very Greek way of talking, more specifically, very neo-Platonic. The more common religious term is “God”. So what do you do with the belief or certain knowledge that All is One or that All is God? How do you reconcile the One with the Many or God and the World?

At the very least, you try to live the best you can in the light of this knowledge, loving your neighbour as yourself, and so on and so forth. This “so on and so forth” is what is commonly called exoteric religion, or the Outer Mysteries. It is a complex of symbols, rituals and teachings designed to help you remember the One/God and is most concerned with, although obviously not limited to, moral conduct.

Some people are not satisfied with this “acting as if” and want to experience this All is One/All is God not once, not fleetingly, not vaguely, but over and over again, powerfully, incontrovertibly, ecstatically. They may follow a calling to dedicate themselves to prayer and meditation as a monastic. Or they may heed the call of psychedelics. Some will fail in this quest for the Holy Grail, the Beatific Vision, and some will succeed.

Those that succeed establish a cycle of remembering and forgetting, journeying back and forth between the One God and the the world of multiplicity. This is often expressed as a kind of death or ego death, as the separate self dissolves into the One, and a rebirth or resurrection, as the world reemerges with the freshness of a new creation. Here we are dealing with the Inner Mysteries, the esoteric, hidden teachings of religion.

Eventually the One and the Many become experienced in close succession, so that neither one nor the other is completely forgotten. This is described in religious terminology as “the practice of the presence of God”. Finally the One and the Many fuse in a nondual synthesis, where Samsara and Nirvana are not-two. It is the third step in Shankara’s famous formula, “the world is illusion; Brahman is the only reality; the world is Brahman”. Here there is no more doubt or confusion: Tat Tvam Asi (Thou Art That).

P.S. The living human organism that you call yourself is the bodymind of a unified Sovereign Self (Ras); the living planet on which your life unfolds is the bodymind of a unified World Soul (Gaia); the living universe in which this planet lives, moves and has its being is the bodymind of the One God (Jah).

The component parts of your bodymind are many but you are one; the component parts of the planet are many but the planet is one; the component parts of the universe are many but the universe is one.

To understand and experience that All is One and that All is God is to understand and experience an essential unity, not just that “everything is connected” or that “we’re all members of a very large set of things in a very large universe”, but that every bodymind, including your own, is both a whole (Ras) and a part of a greater bodymind (Gaia), which is a whole and a part of an even greater bodymind, whose ultimate unity is given by the Absolute Godhead (Jah).

From this nondual point of view, the universe is not God’s creation but God’s bodymind. And incredibly, we are able to identify with and merge with the higher unities of the one planet and the one universe in a mysterious and ineffable unio mystica. Who would have thought?