When asked about the moral implications of this understanding, St. Augustine said, ‘Love and do whatever you want’. In other words, recognise that behind the apparent multiplicity and diversity of people, animals and things, there lies a single reality. This recognition that reality is not divided in two – subject and object, self and other, God and the world – is the experience that we commonly refer to as love in relation to people and animals, and beauty in relation to things and nature.
Awakening is not an extraordinary experience that happens to a few special people. It is not an experience at all; it is the recognition of the nature of our being. Once this recognition has taken place, it remains to align our thoughts and feelings on the inside, and our relationships, activities and perceptions on the outside with this understanding.
Having understood the nature of our being as the source of the happiness for which all people long above all else, we cease using the world as a source of happiness and, instead, use our happiness in service of the world. Our desires no longer arise from the sense of lack that characterises the separate self or ego, but from the fullness of our being, and are how that fullness is communicated and celebrated in society. When J. Krishnamurti was asked if he had a secret teaching, he responded, ‘I don’t mind what happens’. In other words, his happiness was no longer invested in or dependent upon the content of his experience.
As well, this unity of being becomes our guiding principle in relation to the three areas of our external experience: our activities and relationships, and the way we perceive the world. What this means for each of us depends upon the conditioning of each of our minds and bodies. There is no area of human activity or endeavour that cannot be a means by which this understanding is communicated and shared, whether expressed in the arts, politics, science, healthcare, education, business, sports or family life.
Firstly, this understanding implies a deep connection between what we essentially are and what the world essentially is. This has profound implications for our environment – we no longer treat the world as something separate from ourselves to be exploited and degraded – and for relationships between individuals, families, communities and nations.
This does not mean that there will not be differences in relationships, but if this understanding is the principle on which they are founded, then any differences will be explored in the context of this understanding and will inform how conflicts are explored and resolved. In relation to communities and nations, this understanding would make hostility, cruelty, unkindness and injustice impossible, because one feels the ‘other’ as one’s very own being. This also has implications for the way we treat animals. What one does to another, one does to oneself.
Secondly, our activities in the world, particularly the work we do, are no longer informed by the neuroses, fears, desires, demands, insecurities and anxieties of the separate self or ego. Our activities become how this understanding is creatively communicated and shared in the world.
Lastly, art, in its myriad forms, shares this vision of reality by leading us directly to this recognition through sense perception. Cézanne stated that the purpose of painting was to give people a ‘taste of nature’s eternity’; the filmmaker Pablo Pasolini said his films meant to ‘restore to reality its original sacred significance’, to help people see through the apparent multiplicity and diversity of things to its original, divine essence; and William Blake, when asked, ‘When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’, replied, ‘Oh no, no, I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty”.’
