The Separation Verses Unity Trilogy, Part 1

 

The first time I remember this topic entering my consciousness was in the second year of my Psychosynthesis training. We all had to get together with a fellow student and produce a workshop, delivered to the general public. A colleague of mine chose this title for the workshop she and her partner produced. I must confess to confusion on the subject. I couldn't imagine what they would manage to say about it. To me it seemed so obscure. My own topic was Death and Dying, with me doing the death, my friend Margie doing the dying bit in the afternoon. I look back now to realise I had a lot to learn.

The fact of separation begins early in life. The sperm and the egg must separate from their hosts to start the process of procreating this new being. From then on, the embryo must continue the separation process, developing its individual structure. At some point when this is complete, the birth process commences, heralding the first physical separation of its own from the Mothership.  Every skill learnt from then on is an act of separation in some way or another: continued growth of the body, development of the mind, learning language and the ability to speak, walk, run, play and on and on. Further and further away from the parental beginnings the child, adolescent, and adult moves, to construct their own unique life. So unique in fact that there will never be another like them in life, now or ever.

Natural and essential as it is, the road to uniqueness is fraught with oncern. On some deep level we get what I call 'cosmic separation anxiety'. We are scared of this journey into the unknown, coming from the Oneness of potential to the oneness with mother in the womb, to oneness with the family or tribe, we feel lonely. So we seek out connection wherever we can, trying to plug the hole where, what is now 'other', used to fit. If we are unable to find the Inner Self connection to the Whole, we run the danger of attempting to fill the w/hole with anything we can shove in it: friends, lovers, alcohol, drugs, work, endlessly. Indeed, the finding of our own individual Self and its deep connection to everything else is the only way to assuage the feeling of having lost something. Because we haven't.  Here is where it gets bizarre.

If you prepare a bowl of dough, put it into separate cupcakes, and bake them, are they the same or different? Well, they are the same and different. This is the crux of the whole exploration. By coming into a three-dimensional reality plus time, we are set in different jelly molds (wombs), but are made out of the same stuff. Just as there is a reason for putting dough into separate containers, (easier to manage, to eat in pieces without having to rip and tear, easier to share with others) there is a reason we embarked upon this reality swap. It allows for a different experience of ourselves, developing diversity, which gives us greater opportunity for observing and learning than attempting to do it all as a lump. We can learn things more swiftly, from different angles, and then we can also learn from observation of the experiences that others are having. This of course is my way of expressing it. This newly developed change between us creates the need to interact and respect the difference, learning how others perceive their world and sharing our own view of it. We learn connection which is not necessary when we are all one.

 

But like all new experiments there are pitfalls, and we have fallen into all of them, probably by design. It's how we learn after all. From eating, walking, talking to life itself, we mess it up until we gain the skills to do it well. Its called 'faking it til you make it' in popular lingo, but it's how it works for all of us. So most of us have messed up the process since the beginning, learning slowly through crisis rather than efficiently through observation because of a misconception. Fortunately, the conveyor belt of time keeps moving evolution along continuously, and us with it, learning whether we like it or not. But we certainly have got ourselves into some loops. All concepts that have taken us away from the main game of interestedly observing each other to learn has sent us down roads that lead into boggy patches.

 

One of these is the hierarchy that denies that we are all made of the same stuff, seeking to impose value on some at the expense of others. This  led to the idea of some things being right and others wrong. Now this is a really sticky bog to get out of. If you come in a certain colour, you may not be seen as of much value as someone of another colour. This thinking has been applied to everything that has been created, using a system of judgement for the distribution of favours, held by the most valued and distributed (or not) to the less worthy, according to personal or social bias. Of course this leads to those at the bottom of this setup feeling bad and angry, both at their treatment, and at themselves for not measuring up in this rigged system. It's easy to see how the process of observation of others to learn has descended into watching others to compare and judge them (or ourselves), causing defensive feelings and behaviour in one group, and superiority and exclusivity in the other. This has been applied to all species and genus as well as to the planet itself. Placing the human species above all other creation has resulted in the die off of so many that we saw as unnecessary, or detrimental to our forward movement towards converting all value into a monetary system.

 

This shuffling of everything up and down the ladder of worth obsesses us. We feel inferior so we attempt to find others that are more so, in order to feel better about ourselves. Then we feel guilt for the putt downs that we dish out. Swinging to the opposite pole, we now try to lift them up again, but in so doing double down on our superiority, however unconsciously. I remember a dear sweet little girl, crying because she felt so sad about animals. She couldn't say why, not being old enough to elucidate her feelings. Empathy came out of recognition from her own difficult childhood, and so connected to them. But in the process  categorized them as being lesser, as she herself must have felt. Activists are born out of the same process. We have the desire to lift others out of the trap we have set for them. While this is admirable, and necessary in the unequal world we have created, it also presents us with another problem to work through. It's hard to see those that we have designated as being worse off than us as having anything of value to offer us in return. We want to elevate them but using the only model we know: ours. All the people that find their way to my practice are suffering at the hands  of this system. Every one of them. They have never learned the ability to respectfully communicate with the rest of life, or be communicated with in that way. The biases in the system categorize them and those around them into good or bad, desirable or not. They come to me feeling worthless, and from that space it is very hard to look at and respectfully learn from life at all.

 

This process is easiest seen by exploring the white Caucasian race. Not that all races haven't adopted some form of the same. It was inevitable considering the whole physical reality is designed around the concept of opposites, from the -+ charge in individual cells upwards. We had to explore all this. But we have to move on from it also, into a place of learning how to synthesize and reintegrate, or we will split ourselves into oblivion. As the colonialists of Europe decided that life was 'their way or the highway', the alternative cultures of the world were tabulated as savages that were primitive, knowing nothing. We designated certain plants as weeds having no value, and placed animals alongside of them, into Kingdoms, differentiating between them and their wild cousins using the tag 'domesticus' to point out their value to the human species.  As time went by and our system became more and more unwieldy, we began to turn to other cultures feeling guilty about what we had made them endure. Now the conqueror becomes the saviour, leaving them with what we call 'white mans guilt'. We became aware that they were not primitive at all,  often having structures that worked better than ours, in many ways. This guilt, along with lingering feelings of responsibility, now get in the way of an equal dialogue between us. We run the risk of casting them in the underprivileged box and feeling responsible for them, rather than seeing that they are beings of energy, shaped in matter, here to learn from each other. Of course, this applies equally to our relationship with animals and plants, fish and birds; all of them from the same dough, all alive, conscious, and intelligent. We look after but don't learn from.

 

What to do? Good point. It's a big undertaking to root all this out of our psyche, look at it interestedly, and grow from the experience. But there are some simple behaviours we can work on. We can train ourselves to see all things as capable of teaching us something, approaching them with interest, and watching what that process causes us to think or feel at the time. We can stop ourselves from going into caretaker mode, by trusting that our communications will bear fruit, not for them but for us. By this I do not mean that we use them selfishly, but that we adopt a 'child mind' of inquiry, seeing what they are willing to offer us without feeling like we have to do anything. We trust that the being we are listening to is also listening and learning from us, on it's own terms. We are not responsible for what they get, only what we get. This same principle can be applied across the board, to all beings including our interactions with other humans. If we see each other as energetic beings, trying out a reality of separation, we can begin the journey to unity through the simple act of paying attention.

 

The journey was always leading back to it again. The model espoused by Stephen Hawkins was based on the principle that matter burst from a black hole, separating in all directions, forming universes and solar systems from chunks of rock that, continued to move further apart by the original momentum. Eventually that momentum would slow and stop, beginning the move back towards unity. As above so below. What is true for the matter we live on, is true for the matter we are. Maybe we too have reached the extension of our separation experiment, needing now to move towards unification. But to do that we must begin within, taking the warring factions inside of us, and listening to them until they cooperate, bringing us back into a new whole inside ourselves. As we do that, it becomes easier and easier to make our peace with all Life.