For Never Anything Can Be Amiss, When Simpleness And Duty Tender It.

There is nothing, that is not oneness. There is no one, that is not oneness. How can what awareness seems to manifest be wrong? There is nothing wrong. And in that awareness, of neutral, perfect manifestation, lies the attitude that many who seek - and exhort the benefits of - and desperately push enlightenment require. There is both peace and passion in this seeing; and often, there is no desire for it all to change to something better.

Humanity - desperately working for peace, or inciting hatred. Despite the widely varying motivations and personalities, we are all the same. Strip away the belief systems of the mind, look in the mirror and know absolutely that the person seen is just the same as the Taliban member who wakes up in the morning, looks into his bit of mirrored glass and reaches for his turban. That sense of self, of I Exist, of I Am, that seems so singular and special and ours - that consciousness is shared. And simply that is what these words point to. It is tempting put a lot of importance on the thoughts, the story of existence; the people who write about oneness, Advaita, consciousness, awareness, or whatever we're calling it, go to great lengths to try and devalue the mind and the thoughts, and the personality they weave, the personality so often mistaken for that shared consciousness. The story of dispelling all that is the most important story, evidently. "Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9% of everything you think, and everything you do, is for your self, and there isn't one," says Wei Wu Wei. There is a great urge to end the suffering that the misguided attribution of the story equalling the Self apparently causes. There is a lot of energy devoted to insisting that the sense of separation - the effect of this mis-attribution - is incorrect, and not clear seeing of reality. Or, the self and its personality is celebrated, and the oneness of shared consciousness is rejected as too dry and arid; the story of life is treasured, and the tasks presented by life are deeply valued. If we all see clearly our shared consciousness, say some, then we'll be a world healed, working together for a common, loving goal; we will be love in action. Or, say others, if we lose our value of the separate life, we will be passionless, and be unmoved by the plight of mankind, and unmotivated to work for peace, healing and harmony. Or perhaps, say the haters of dispassion, if we lose our personalities and passions, the world will be a dull, saccharine place, full of do-gooders with no hopeless cases to take under their wing, all happy-clappy, touchy-muchy and healy-feely. Bleagh, they say. Where is the wholeness, the interest, the variety, in that?

It is already just as it is. How it might be is speculation happening now. How it has been is memory happening now. It is, was and will be as it must be. All the suffering, war, working to end war, passion to make a positive contribution to society, present awareness uncluttered by believing the thoughts that arise, apathy, hard work -it's all here now. Those thoughts - no matter what they are - are not yours, and every single thought is a gift. Those actions - no matter how well-considered - are not your actions, and every action is an act of worship. The thoughts rejecting or embracing the concepts just read - again, not yours, no matter how involved they seem to be with your personality. There is nothing wrong, not with the most amoral acts, or the understandable resistance to those acts of immorality; nothing wrong with passionate, missionary actions to save the world, and get us all to behave compassionately. Life is, has been, and will always be everything. It is here for no reason other than itself. Those stories, seeming to unfold, are real and unreal, meaningless and meaningful; the bland, passionate, cruel and loving Utopia our separate personalities have been looking for is right here.