A Dialogue Transcribed between Asa and Rhea
Unity and the reconciliation of the Relative and the Absolute
Q: What is the Truth about Unity?
A: The direct answer is given that, the Truth of Unity is Love. Love is The Law of Unity. Love under ONE WILL. You were made by it, in it and of it. However, such an answer may not dissolve the questioner into the experience of Unity, so we will take an indirect approach through Alchemical metaphor.
What we want to observe is the function that this question serves, and its inherent presuppositions. First, this question presupposes that there is an untruth about Unity. If there is a Truth then there must be an untruth, here we see a division within this idea and in the question, and so to approach the question from within a division is to obfuscate the experience of Unity, and making Clarity impossible. Any answer to this question will only ever come from a context of polarity, and be an intellectual analysis which, will not adequately establish the reference frame for a direct experience of Unity. The intellect can not know Unity directly, it can only formulate clever interpretations and definitions. Speaking of it is like standing on a mountain to try to touch the sun. The Heart is the only aspect of the Human Instrument that is capable of Clarity, when we define Clarity as being, a Unified perception that knows all duality as neither real or unreal. No words can be said about Unity that accurately represent it in its entirety, and the closest we could come to this would be through the domains of mathematics, sacred geometry, art, poetry and music which are still just the shadows of what they represent.
The function of this question is to come to Clarity, and to have a direct experience of Unified perception. And so in the spirit of this genuine intention, you are invited to open within, to the feeling of Oneness held forever in your Heart. And as you read these words, allow the Heart’s Eternal Intelligence to interpret them. Listen behind the words for the finer frequencies they point to. The words are just the vehicle for the Vibrations of Love that can come through them.
The Law of Polarity
We can not talk about Unity without getting stuck in the mire of the mentalism and paradox. The closest we can come to the description of Unity is to say what is it not. So instead we will approach the question of Unity by the investigation of the Law of Polarity, which states: “Everything is dual; everything has two poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.” – The Kybalion
To acknowledge one aspect of anything is to presuppose the existence of its opposite. In this way, a relative truth is only half-true, and equal parts of “reality” are given to both sides of its division. Herein lies the Divine Paradox where the mind attempts to reconcile the Relative with the Absolute.
From the context frame of the Absolute, Unity or Oneness is All That Is in reality. And, it can be said from the context of the Absolute that the Relative – which contains all the multitudes of contrasts and variations within the perceptual world – is an illusion. Yet the context frame of the Absolute is an abstraction outside the realm of perception. The intellect and brain and senses are incapable of witnessing to this level of perception directly. This limitation is inherent in physical embodiment. A mouth that speak the words “time and space is and illusion” speaks the ultimate Truth but knows it not. The Absolute is unknowable, because knowledge is contained within the Relative or perceptual realm. Knowledge, in the way we understand it is sensory based and therefore of duality. It is forever bound in time and space.
Thought will never touch the Absolute. The mind, which employs the intellect as its primary mode of function operates sequentially, temporally. It is of time. One thought comes after the next. One word after another strung together to form an idea, one idea strung together after another to form a perception, one perception after an another to form a belief structure. There is no-thing, no structure, and no perception outside of time. Atemporal or simultaneous thought is not an experience that one would have a mental reference frame by which formulate an internal representation giving it any meaning, and so the One Absolute Truth is not something the mind will ever apprehend.
From the context frame of the Relative, what has reality is the world of forms. What has reality is what the senses can measure, either by themselves or by their extensions, as with technological instruments -which includes telescopes, microscopes, computers and even mental instruments of mathematics and theoretic physics. The Relative is made up of endless multitudes of polar opposites dancing in ever moving waves of vibration. Light contrasts darkness, day contrasts night. One pole defines its opposite, giving it life by defining its meaning.
When we observe reality from the view point of the Absolute, we see only Oneness, which has nothing to do with perceptual seeing. Absolute Truth or Unity could be defined as a thing of the Mind of God, or Source Intelligence, while the Relative truths are of the mind of Man. And so, to Source Intelligence the universe must be unreal, as an illusory dream or a result of meditation, because wholeness can not acknowledge separation and still be Whole. But to the finite minds embodied in these human instruments, reading these words considering these ideas, the Universe is very real indeed and ought to be considered so lest we become cut off from humanity and flounder in the nebulous abstraction of high metaphysics, incapable of relating to the world in an integrated way.
In considering the view point of the Absolute we must not make the mistake of ignoring or denying the facts of the perceptual phenomena that is reported through the senses. Though we may recognize the holographic nature of matter through the field of metaphysics, seeing atoms as aggregates of even smaller particles of energy organized in structures of mostly empty space, if we kick the bed post as we are climbing in to bed at night it will hurt. Though it is our brain that feels the pain of the foot, which is also comprised of atoms, it is not sufficient to deny the pain on the basis of the illusory nature of matter, lest there would be no experience of the foot or the bed post at all.
To the untrained mind a paradox is experienced as a dichotomy. It seems to be a contradiction that is inherently conflicted. This need not be so. The tendency of the mind is to select one aspect of a pair of opposites as reality or truth to the rejection of every other. Either the lights are on or they are off, both are not true simultaneously. Either the Universe is Real or an Illusion. The either/or condition of the polarized, dualistic mind is embroidered into the whole fabric of creation. Existence is dualistic in nature, but Being is Unified. All conflicts and disharmony operate out of the context of irreconcilable poles of opposites. This is the meaning of “the war between good and evil”.
Vesica
Yet we can shift out of a binary mode of thinking, thereby reconciling all opposites and their conflicts with a single recognition that, all meaning is context dependent, and we can inhabit multiple contexts simultaneously . This idea loosens the mind’s grip on the need to have a concrete mental position for its certainty. Uncertainty, is the foundation of all emotional turbulence and the very thing that interrupts the experience of Unity. The Absolute and the Relative do not need to compete for reality. They indeed exist simultaneously, harmoniously one reflecting the other in the mirror of existence. When we observe life from this context, this – the Law of Polarity – is experienced as the divine interplay of lovers as opposed to warring factions. In fact, unless and until they exist within the mind simultaneous and harmoniously, the experience of Unity is impossible. The Absolute will deny the forms, and the Relative will deny the formless, causing the mind to be fragmented between the two and uncertain of its nature.
Hebrew letter Zain
Material Creation was built on the foundation of separation. In the process of material creation the Oneness is divided in to twoness, just as cells in mitosis divide themselves again and again to build the body. Before there was anything there was no-thing and no-mind to discern between this or that. There was no contrast, no variation and no movement of any kind. In Qabalah the faculty of discernment is represented by the Hebrew letter Zain which means sword, and is imaged by tarot Key 6 “The Lovers”. It is the sword that divides the light from the dark and the illusions from reality, the day from the night, the man from the woman, the conscious from the unconscious. It’s attribution within consciousness is given the title, the “Separating Influence”. It gives consciousness the ability to distinguish between this and that, right and wrong, the inner and the outer, past and future and all the multitudes of polarities that come out of the original division that gave birth to time/space.
Key 6 The Lovers
If we look within, to our own personal experience of consciousness, we can observe that the “Separating Influence” is very much alive through the mind’s continuous activity of division. The dictionary defines the word discern as: “To perceive by sight or other senses or by the intellect; to see, recognize or apprehend. To distinguish mentally; discriminate right from wrong.” Discernment is defined as “The faculty of discerning, discrimination; acuteness of judgment and understanding.” Your mind is actively discerning right now. You are reading, you are perceiving, you are interpreting. And, in discerning between this word and that word, this meaning and that meaning, you can see clearly that discernment is apart of polarized thinking. With out it you could not know one word from the next, or even observe “things” at all. It operates out of the mental faculty and gives us the ability to categorize and organize images in to a context whereby the mind derives meaning based on its memories from the past.
When we view the Law of Polarity, within the process of cognition, we can see that there is no absolute meaning. A truth is relative to the context from which it is perceived, and perception is a choice for which frame of reference(s) you would hold at any given moment. If you desire to experience Unity, then you would need to integrate your context frame to include the Relative and the Absolute. In other words, drop the activity of binary discernment. You would stop dividing, analyzing, categorizing and ordering interpretation in a vertical hierarchy of ideas. Said, another way, suspend all meaning, and allow Unity to cover all perceptions with a blanket of forgiveness and wholeness, which simply means to accept the one meaning for all perceptions. This will restructure the hierarchy laterally giving all perceptions equal portions of reality and non-reality, nullifying the conflict of paradox.
Yet this is easier said then done as the untrained mind is addicted to the activity of interpretation by process of division. Words about Unity are not the experience of Unity, just as the word tree is not the tree. If we are to come to a direct experience of what the words point to we must subject the mind to a process of sublimation where by the Separating Influence of consciousness is employed in a multidimensional context that sorts out the coarser from the finer elements of perception and then conjoins them together again. The key to this capacity is in the approach.
Alchemically, the psyche undergoes a process of separation and conjunction where the relative and the absolute are pored in the container of consciousness in equal measure. These seemingly separate contexts of awareness then react so to speak, combining into a third quality that integrates both dimensions of Being into a untied field of perception. This is what the Emerald Tablet is speaking of when it says, “Separate the Earth from Fire, the Subtle from the Gross, gently and with great Ingenuity. It rises from Earth to heaven and descends again to Earth, thereby combining within Itself the powers of both the Above and the Below. Thus will you obtain the Glory of the Whole Universe. All Obscurity will be clear to you.”
In L.V.X. Asa and Rhea
