Thou Art That: A Contemplation On Peace & Unity

At times we may find that issues from our past often rear up their ugly, hydra-like heads so that we can finally deal with them.

Once we’ve done that we can truly move on with the rest of our life and get on with whatever it is we are meant to be doing with it.

At some point, we need to be able to allow our heart to catch up with our head. Understanding "truth" is the easy part; living it, breathing it, putting it into practice is the hard part.

From what I've noticed, those who live the way of the healer — those who have embodied practices such as Yoga, Tai Chi, meditation, etc. — actually have the tools to be able to put these things into practice.

So what holds us back?

When we find ourselves blocked by old thoughts, feelings, or behaviours, what benefit could it possibly serve? What is the purpose behind this? What is the pay-off?

How we relate with others can be a real bugger. Romantic relationships: even more so. Add children into that mix — and it’s doubly so.

We all hate being hurt — I don't think I have met anyone who doesn't!

I recently learnt something important: that of the illusion of the boundaries between the Self and the rest of the world.

It was hard at first to quieten the “monkey mind”; but once I did — even if it was for only the briefest of moments — I realised that beyond the echoes of old thoughts/words/voices there was nothing truly separating subject from object.

Wholly immersing myself with the cosmos, I realised something important:

That which arises is nothing but illusion; it holds no power over you.

What is stopping us from forgiving others, if not but our own deep-seated desire to not-forgive?

Or put another way, the deep-seated fear of forgiving (or maybe even being forgiven).

It’s easier to dislike someone who hurt us, rather than to love them. It plays into our fantasies about how hurt we are, or how victimised we may feel.

What if that dislike were to be self-directed?

What if it was our own mistakes that we can't actually forgive?

It plays into a kind of “misery narrative”, a genre of narrative we are exposed to by the mass media every waking minute.

A friend of mine calls this stuff "misery porn", the kind of thing that the tabloid current affairs outlets spew forth in the name of sympathy.

It's sickening and banal, and it reinforces this type of victim mentality within us: the "poor bugger me" attitude.

Ultimately, it does nothing other than encourage us to feel miserable and fearful, and creates the perfect environment for striving for illusory perfection. This of course can never be attained, thus feeding and reinforcing that "poor bugger me" misery-victim notion.

Knowing (gnosis) that you can achieve whatever you choose… that you can heal… that you can forgive… these are powerful, liberating, and transformative.

This is not a belief; beliefs are something that are rationalised, that you can convince yourself to be truth even if it is not.

Gnosis — true knowing — comes from the Heart.

Truth is known, not believed.

When you know something, you feel it in your Heart; and that feeling is amazing and blissful, the kind of feeling that causes you to grin from ear to ear, that makes you feel like you are floating as you walk.

We need to do more than merely forgive the hurt; we need to know forgiveness. It needs to be embodied, felt throughout our whole body and nervous system.

Once you do that, it has been said that you will truly understand liberation.

In the Taoist healing tradition, emotions are expressions of our Qì. When we are in this state of embodied forgiveness and kindness, our Qì flows freely; it goes where it needs to go, warms what it needs to warm, and nourishes what it needs to nourish.

When we have lived with a constant feeling of constraint for a very long time, we get used to the numbness. Once it starts to flow again, it feels like a tingling all over and all through our body.

This was the true purpose behind the ancient practices of Qigong, Tantra, Yoga, Tai Chi, and so on.

When Qì flows, emotions flow where and when they need to. Then, we are able to be real: we can cry when we're sad, laugh when we're happy, and change our world when we are angry. There are no 'good' or 'bad' emotions; the emotions are what they are, and we either express them honestly and authentically, or we hold them back and allow them to make physiological or neuro-chemical changes to our body.

The ancient Chinese shamans recognised this, which is why they wrote about how the internal causes of illness and disease were our emotions.

The real goal of healing is to become whole; being whole by definition means incorporating all our parts into an integration that is more than just the sum of those parts.

All of our parts.

Even the murky ones.

The real illusion (or so it seems to me) is that these are 'parts'; that is, that they are somehow separate —they're not!

To be whole is exactly that — whole! And that, of course, includes what is seemingly outside of us just as much as what is inside of us.

There is no difference. To paraphrase the old Hermetic aphorism:

That which is above is as that which is below..

There is no "us and them".

There is no subject/object.

There is no "me and you".

There is only "thou art that"!

Image courtesy of Fares Hamouche on Unsplash

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