Another Possibility
It seems that you are reading these words, maybe sitting on a chair, you are breathing and hearing and perhaps thinking. What is happening is happening to you . . . apparently. And you are an individual in a world full of individuals. This is normal, this is the way it seems. There are people and life happens to them.
Life is happening and apparently people make choices in order to deal with life. They try to make their lives work. It seems that there are various ways in which people negotiate with life . . . sometimes superficially and sometimes more profoundly. But these responses seem to be generated out of personal free will and choice which, in simple terms, avoids pain and seeks pleasure and personal fulfilment. It is believed that people have the ability to influence, to some degree, what happens in their lives.
So what about the possibility that the above is a delusion? What do you feel if it is suggested that you are not reading these words, and sitting and breathing or thinking? Is it possible that reading these words, sitting, breathing and thinking are simply all that is happening. There is no-one doing anything. Is it even possible that there is no-one? Just space in which things seem to happen.
What about the possibility that this self-autonomous individual that feels so very real and so in control is actually a simulation?
Neuroscientists around the world have recently discovered that the brain, as it develops in early infancy, makes the assumption that the world outside the body is separate and possibly threatening to the organism within which it lives. In order to protect itself it apparently simulates a centre or self from which its negotiations and control can be represented. Of course this simulated individual would appear to have free will, choice and the ability to act. And all of this to deal with a world that is assumed to be separate. But is there a separate world? Or is the simulation of individuality generated from a false assumption?
Is this apparent self born out of a “divine” misconception which is thereafter the mother to a raft of other “divine” misconceptions? For, together with its apparent self-autonomy, the individual also comes to believe in and experience what it perceives as the reality of time and space, purpose, destiny and even deity. And all of these assumptions seem to create a personal story in time which usually concerns a search of one kind or another.
Out of this sense of separation there also seems to arise an inherent dissatisfaction. A sense of something missing, an apart-ness from something deeply profound and yet indefinable. This underlying discontent generates a need for comfort or resolution.
Is it possible that all of this story of separation is only wholeness appearing as an apparently separate part of wholeness seeking wholeness. And because the nature of individuality is to be locked into a seemingly separate story in time, it can only function from this personal perspective within the limitations of its own efforts to find something for itself including even spiritual fulfilment. Hence the attraction of paths, formulas, methods and teachings of becoming which promise the seeker future personal fulfilment.
And is it possible that the seeker feels that they are something in the whole and so their search for enlightenment is a search for something else that they can grasp and own. And the more the seeker struggles to find that which cannot be grasped, the more it reinforces its sense of loss and hopelessness.
Perhaps the whole story of separation is simply and only a metaphor pointing to another possibility. And supposing that suddenly this whole individual construct could evaporate and there would only be emptiness? Could it be that, like a vacuum, emptiness is suddenly absolute fullness? The absolute fullness which is wholeness . . . a wonder and an indescrible love that is unconditional. And there could be the realisation that all of that seeking and longing and struggle is also already absolute wholeness . . . an all-embracing love. And that love which we have longed for, has never left us but constantly sings to us through our senses and in every part of the aliveness which is happening . . . reading these words, sitting, breathing, hearing, feeling and thinking. It is all there is, as it is.
Here is the essence of this radical and uncompromising message which is no-one’s.
Tony Parsons
May 2009
