Exclusion or Inclusion?

The atomising and homogenising effects of the prevailing monoculture have left us feeling isolated, alienated and separate. There is a pervasive feeling of disconnection. Despite being globally linked through computers, relationships are fragmenting as increasing numbers of us spend our days communicating with a screen. Rather than running around in the woods building camps, children are glued to consoles, their world absorbed by cyberspace.

The current form of economic globalisation both homogenises global culture and exacerbates social tensions, as MTV and Baywatch beam their way into rural Indian villages that have hardly changed over millennia. Communities that have lived peacefully for centuries are erupting with fundamentalism, due to the destabilising effects of this process. It seems that we need a new way of relating to each other if we are have any chance of shifting from the path that we are on.

In 1945, Aldous Huxley published a book called The Perennial Philosophy, tracing the single strand of ancient truth that lies at the heart of all the world’s religious and mystical traditions. In essence, this strand, or philosophia perennis, claims that we are not separate individual entities but are in fact all just expressions of one universal consciousness, which is ultimately all that there is. The great illusion is that of being a separate little self, not the manifestation of one universal and absolute Self.

This basic understanding is reflected within the original teachings at the core of all major religions. In the Christian Old Testament, we find ‘Before Abraham was, I am’, ‘I Am That I Am’ and Yahweh, the Hebrew term for God, which literally translates as ‘I Am’. In the Hindu Upanishads, ‘Tat tvam asi’, Thou art That. In Taoism, ‘The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.’ Unfortunately, this essential message, that consciousness is primary and not secondary - that you are within consciousness, it is not within you - has been obscured by institutionalised religion.

Now we find that it is not only resurfacing in a spiritual context, but also within a scientific one. For example, Nobel prize-winning scientist Ilya Prigogine claims that ‘Today the world we see outside and the world we see within are converging. This convergence is perhaps one of the most important cultural events of our age.’ His words seem to echo those of Jesus in the Gospel of St Thomas, replying that the kingdom of God arises ‘when the two shall be one, when that which is without is within, and the male and the female shall be one’. Peter Russell is a prominent physicist to have reached similar conclusions about consciousness being primary and not secondary, along with many others, from a whole variety of disciplines, ranging from biologists to transpersonal psychologists.

In other words, a new way of seeing ourselves in relation to others, to the natural world and even to the entire universe, is starting to germinate within the academic world. Since this supports the essence of ancient spiritual teachings, before they were corrupted into ‘religions’, the implications of this perspective gaining wider acceptance could be momentous.