The Way - Spirit from the Well: A way of life for the modern world based on the teachings of the ancient wisdom

Part One. The Origin.

ALL IS ONE

This refers to there being but one power that is the origin of all there is. Apart from this power there is nothing. This power is in and behind all phenomena. It is formless and yet causes all forms to come into existence. Above all it is sentient, that is it feels and knows itself, it is not blind and purposeless.

To understand something we give it a name hence this power has many names, as God and Godhead, Allah, Brahman, Tao, Absolute and Absolute Sentient Power, First Cause, Primum Mobile and so on. Yet this power is beyond all naming. These names mean nothing. It can never be described in words. Yet it is the origin of everything. What it is in essence can only be felt, be experienced. Its essence cannot be understood intellectually. It has been — and can be today — experienced, almost, in its fullness by some of those we call mystics throughout the ages. Yet most people at some point in their lives have had a dim glimpse of this Power, have felt a stirring of wonder and awe at the mystery at the heart of things. We all come from this power and for the most part we are ignorant partakers of this power. The purpose of life is for the being to pass beyond its sense of separateness and realise and then regain its union with this power. The return to its true and real home. Jacob Boehme calls the Infinite Power ‘The Ungrund’. It is a sentient void, nothingness, that is no thing, yet it is the source of all things. It is Absolute Freedom.

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ALL IS TWO

This refers to the twofold aspect of existence. Everything is bi-fold. To define something its opposite is implied.: Good requires Evil, True requires False, Beauty requires Ugly. This twofold aspect of Life originated necessarily in the First Cause, the Initial Power. Before the beginning this power was alone, there was nothing except it. It has no beginning, it will have no end, it is infinite and eternal. It can never die, it can never cease to be. It feels its aloneness (all oneness), which is to us, and possibly is also to the Infinite Power, a terrible thing. How it actually feels to itself, the human heart and mind can never fully comprehend. Imagine being the only person alive in the whole world. For ever. At a certain point it decides to do something: it decides to create. It does this because that is its nature. Possibly also because it is something to do to alleviate its aloneness. It decides to discover itself, find out what it can do. For it can do anything for there is no one else to stop it. It can be considered as playing a game with itself, a game that gives it the utmost joy. It decides to manifest, to bring out into the open what is inside itself, hidden in potentia. It decides to produce forms from the formless. Many myths tell the story of a god who sees a beautiful damsel and pursues her. Each time he catches up with her she changes shape and runs away again. Thus are born all the various forms and shapes of the universe. So it divides itself from itself. The formless gives birth to the formed The latter is the universe. How it does this, I try to inadequately describe in a subsequent section. Behind, and yet in, the universe remains the formless. This twofold aspect, the formless and the formed is a reality, yet also at the same time an illusion. The universe is the shadow of the real, and the only real is the formless, the sentient God. From a certain viewpoint the Good, the True and the Beautiful are the formless; the Evil, False and Ugly are the formed. The former we call God, the latter the universe. These two are one but also not two (see next section). The universe can be said to be the body of God, while the Good, True and Beautiful is his consciousness. Just as you have a body which is formed and visible and a consciousness which is formless and invisible, so with God. You and God are one and the same though on vastly different scales and seen from reverse viewpoints: God moves down into form, Man moves upward to the formless.

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ALL IS NOT ONE, NOT TWO.

This is a difficult idea to understand. A certain leap of the imagination is required, (The Indian Sanscrit word is Advaita meaning precisely this. and a whole Vedanta philosophy of non-duality has been built on the concept.) Put another way, everything is nothing yet everything is something. It has been said that God is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, (I can understand if you are now completely bewildered. It all sounds so impossible, a paradox of paradoxes but bear with me.) We live always in this situation but do not realise it. The purpose of life is simply to realise it. This we do by clearing away all concepts of separativity. (How we do this I do my best to explain in Part Two.)

Eugene Halliday called the state of non duality when reached, Reflexive Self Consciousness which is a state of transcendental consciousness which he said that if humanity realised its huge importance their whole effort would be directed to achieving it. Furthermore he said that the ultimate survival of mankind depended on their so doing.

What does it mean to say everything is nothing yet everything is something. We live in a world of opposites, a world where things are either/or. ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it’, as the saying goes. ‘Make up your mind, it’s one thing or the other.’ This is the function of the rational mind which operates solely by comparing one thing with another. The rational mind is not creative, it simply compares and evaluates one thing or idea in order to reach a conclusion or find which is fit for purpose. But there is another way, a higher mind which rises above these two contrasting things or ideas by bringing them together into a new emergent. This is Advaita, not one not two, or non duality. The original Advaita is the creation process itself, for this is the formless limiting itself in order to create form from itself while still remaining formless itself. (How it does this is described in the last section.) The first emergent has arisen. The only image I can think of to give a glimpse of this apparently contradictory and impossible state of affairs is to think in terms of yourself, for you are a body which is overseen by your sense of awareness of yourself. The body is visible to the senses while the overseeing is invisible. (It is no good saying the awareness is simply a product of the function of the visible brain for this has not as yet been proven and probably never will be. It is equally permissible to say the brain itself has been produced by the awareness, i.e. consciousness, in order to provide for itself a vehicle by which to manifest itself. This is the understanding of all the best ancient authorities and mystics.) The formless causes the formed as a vehicle for its own manifestation, just as your own consciousness or awareness is the ultimate cause of your physical existence. (This is heretical to modern scientific thought, though that thought is still trying to determine exactly what consciousness really is.) All ancient teachings, as well as modern theologians, speak of the ‘Mind of God’. This mind produces the universe — God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. His word, which is invisible, produced the world.

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ALL IS THREE

This refers to the new emergent. In life everything goes by threes. ‘Third time lucky.’ For anything to come into existence there must be first a force, second there must be a resistance to that force and finally there is the result of the force pressing against what resists it. Press your closed fist against your open palm. Press harder and harder. The result. A slight pain perhaps, but definitely, if the pressure is maintained, warmth, heat. Heat. And heat is the origin of the universe. Resistance causes heat. The universe comes about by heat. This is why resistance is necessary to life. Positive and negative: male and female: good and evil. Both are necessary. Everywhere you look you find the threefold process operating. The most obvious example is when you do anything. First you have a will and feeling you wish to do something or you wish to know and understand something, second you think or plan how to go about it, third you do it. Think of any process you like it’s always threefold. In philosophy it is expressed in the terms of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. In psychology it is Conation, Affection, Cognition. It is the Trinity doctrine of the Christian faith, the three triangles of the Sephiroth of the Jewish Qabala. It is the three gods or principles of Hinduism — Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva — and the Trikaya system of the three bodies of the Buddha. In ancient Egypt it is Osiris, Isis and Horus. Finally, the Chinese of the Tao, the Tao- Te-Ching and the I Ching is full everywhere of threeness with the Yin Yang and the constant interplay of change between the two. Tao stresses the concept of Heaven and Earth with Man as the mediator between the two. Heaven is Yin, the spirit, while Earth is Yang, the substance and form: Man is spirit, soul and body. Only Islam, except for the Sufi tradition, as far as I know, is strictly monotheistic and does not accept any concept of threeness.

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IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

This refers to the Finite (Immanence) and the Infinite (Transcendence). The idea that the Infinite Power is in the formed individual and at the same time in the formless.

Infinite Power. (Remember this Infinite Power is sentient and aware of itself. Sentience is a feeling–knowing state, a more generalised sensation than consciousness which is a more focussed awareness.) This Infinite Power is not the blind force of materialistic science, rather a sensitive intelligent power seeking always to evolve. The power evolves through the workings of the universe it has created, striving always for more and more perfection. (However this power is not merely the somewhat impersonal and abstract force it sounds from how I have described it so far. It is that, but it is also personal and loving. Christ talks if it as Him and My Father. He says ‘I and my Father are One. My Father works and I work’. This illustrates well the idea of immanence and transcendence, Christ being immanent in the transcendence that is God. In the same way the Christ in you is immanent in the transcendence.) But there is a paradox here. The Power — or let us now call it also the Father — although it strives ever for more and more perfection, of itself it does not strive for it is already perfect. It is Absolute Being and static; the universe is Becoming and dynamic. Being and Becoming, those are the two states of the One, God, the Father, the source of all there is. The purpose of life is to move from Becoming to Being. The immanence in the depths of the individual is identical with the transcendence of the Infinite Power, God the Father, but writ small. When the individual fully knows and identifies with this he has reached Unity, the ultimate and optimum state for the human being.

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LOVE

This refers to what makes the world go round as the popular song has it. How does Love make the world go round. It is said ‘God is Love, Love is God’. This is literally true. God loves himself. He loves himself because there is no one else to love. His loving himself is the developing of himself. My mentor, Eugene Halliday, defines Love as ‘work to develop the potentialities of being’ That is what God does by loving his creation. He discovers himself by manifesting himself through his creation and then developing it which is done by loving it. As I say in the final couplet of one of my Sonnets of Love (No 23):

Love loves itself, for it can do no other,

It loves itself