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The Paradox of Multiple Onlyness Years ago, I received a note from a couple asking a good question. They were wondering what Saniel meant by his statement in his book Waking Down that "…I do propose that they (the spiritual giants of the past) were, or are, misinterpreting the phenomena revealed by their own illumined observation." Here are excerpts from my reply. Your question about how a spiritual giant might be "misinterpreting the phenomena revealed by their own illumined experience" is a really good one, and strikes at the core of what Saniel is trying to say about this (the second birth) realization as lived in mutuality. I believe his main point there is that, just because someone is "enlightened" or "realized", it doesn’t mean that everything they think or say is True in either a human or even a cosmic sense. It’s simply what that person is thinking or saying. To the realizer established in the fundamental confidence of his or her own Being, things can tend to look and feel pretty darned clear, and therefore worthy of stating emphatically, or even framing as an absolute truth. I tend to do this myself. Still, it ain’t necessarily so. And if the realizer insists on the absolute truth of his/her own observations, those around him/her who happen to disagree will be forced to either 1) submit and suppress their own truth, 2) try to suppress or undermine the realizer, or 3) leave. Of course, the concept of "leaving" can be pretty illusory since one’s stance in Being goes wherever you go. (For more on this idea, see my essay titled Mutuality.) The problem is that, in such a situation, the realizer is not making him/herself permeable to the embodied truths of others. Not only is the realizer not open to the inherently divine and human truths of others, but such a realizer will not be capable of truly empowering others to find their own truths. The result is that, if those others are in an aspirant relationship with the realizer, the aspirant never gets a truly liberating green light in Being for the realization and embodiment of their own truth. I have my own feeling for why this happens; here’s my rendition of it. When one realizes the Onlyness (I’m not talking about realizing Consciousness here; that’s what I refer to as the Witness Awakening), it’s perfectly obvious that the Self nature is all that exists, not only in this body, but in all bodies. What that experience suggests to the awakened mind is that his or her Onlyness is the ONLY Onlyness. This suspicion is especially born out when no other Onlynesses show up to stake their claim. If the realizer is unfortunate enough to be deprived of such evidence for long enough, that realizer is likely to assume that no other Onlynesses can possibly exist, and might even declare him or herself to be the One and Only Divine Avatar on Earth. This, according to the dynamics I outlined earlier, then perpetuates the inability of others to receive a truly liberating green light for their own avataric incarnation, which in turn validates the declarations of the realizer. What we have in our little community is what appears to me to be the first appearance of what I call the Paradox of Multiple Onlynesses: a bunch of us all realized as the Onlyness. Believe me, it’s weird. Mutuality appears to be the only option for a sustainable future. © 1998 Ted Strauss |
