Unity

Unity — the experience the mystics call non-duality, advaita, the One — is Cell Fifty-Eight's territory. And it is placed here, this deep in the upper range of the Lila, because the taste of genuine unity consciousness is not available to the beginning practitioner. It requires the groundwork that the previous fifty-seven cells have been building: the ego examination, the compassion work, the surrender, the love. Only when these conditions are present does the next layer of the veil become thin enough to see through.

The unity spoken of here is not a philosophical position. It is an experiential truth: the felt recognition that the boundary between you and the universe is not fixed, not absolute, and not real in the way you have assumed. What the Vedanta calls Brahman — the ground of all being — is not separate from what it calls Atman — the individual self. They are one movement. The wave is the ocean.

Moments of genuine unity consciousness alter the person who has them permanently. Not because they remain in that state — they almost never do — but because having touched it, they can no longer believe fully in the absoluteness of the separate self. A door has been opened that cannot be closed.

What has your own experience offered you, in glimpses or in sustained periods, of this quality of connection?

The distance between myself and the world I love is the same as the distance between a wave and the sea.