Failure to thrive

   I have a kind of collection of stories about people who devoted their lives to spirituality, or truth, or science, or metaphysics, mysticism, psychology and at the end of their lives made statements to the effect that they had missed the point of their life.  The meaning of life generally is a fascinating study and it can keep me very busy and distracted from discovering the truth that I haven’t discovered the meaning of my life.

Failure to thrive is a phrase which the medical community applies to infants and old folks.  The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said that most problems in the second half of life stem from the lack of a profound spiritual vision.  The science of metaphysical thinking is based on a single fact: that the basis of life is oneness, wholeness, and completeness.  Regardless of the looks of things, existence of any kind would be impossible upon any other basis.  The law of oneness upholds and sustains all life, including the life of mind and the minding of life.  One absolute and its absolute oneness are the spiritual facts upon which everything must be considered.

When I was a young man, just starting out as an “adult”, within a short time, my world fell apart.  I was utterly lost.  My body was healthy, and so was my bank account.  I was successful in my work and ready to go at the world.  But doors began closing before me and the prospect of great failure stood immovably before me and I stood stunned and immobilized.  Through an amazing to me turn of events, everything changed.  My body was the same, my finances and my career were intact and all of the relationships I lived remained.  Only one thing had changed:  my fundamental point of view.

One new relationship began to grow in my experience.  I became a student of spiritual psychology and my teacher was a charismatic Presbyterian minister with the spiritual gift of “counseling”, who had studied with Dr. Karl Menninger, the famous psychiatrist.

This earth-shattering event, which left the earth unshattered, and me externally unchanged had done a “mighty work of God” in my interior.  From then to much later, something within me guided me along a trail, had me searching for something, and only years later could I name it adequately, correctly and truthfully for myself.  Today, I understand that this something is my own divinity, my own divine nature, the life that is mind, always mine, whose basis is oneness, wholeness, and completeness and whose law is absolute oneness.

Experiences always come before the language which describes them and only later does this language become definitions defining the experience.  You and I experience the “mystical oneness with the divine” long before we discover a language or a community for the shaping of our living of it.  Many of my mystic friends do not seem to know that a student of mysticism is not a mystic.  A mystic has had an experience that so separates two states of life within them as to make the preceding one leading up to the mystic experience, fade into oblivion.  The name is not the thing.  And it is very sad when one comes to the end of their life and discovers they have deceived themselves by the very devotion, study and practices of spirituality, mysticism, or whatever the pursuit of knowledge is called.

Suppose that we have built within us a ‘knowledge or truth instinct.’  Like hunger it has a source, an impetus, an object and an aim.  Suppose like hunger, this truth-hunger nags at us, even hurts us, until we give it the attention it demands.  Have you ever noticed that when you take something to eat, an apple say, your hunger begins immediately to diminish?  During World War II, children whose parents were killed had been gathered into an orphanage.  The children were well cared for in a safe place full of caring people, but many of them could not go to sleep.  Inspiration, came to one of the nurses and she gave each troubled child a piece of bread to take to bed with them.  They just held it --- just in case --- and went to sleep.

If the hunger for truth or knowledge shows up initially as afraidness - anxiety, even panic, is dis-ease a punishment for ignorance of truth or is it a symptom of a specific lack?

There are never two states of life -- good and bad -- if life is one absolute and its nature is absolute oneness.  However, it seems that there is generally an unconsciousness of the basic holistic nature of life, basic completeness, as opposed to the consciousness of it.  Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that the same law obeyed and disobeyed brings opposite results.  It is the awareness of oneness, wholeness, completeness, perfection that we call “good”.  The experience always comes before the language about it.  The absence of the consciousness of perfection, or law of oneness, we call “evil.”  Again, we experience the consequences within ourselves that give these names their force, meaning or value.

But, is there “good” and “evil”,  or is there consciousness and unconsciousness of oneness?

Suppose that every human problem, every trouble and all suffering occurs when we are acutely unconscious of oneness.  When faced with conflict, lack and destruction the common belief is that there are two powers, two presences, two qualities happening and the appearances of things can be very compelling.  It was not until fairly recently that spiritual researchers discovered the fact that the absence of conscious oneness-wholeness-completeness results in the negative appearance of innate oneness, perfection, and in this negative consciousness, the law of oneness seems to operate in reverse.

But what seems to be and what actually is, has long been an interest for spiritual and psychological researchers.  There is no lack of oneness (duality).  There cannot be two absolutes.  There is no lack of wholeness (inadequacy).  Insufficiency of basic substance would mean an inherent self-destructive tendency in the absolute and the absolute would have long ago destroyed itself.  Hence, there is no lack of completeness (destruction).  It is the lack of the consciousness of completeness, wholeness and oneness that makes the universe appear potentially harmful, hostile and negative.  

But another fact needs inserting here.  There is no such thing as “consciousness”.  Consciousness is just a name, just a word - unless and until it is seen and understood that consciousness must of necessity be the consciousness of an individual self.  All consciousness is self-consciousness -- one, only, all.

The lack of conscious assent to the fact of absolute individual oneness appears as opposition; the lack of assent to the fact of absolute individual wholeness appears as inadequate substance, inadequate supply; the lack of conscious assent to the fact of absolute individual completeness appears as destruction and loss.

It is in the conscious assent to these spiritual qualities, to acknowledge them as basic, that opens the way to the perception of oneness, wholeness and completeness in the lived or “human” level called experience.

The negations, apparent violations of the law of oneness, that seem so evident in human experience, the apparent violations of this one divine Principle and its law of oneness is nothing but the absence of the consciousness of that ever-present, ever-operative fact.

Remember, there is no “good and evil”, there is conscious or unconsciousness of oneness.

Remember, when faced with an experience of human conflict, lack and destruction, this is the negative appearing (unconsciousness) of oneness, wholeness and completeness.

Unaware that “I am one” sets me in apparent opposition to myself and makes my universe appear potentially hostile, harmful and negative to me.

Since the absence of conscious oneness-completeness-wholeness results in the negative appearing of the inherent oneness the problem before us, then, is not the obliteration of evil and the preservation of good.  The problem is how to rise to the conscious appreciation of the formerly hidden and unconscious oneness-wholeness-completeness - the perfection of being we already are (have).