told me that I shouldn’t complain because, after all, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in the sixteenth century during the Inquisition for espousing ideas not very different from the ones I expressed. Bruno believed in the unity of all things, and he strongly opposed Aristotelian dualism for separating body and spirit. He exhorted us all to achieve union with the “Infinite One” in an infinite universe.
Figure 1. Samanthabhadra, the primordial Buddha, and his consort.
Baruch Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, had a similar worldview; since he was Jewish, he was fortunate to be spared the Inquisition. He was, however, banished from his own synagogue because of his pantheistic model of “all things together” comprising God. Einstein said that he “believed in the God of Spinoza,” which we understand to be the organizing principle of the universe. In the Dzogchen tradition, our personal experience of this profound principle is known as dharmakaya, and it is considered equivalent to the experience of undifferentiated loving awareness, or vajra (heart-essence). It is the vehicle and the dimension through which we directly experience the organizing principles of the universe (the dharma).
The philosophy of a universal connection among all things was taught in the 1750s by Bishop George Berkeley, who could be considered an early Transcendentalist. He felt that the world was greatly misapprehended by our ordinary senses, and that consciousness was the fundamental ground of all existence. In the nineteenth century, this idea was expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and today by Christian Science, Science of Mind, and Unity churches.
The coherent theme among all of these is that there is an essential part of all of us that is shared. The famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung described our mind-to-mind connections in terms of a “collective unconscious.” Contemporary Judaism teaches a similar view of our interconnectedness. The revered Jewish theologian Rabbi Lawrence Kushner tells us that:
Human beings are joined to one another and to all creation. Everything performing its intended task doing commerce with its neighbors. Drawing nourishment and sustenance from unimagined other individuals. Coming into being, growing to maturity, procreating. Dying. Often without even the faintest awareness of its indispensable and vital function within the greater “body.”. . . All creation is one person, one being, whose cells are connected to one another within a medium called consciousness.19
Historically, the belief in our connected nature has largely been based on the personal experiences of the people who promoted the view. Today, we recognize that just because large numbers of people have believed something for several millennia (for example, that the earth is flat), that does not by any means make it true. How are we to decide whether this view of community of spirit is deep nonsense unrelated to nature or a valid concept of the workings of the world? The usual scientific approach is to see if the model offers testable predictions.
The idea that our thoughts transcend space and time is definitely not a new thought. In the collected Buddhist teaching of 500 b.c., recorded in the Prajnaparamita, we learn from almost every page that our apparent separation is an illusion and that there is “only one of us here” in consciousness — perhaps not even one.20 Once this spiritual connection is experienced, compassion for all beings is the natural consequence.
We have the opportunity to experience a self, but that is not who we really are. In fact, in the teaching of the enneagram, a traditional Sufi analysis of character traits and behavior, the self or ego is a fixation from the past; it is conditioned existence — exactly who we are not.21 The enneagram, brought to us in the 1970s, attempts to make us aware of the extent to which we live in a trancelike attachment to our story of who we think we are. Our “business card,” over which we lavish so much attention, is really a kind of “story card” that we give people to tell them who we think we are. If we believe that story, it can cause us a lot of suffering.
In his book on the enneagram, psychologist and spiritual teacher Eli Jackson-Bear makes this important idea poignantly clear. He writes:
When identification shifts from a particular body... to the totality of being, the soul realizes itself as pure, limitless consciousness. This shift in identification is called Self-realization. In this realization, not only do you find that love is all that there is, but you also discover that this love is who you are.22
FOUR-VALUED LOGIC
I believe that we are neither a “self” nor “not a self,” but that we are awareness residing as a body. This is the sort of apparent paradox about who we are that may not be solvable within the framework of what we call “Aristotelian two-valued logic” — the logic system basic to all of Western analytical thought. In two-valued logic, we frame our reality with questions like “Are we mortal or immortal?” “Is the mind or soul part of the body?” or “Is light made of waves or particles?” But none of these have “yes” or “no” answers. The exclusion of a middle ground between the poles of Aristotelian logic is the source of much confusion. Other logic systems have been suggested in Buddhist writings; the great second-century dharma master and teacher Nagarjuna introduced a four-valued logic system in which statements about the world can be (1) true, (2) not true, (3) both true and not true, and (4) neither true nor not true — which Nagarjuna believed was the usual case—thereby illuminating what is known as the Buddhist Middle Path.23 According to Nagarjuna, the Buddha first taught that the world is real. He next taught that it is unreal. To the more astute students, he taught that it is both real and not real. And to those who were furthest along the path, he taught that the world is neither real nor not real, which is what we would say today. (In an interview in the magazine What Is Enlightenment? the Dalai Lama singled out Nagarjuna as one of the truly enlightened people of all time. He is thought to be a contemporary of Garab Dorjé, the spontaneously awakened discoverer of Dzogchen.)
The two-valued Aristotelian logic we use every day is simply inadequate to describe the data of modern physics, while the four-valued logic system appears quite outside Western consideration and thought. A seeming paradox in physics that may well find its resolution in “four-logic” is the so-called wave/particle paradox. It is well known that, under the conditions of various experimental arrangements, light displays either wave-like or particle-like properties. But what, then, is the essential nature of light? This question may not be amenable to our familiar system of logic, and may be better addressed by an expanded logic system. We might say, for example, that light is (1) a wave, (2) not a wave, (3) both a wave and not a wave, or, most correctly, (4) neither a wave nor not a wave.
This is how we are able to be both a self and not a self — both separated as bodies and not separated in awareness. Four-logic shows that the so-called problem of mind-body duality is not a paradox at all. I discuss this here because four-logic is really the handmaiden of nonlocality, wherein things are neither separate nor not separate.
In the Sutras of Patanjali, which are still in print, the great teacher was not primarily trying to interest people in developing their psychic abilities.24 He was actually writing a guide on how to become a realized person — how to experience God. He would say that knowing God is part of knowing yourself. The mystic had observed that, once people learn to quiet their minds, they begin to have all sorts of interesting experiences, such as seeing into the distance, experiencing the future, diagnosing illness, healing the sick, and much more. But his goal was to help his students achieve transcendence, rather than to display these siddhis, or powers.
I see these abilities, and the mental interconnectedness that they imply, as part of the “perennial philosophy,” and I believe they should be seen as matters of experience rather than items of belief. They provide an opportunity to step outside the accepted contemporary paradigm (or religion) of “scientific materialism,”
