The Healing Generation

A Non-Mystical Philosophy of Oneness: Complexly Simple

A non-mystical philosophy of oneness is not easy to apprehend.

The most fundamental existential coherences -- matter, consciousness, and possibility -- are pervasively accepted as true, if not ontologically real (as in radical nihilism). Still they remain as mysterious as any religious epiphany or spiritual principle. The truth of any coherent experience, and the coherence of any existential experience, only make sense if an ontological (real) oneness is accepted as its basis.

The perception of oneness, however necessary its underlying reality may be, is still elusive. Thus mysticism and scientific unknowns became placeholders (more gap-fillers really) so we can continue to interpret reality through rational thought with greater and greater degrees of separation from direct perception.

In suggesting to you a non-mystical philosophy of oneness, I offer most essentially that reality, not as we know it but as it actually is, is a complex system that encompasses all contexts and the smaller coherences they give rise to.

Complex systems are systems with conditional variables and sensitivity to perturbation. They are not just a steady state or an oscillation between or among known conditions. Think of weather, which arises within the earth's atmosphere and varies widely at different scales on a continuum from clear and calm to severe storminess. A philosophy of oneness is the same as noticing that the system itself -- in this case the planet's entire atmosphere -- also carries with it the innate capacity to resist dissolution at the meta-physical level, that is, at the level of the atmosphere/planet whole.

Cosmic coherence has an additional complex feature when compared to the atmosphere, one that it has in common with our ecosystem, living beings, and other systems that are to some degree self-regulating. The system is auto-catalytic, meaning it can change and adapt itself to its surroundings through internal generation of positive and negative feedback loops.

The table below outlines the reiterative patterning that demonstrates a few perceived, non-trivial, and often useful divisions of oneness. The items given here as column headers are the Big Coherences.

The three-fold divisions within each column taken together are complexly interrelated within the Big Coherence category. The bottom line in each column indicates the perceived oneness that results from the associated Big Coherence. Smaller levels of contextual coherence are perceptible at whatever level of observation is desired -- think of the poetry of a single bee visiting a single flower.

By way of analogy, the common physical coherence of weather is again useful. Humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure combine to produce weather. Weather varies across the face of the planet and changes over time within ranges that can be calculated and even projected. Atmosphere is weather from a unified perspective. The oneness of weather.

Stillness is the mystery that is existential physics from a unified perspective. The soul is the mystery that is the rational self from a unified perspective.

But how can oneness be oneness and also be three-fold divisions in five categories -- and then some? Oneness is not "one", as in singular, non-possessive, non-transitive state. Oneness is one-NESS, a steady state, a quiet truth, a condition that if not met at a given moment in a given place remains nevertheless the case for the whole. In a word: coherence.

Still, doesn't that just mean multiple onenesses, which is not oneness at all? The very nature of the oneness is to exist complexly, and it originates from atomic level phenomena so what we see at the level of sensory perception is already complexly expanded beyond any one person's ability to imagine it in its "simple" form.

Click here to view my 2011 video "Making Way for Coherence."

The non-mystical nature of the model is grounded in certain ontological features:

** Nothingness is defined in such a way that somethingness can and does arise directly from it, not only as an initial condition but in any moment and location where conditions are favorable.

** Three characteristics -- which manifest as behavioral continuums -- are defined as arising from any dynamic interaction between nothingness and somethingness.

** The behaviors manifest at a level that so far eludes direct perception or detection, yet it is possible to logically trace derivative phenomena to their source and thereby affirm the model. (No different than what is currently possible with any model of theoretical physics. The difference here is that we do not start off with conflicting models of physics to resolve.)