Circular Letter january 2010

An ant got lost in a sugar bowl. She took a grain of sugar and ate it. Liking the sugar she took a grain to carry back home. But on the way she decided to return and eat all the sugar in the bowl. The ant never returned home.

Living without proper measure brings us into a world of never ending desires which clamour for yet more and more. We are carried off by endless dreams, heedless of the truth or of the facts. Just like the ant, we are enveloped by a great blanket of forgetting. Only Oneness is the ultimate reality. It is not the glitter and glamour of the ‘more and more’. In real oneness there is just the all-embracing One. That One is also called ‘the One without a second’. That One is the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality. Living in a concrete and material world we are convinced that the material is its nature. Indeed we find it very difficult to visualize any other world or any other degree of realness. But matter maybe considered as an almost endless collection of molecules. These molecules may be divided into atoms and atoms into subatomic particles and subatomic particles in energy-fields. Finally, the energy-fields seem to merge in an mysterious emptiness. That apparent emptiness is most potent and the real basis of the material world. Seen from this angle the material world is like a dream and transient. Only One is real. What is not-One and therefore dual or multiple has been created and is relative and ephemeral. It has a beginning and therefore an end. What remains is the One, the potent and apparent emptiness.

This all-encompassing oneness is the basis of the love and charity as preached by Jesus Christ: love others as much as you love yourself. The same applies to the compassion of the Lord Buddha, to the mildness of Lord Shrî Krishna and to the empty fullness of Zen. Oneness includes everything and excludes nothing. In dire ignorance we turn all-inclusive oneness into the exclusivity of a chosen group, barring everybody else. Our lives become filled with contradictions. Everything becomes polarised because of pairs of opposites such as ‘ I and you’. Love turns into hate and anger, compassion turns into ruthlessness, mildness into cruelty and emptiness into endless consumption.

The truth remains that the limited arises from that which is unlimited. Everything arises from empty fullness which is most potent and creative. That fullness is the basis of inspiration and motivates us to bring our lives to fulfillment. Yet, at the same time, it is a dynamic and potent emptiness as in the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. The one substance of unlimited consciousness penetrates, inspires and transcends everything created. Everything comes forth from this one consciousness, is kept alive by it, and merges into it. This is the ultimate reality of any scientific research. Unity or oneness is not the fleeting product of an exalted mind but is a fact, the reality itself, the ultimate truth. There is nothing else. Only a knower of that ultimate reality can teach us how to get there. Seek and you will find.

Paul G. van Oyen