Presencing Oneness in Our Lives
“We are One” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
Part Six: Whole-Body Mystical Presencing
"For this is the truth in nature, that this ego which thinks itself a separate independent being and claims to live for itself, is not and cannot be independent nor separate, nor can it live to itself even if it would, but rather all are linked together by a secret Oneness." – Sri Aurobindo
“May they all be one, as you, Abba God, are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us.” – Jesus
Whether it’s Jesus, other spiritual teachers, and now many scientists as well, the world is waking up more and more to an understanding and participation in the reality of Oneness, as Paul recently detailed thoroughly in a six-part series.
In spiritual practice, we can move into deep states of experiencing our Oneness. While it is sometimes bestowed upon us as a grace, it is a consciousness we can intentionally cultivate and develop with regular practice. Whole-Body Mystical Awakening can lead us into ways of experiencing this Oneness in our hearts and minds, in our spiritual womb, feet, and whole body. In meditation, we can consciously practice moving into unified reality holistically.
In Whole-Body Mystical Presencing—which is a practice to enter the everyday reality of Christ consciousness, a moment-to-moment permeation of divine spirit—we can live from Oneness while we’re having lunch, walking the dog, working, playing, talking, and resting.
Do you believe that’s possible?
Can we engage a universal sense of presencing Oneness in our daily lives, in our embodied mystical being at any moment?
(I remind us WBMP is an evolution of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening, a developmental deepening we experience over time after familiarizing ourselves with WBMA practice. I encourage you to feel the freedom to engage in either or both in response to where you are in your practice.)
The Challenge and the Gift – Oneness and Time
In Whole-Body Mystical Presencing, we are bringing forward into the present moment a state of being, an energetic attunement and engagement with a way of being in reality. To presence to divine reality in this way, we often begin by relating with past experiences we’ve had that carry this felt sense and quality of presence. We know what it feels like to be in the flow of energetic aliveness, of love, of deeper awareness. We have all experienced this at times in our lives, whether in meditation, in a shared spiritual experience, or otherwise.
An experience of Oneness or transcendence, of unifying relationship with the Ultimate, is a powerful thing. And for most of us, if we have had such an experience, we may treasure it as a significant life experience that happened in our past. It is a precious gift that is not easily come upon or recreated. We can’t just make ourselves feel this way again, experience it any time we like, right?
In one sense, yes, we cannot just recreate this experience to have again. We don’t generate Oneness immediately at will. And at the same time, we can presence this Union reality into the here and now—not as a memory of a separate experience in the past, but as something that is still happening right now.
For such experiences engage us in the eternal, which is to say the reality free from the constraints of time. This is not everlasting time or total separation from time, though it can include both of those dynamics. It is another dimension of being entirely, which exists in the now as much as in the past or future. God is not just everywhere. We can presence to the divine reality which is everynow.
The key to presencing is that which was then is also already and always now. And that which is now is also still then (and coming still then).
If that hurts your brain a little, that’s ok. It’s meant to. A bit of Mystery is a main ingredient here.
It’s more something we experience in embodied presence. If we move out of the head-space of thinking back to the past experience, but presence in our bodies with the felt reality of it in the here and now, we are able to re-member it at any moment. Not as a memory still felt, but an eternal reality we are always experiencing, whenever we engage our presence into it.
We’ll look at some specific practices of how to do that at the end of this writing.
Releasing the Grip of Individuality
“Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul. Now in this ocean of pearling currents, I've lost track of which was mine.” – Rumi
We are also not just presencing to a reality through our own individuality. For that wouldn’t be a holistic experience of Oneness, just a refraction of it through singular experience. This is a significant way we touch into Oneness, but it isn’t the whole story.
For in the same sense that then is also now, that which is me is also All. And that which is All is also me.
This is another way of naming Oneness—which is not amalgamated uniformity but one-One consubstantiality, of the same nature and substance and still with distinction. The I am We are in the I AM.
And so we open our attunement to receive the presencing of this Oneness not just in the felt experience of it personally, but within the flow of the ocean of pearling currents, as Rumi puts it so beautifully.
And so you are not presencing Oneness—though you can do this too—but rather Oneness is present. It is always present. And you are always in Oneness.
Or to put it another way, you are in God and God is in you. You cannot be separated from God in any action, in any state of being, in any awareness or lack thereof. We are always in love, in God, in Oneness, present at any and all times.
And so you are already presencing Oneness simply by existing. Welcoming and receiving this reality consciously frees us from any sense of needing to attain. For we don’t hold it ourselves—we cannot hold it individually. We are simply opening our conscious awareness and active engagement in this already-present, always-here Oneness verition.
“You thought union was a way
that you could decide to go.
But the world of the soul
follows things rejected and almost forgotten
Your true guide drinks
from an undammed stream.”
– Rumi
Practicing Whole-Body Mystical Presencing – Oneness
“This is how you pray continually, not by offering prayer in words, but by joining yourself to God through your whole way of life, so your life becomes a continual and uninterrupted prayer.” – St. Basil the Great
We cannot really come into the presence of this reality conceptually. Words, whether they be poetic or spiritual, clarifying or evocative, will only get us so far in this respect. To bring this eternal reality into conscious engagement, into lived experience through our everyday reality, we need to go further than ideas and understanding.
I offer a variety of practices here as forms of engagement that might fit with your experience with the All. They are invitations to means of engagement, drawing upon our four centers—but not limited to any in its singularity.
Choose whichever of the following you feel drawn to practice now (or anynow!).
The Ocean of Shared Feeling – Heart
At any time when you are engaged with others at work, school, home, or play, drop into the ocean of shared feeling among you. This is the energetic flow of heart happening in the space between. You can do this in a moment of in-between time or while in conversation. It is a skill honed with practice. A double-plane functioning of engaging in social activity while also connecting to the shared ground of being. In this ocean of shared feeling, where we become one with one another, you can sense the felt particularity of this collective current in its locality, while also presencing to the infinite ocean encompassing us all.
While this is primarily a practice of the heart, we can be immersed in this ocean in any of our centers and whole being.
“Heart of All” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
The Lens of Attention – Head/Mind
Our faculty of attention is the focusing of our awareness. It gives us the capacity to be conscious and engaged in life. We have spoken of opening the inner eye of presence. As we take in reality, attentive to what is before us, we refract the light into particular perception of what we are looking at in any moment.
If we close this inner eye, while still remaining awake and aware, we open our perceiving to “the vast expanse of transpersonal awareness, a soaring outreach of universal intelligence of which our own attention to daily life is the local manifest. Such vigilant awareness of its own intrinsic stillness opens to the cosmic ocean of consciousness.” – John Heron
Here, we are presencing to the vast beyond, which is not empty, but full of wisdom, Mystery, divine speech, ineffability, indwelling, preeminence, and immediacy.
Close the inner eye now and be with the vast expanse of Mystery beyond, which is also here now. Be in this state of open allowing. Let yourself remain in the soaring outreach. Or let yourself be given wisdom from beyond, drawing it into the immediacy of now—as seems fitting for the moment.
“Ocean of Consciousness” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
Rooting into Ever-Present Origin – Spiritual Womb
“What is ‘before’ space and time, what has become ever more intensely realizable via the time-lessness, temporicity, time and space (owing to the various consciousness structures), becomes perceptible in conscious achronicity. The pre-temporal becomes time-free, vacuity becomes plentitude, and in transparency the spiritual comes to perception: origin is present.” – Jean Gebser
In the depth of our being, below the ground of our being, “before” the springing forth of our continual creation in uniqueness, lies Origin. The in-breath of all creation, the primordial deep, the preconceived All of Source Oneness, before particular manifestation. God before us.
The Eternal is always present and always beyond time. As such, it is not something we move into with steps in a process—this practice is not “done” in a particular time. Rather, simply, we are presenced/we presence this eternal being in Origin always. You have already done it. It has already happened, is happening, and still happens. We merely open our felt sense of it, which is less a feeling so much as an inexpressible perception.
Don’t try to perceive it. Be in perception from the wholeness with/in/as All.
“Womb of Infinite Origin” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
Seamless Perceiving from Interbeing – Feet/Body
In participatory awareness at any moment, we can open to the processes of perceiving awareness from interbeing. “That there is no gap between seer, seeing, and seen; between hearer, hearing, and heard; between toucher, touching, and touched…to perceive a world is to feel, to participate in, an ongoing interfusion of subject and object through sensory and extrasensory imagery, an interfusion which is capable of development and extension and which reveals the distinctness of subject and object within their interactive communion.”
“Seamless perceiving is not something to be constructed and manufactured. It is a matter of uncovering and noticing what is already going on as an innate condition of our being-in-a-world. We open fully and equally to inner and outer experiences, while letting go of any tight conceptual grip upon them, and at the same time abandoning any compulsive emotional grasp of them. Then we enjoy their seamless marriage within the encompassing embrace of being.” – John Heron
I have found this encompassing embrace is best experienced in a somatic, bodily way. Our mind releases the grip, our hearts let go of emotional grasp, and we simply inter-sense in our body the quantum perception of incarnated entanglement.
You might lie down and open your arms. Let your awareness be with the smallest elements of your being. The vibratory dance of quantum nonlocality, here and not-here at the same time. In this constellation of being, let your perception dance among and between various stars. Not as objects of perception, but lights of your very being shining forth as our emanations. As our cosmic and present body beyond individuality.
Whenever needed, if you feel disoriented, anchor back in your core of particularized being, knowing you are here in your uniqueness. Feel free to dance between the fields of interbeing and being you.
Once you have a felt sense of this, you might find this interbeing arising in any moment, a sudden expansion and contraction of entanglement at the sub-atomic level. At times, I find this vibratory body-bliss shakes my whole being. At other times, it is a slight and simple pulse. Or even just simply an imperceptible tremor below the surface of awareness.
Many of these practices are adopted and adapted from John Heron’s Spiritual Inquiry handbook.
All Images are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN