Our Sacred Responsibility

A Conversation with Nienke from the Netherlands

Nienke joined one of our dialogue evenings during a recent retreat with a question that many people carry but few articulate as clearly as she did. If everything we experience is an illusion, what does that mean for our responsibility to the world? Does this understanding ask us to disengage, to stop caring about injustice, about truth, about the shape of the society we live in? At its best, she suggested, non-duality might cause confusion about what really matters. At its worst, it might lead to nihilism.

There is a version of the non-dual understanding, in both traditional and contemporary circles, that conflates what is an illusion with what is unreal. If the world is unreal, then nothing in it deserves our care. That is nihilism, and it is dangerous.

Let us explore the difference between something unreal and something illusory. Something unreal is something that cannot exist in any form, like a square circle or a married bachelor. An illusion, however, is something that is real but is not what it appears to be. All illusions have a reality to them, although the way they appear usually veils that reality. A pool of water in the desert is an illusion, but it has a reality, namely the play of light. A landscape in a film is another example. The landscape is not real as a landscape, but it has a reality, namely the screen.

To suggest that the world is an illusion is not to deny its reality. It is to suggest that the world is real, but is not what it appears to be. What does it appear to be? It appears to be a multiplicity and diversity of objects that we see, hear, touch, taste and smell, and it appears this way because we view it through sense perception. But there is a reality to the appearance, and that reality is consciousness itself.

I would suggest that what we have taken to be a collection of objects made of inert matter is in truth the activity of consciousness. In referring to the world as an illusion, we are not denying or downgrading it. We are upgrading the world from matter to spirit, from the reductionist, materialist view derived from sense perception to a recognition of its deeper nature as the expression of one infinite consciousness.

Far from leading to disengagement, this recognition is the ground of our deepest engagement with the world. I suggested to Nienke that each of us has a sacred responsibility to let this understanding find expression in our lives, in whatever way is natural for each of us. For some, that expression will be inward, simply being. These are what Eckhart Tolle refers to as the ‘frequency holders’, those whose contribution is the field of presence itself rather than any particular action, whose very being changes the atmosphere of a room, a family, a neighbourhood.

For others, the expression will take a more active form, in artistic creativity, political activism, investigative journalism, scientific research, the caring professions, work with the dying, environmental stewardship, the law where it serves justice, or the raising of children. Each of these is a unique expression of the understanding making itself visible in the world. The spectrum is as wide as there are individuals. What matters is the place from which the response arises, the felt sense of our shared being.

Among the conversations that stay with me from a retreat are the ones in which someone names a tension they genuinely feel, between what they have recognised and what the world seems to demand of them. Nienke’s question was of this kind. What I would suggest in response is that inner recognition and outward responsibility need not be balanced against one another, since one is the source of the other.

This is what I explore in Living in Peace, Living as Peace, a guided meditation I have recently shared. It is an invitation to discover the peace that is already present as the nature of awareness itself, and to find that what flows from this discovery is a natural and wholehearted engagement with the world.

You’ll find the meditation here.

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