Three Portals to the Unity of Being
Nature, Teaching and Friendship as Gateways to Our Shared Being
Every experience you have – the sight of these words, the breath you are taking, the sounds around you – is pervaded by a quiet knowing. That knowing, which we call ‘I’, is not something you possess but what you are. From it arise all thoughts, feelings and perceptions; within it the world appears.
This reflection invites you to rest as that simple being, to see it mirrored in nature, expressed in friendship, and illuminated by the teaching that points you back to your self. These three – perception, feeling and thought – are the portals through which being expresses itself in form. Through these portals, being knows and celebrates itself in every form. What begins as reflection becomes remembrance – the recognition of the unity we have never left.
The ultimate truth cannot be expressed in words, and therefore silence is its highest expression.
However, if the ultimate truth were to be expressed in words, ‘I am’ would be its highest expression, because ‘I am’ expresses reality’s experience of itself. ‘I am’ is what reality, the one infinite, indivisible whole, would say of itself if it could speak.
Therefore, the words ‘I am’ are the highest formulation of truth in the English language.
But for one who does not yet know themself purely as the ‘I am’, who has allowed their being to be qualified or conditioned by experience, this pure recognition is obscured. They believe and feel not just ‘I am’, but ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’. For such a one, a teaching is needed to bridge the apparent gap between who they seem to be and who they truly are.
What would be the highest expression of such a teaching?
Simply be.
All the methods, practices and pathways prescribed in the great traditions are preparations for the ultimate practice – the non-practice of simply being.
The instruction ‘simply be’ is just one tiny step away from the experience of simply being, which is reality’s experience of itself.
The instruction ‘simply be’ makes a small concession to someone who feels themselves to be other than the one infinite being.
After all, the One does not need to be told to be. The instruction ‘simply be’ is a small concession that, if followed, takes you straight to your true nature. And there, no further instruction, effort or practice is required.
Nature as the Symbol of Being
The idea for this essay arose during a recent retreat at the Mandali Retreat Centre, near Milan, set on a hilltop with a spectacular view of Lake Orta. One reason I like holding retreats in places like this is that nature is so overwhelmingly present and powerful.
When you look across the lake at the mountain on the other side, the mountain is an emblem of being.
To see it as such is the experience of beauty.
This is what Wordsworth was describing when he said, ‘I was only then contented when with bliss ineffable, I felt the sentiment of being spread o’er all that moves and all that seemeth still.’1
He wrote this in the Lake District in northern England. Looking out across the hills and lakes, he was overwhelmed by the primary fact of nature: it is. The mountain stands as a symbol of being.
If you live in close proximity to nature, it impresses its being on you. This is why being in nature is itself a meditation. Beauty is both a portal and an expression of the one reality.
The mountain on the other side of the lake is like a symbol of the magnificence, immobility, agelessness, nobility and tranquillity of being. It is a representation of these qualities in form, and the contemplation of its form takes you to the experience of its qualities.
The healing power of beauty.
Clothed in Experience
You are always experiencing your being, but it is often overlooked because it is clothed in the shifting textures of experience.
You do not need to get rid of anything, nor do you need to become anything. Simply return to the being that you always and already are. Be that knowingly.
No effort is required unless, of course, you are temporarily lost in the content of experience. In that case, a gentle effort is needed to disentangle yourself and return to your self.
The same being that shines in you as your knowledge – your experience of yourself – shines outside of you as the world.
Just as we don’t notice our being on the inside, because it is clothed in experience, so we don’t notice the same being on the outside, because it is clothed in the names and forms that thought and perception confer upon it.
It is perception that confers form on nature. It is thinking that confers names on those forms. But behind those names and forms, and shining as those names and forms, is the one infinite, ever-present being that you are.
In other words, it is you, infinite aware being, who, in rising as perception and thought, draws existence out of yourself. It is perception that draws existence out of being and gives it a temporary name and form.
The Poet’s Pen and Airy Nothing
It is what Shakespeare meant when he said:
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.2
He was trying to describe how the poet’s pen – the faculty of thought and perception – gives names and forms to airy nothing, to the one infinite being.
We are not just spectators of nature; we participate in nature. Nature, as we experience it, takes place at the interface between infinite being and the finite mind. The world owes its reality to infinite being, but borrows its appearance – its name and form – from the finite mind.
As Wordsworth said, we half create, half perceive the world.
The Three Portals of Unity
In its own experience of itself, the One is infinite and indivisible. There are no parts, no objects, no subjects, no selves. And this utter indivisibility, this absence of otherness, is the experience we know as love – the unity of being. This is why love is said to be the nature of reality or, in religious language, God’s nature.
But as soon as the One is refracted through the prism of thought and perception, it seems to be fragmented and appears as the many. In other words, unity seems to vanish and multiplicity appears.
When love is refracted through the mind – through the prism of thought and perception – it appears as relationship between the apparent parts of the whole.
But what is the energy, the attractive force in relationship? It is love – the magnetic force that draws together two people, two creatures, or any two things that seem separate.
Love is not limited to the human heart; it is the same force at work throughout creation, always drawing all things back into their original unity.
If, at the level of experience, love is the magnetic force that draws together two people, then at the level of the physical world, gravity is its reflection. What physics describes as the attraction between two bodies we may understand as love viewed from the outside. Love and gravity are not different forces but two aspects of the same movement of being towards itself – the impulse of unity to overcome the appearance of separation.
The pull that draws one body towards another and the yearning that draws one heart towards another are both expressions of the same reality: the activity of love through which being gathers itself into wholeness.
This is the second aspect of our retreats. The first is the proximity to nature, where we feel the sentiment of being ‘spread o’er all that moves and all that seemeth still’. The second is friendship, where we feel the magnetic attraction of our shared being.
And the third aspect, of course, is the teaching – the attempt to formulate the one reality in words and to provide pathways by which we might experience it for ourselves.
If nature is infinite being clothed in perception, then friendship or relationship is infinite being, or love, clothed in feeling, and the teaching is infinite being, or pure consciousness, clothed in thought.
Through the three portals of perception, feeling and thought – expressed as nature, friendship and the teaching – our original unity of being is revealed as beauty, love and truth.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 2 (1805 text).
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1, lines 14-17.
So beautifully expressed!