When One Appears as Many
An Investigation into the Nature of Being and the Reality of Love
This essay invites you into a direct investigation of your own experience. Beginning with the simple observation that everything in experience appears and disappears, we explore what remains constant – the medium or background in which all experience unfolds. Through everyday analogies like the screen and movie, we discover that this background – which we call ‘being’ or ‘aware presence’ – is not separate from what appears within it, but is their very reality. The investigation then reveals how the appearance of separation between subject and object arises, and why this duality ultimately dissolves back into the one reality from which it never truly departed. What emerges is the recognition that love is not merely an emotion, but the very nature of reality itself – the complete absence of anything other than the infinite aware being that we are.
Notice what’s happening right now as you read these words. Thoughts are appearing in your awareness, existing for a moment, then dissolving away. The sounds around you come and go. Even your body sensations arise and pass. Everything in your experience is in constant movement – appearing, existing briefly, then vanishing.
But from what do these experiences arise? In what do they exist? And into what do they disappear?
Look at any appearance around you – perhaps the screen you’re reading on, or a tree outside your window. The image on your screen appears within the screen itself. A cloud arises in the sky, exists in the sky, dissolves back into it. A wave emerges from the ocean, dances on its surface, then dies back into it.
This pattern is everywhere: anything that appears, exist and disappears must arise within some medium. It arises in or on that medium and vanishes back into it.
The medium from which an appearance arises, in which it exists and into which it vanishes, is the reality of that appearance. To put it simply: the medium and the appearance are not two separate things – the appearance is the medium itself, temporarily taking a particular name and form. The screen is the reality of the movie playing on it – not a separate reality standing behind or beneath the movie, but the very substance of which the movie is made. By ‘reality’, we mean that which truly is, not what merely seems to be. The mountains in the film seem to be mountains, but the screen, relatively speaking, truly is – it is their reality. If you were to touch the landscape in a film, you wouldn’t really touch mountains or trees – you would touch the screen. The appearance is simply a temporary name and form given to its underlying reality.
So what might this tell us about the medium of your own experience?
What Never Comes or Goes
Let’s turn this same investigation towards your own experience. Notice that thoughts arise, exist briefly, then vanish. Your bodily sensations appear and dissolve. Any object you perceive comes into awareness and fades away. Even the world itself – everything you normally consider to be real in its own right – at some point appeared and will one day vanish.
From what do all these objects and experiences arise? In what do they seem to temporarily exist before dissolving away?
The word ‘existence’ comes from the Latin exsistere – ex meaning ‘out of’, and sistere meaning ‘to stand’, implying that something that exists stands out from a background. So, from what background do these experiences stand out? And into what do they disappear when they vanish?
That background, that medium, is being. Being is the underlying reality from which everything seems to emerge, in which it briefly seems to exist, and into which it vanishes when it disappears.
Take a moment to notice this being – the simple aware presence that underlies all experience. It’s not something you can grasp or locate, but rather the open background or medium in which all experience appears. Just as the screen provides the space for the movie, so being is the medium that allows all experience to unfold.
Now consider: does this aware presence have any boundaries? Can you find where it begins or ends? Notice that whilst thoughts, sensations and perceptions all have limits – they arise, exist briefly, then fade – the aware presence in which they appear seems to have no such constraints.
Just as the screen shares none of the limitations that characterise the objects and people in the movie and is, as such, unlimited with respect to them, so being – aware presence – does not share the limitations of any particular thing. It is, as such, unlimited, infinite aware being. It is the very reality from which you and everything you experience derive their apparent existence.
To understand this more clearly: the screen never really becomes the landscape in the movie. It remains the screen before the film begins, whilst the film plays, and after it ends. The landscape is simply an appearance of the screen, a temporary name and form taken by the screen. The landscape doesn’t have its own separate existence – it borrows its apparent reality from the screen itself.
This same principle applies to infinite aware being itself. It doesn’t become a person, an object, a world, and then revert to being itself when these dissolve. It is always only ever itself, temporarily appearing as a person, an object, the world, but never actually being or becoming any of these. Notice that your own being doesn’t become thoughts or sensations – it remains itself whilst they appear and disappear within it.
When One Appears as Two
We have seen that infinite aware being is the reality of all appearances. But this raises a profound question: if there is truly only one infinite reality, how do we experience a world of apparently separate things? How does the one appear as many?
In reality, there are no things, no people, no world as such – that is, as we normally conceive of them. There is just the appearance of people, things and the world.
However, this is not to deny or downgrade the world. On the contrary, we are upgrading the world from what is normally considered to be a collection of separate material objects to an appearance or expression of the one infinite reality. As the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini reportedly said, ‘I want to restore to the world its original sacred significance.’ This is precisely what we are doing – recognising the world not as mundane matter, but as the sacred appearance of infinite aware being itself. The world is not less than we thought – it is infinitely more.
But how do finite things appear to exist at all? Just as from the point of view of the screen, there is only the screen, so from the point of view of reality, there is only reality. That is, from the point of view of the infinite, there is only the infinite. There is no room in the infinite for the finite, because if something finite were to appear within the infinite, it would displace a portion of its infiniteness, and then the infinite would no longer be infinite. In other words, the infinite does not and cannot know the finite, at least not directly.
So how do finite things appear to exist? For whom are there separate objects? There are only separate objects from the perspective of a separate subject. The apparently separate objects of experience and the apparently separate subject that knows them are like two sides of the same coin – they seem to arise, exist and dissolve together.
A finite object can only be known from the perspective of a finite subject. It is only from limited, localised points of view that there appear to be objects and selves. The subject-object relationship is the means by which finite things seem to appear in the infinite.
Consider how perception works: just as your eye can only see something at a distance from itself, so an object can only be known by a subject that stands apart from it. The object is only an object from the perspective of a separate subject, and the separate subject is only separate in relationship to the object.
What happens if the distance between the subject and the object diminishes? When you hold your finger in front of your eye and bring it closer until it touches your eye, you cease to see it as a finger. As the distance between the subject and the object diminishes, there comes a point when they touch each other. At that moment, the object disappears and, with it, the subject, because they are like two sides of a coin – you cannot have one without the other.
The Nature of Love
This reveals something crucial about the nature of reality itself. Reality, infinite aware being, is one, not two. Therefore, it cannot know anything, because anything that is known can only be known by a subject that stands apart from it. It can only be known in duality, in the subject-object relationship.
But in reality, in infinite aware being, there is no such duality. Therefore, infinite aware being knows nothing, although it is what the mind calls ‘everything’. Why do I say ‘what the mind calls everything’? Because, as we have seen, for infinite aware being there are no things for it to be the ‘all’ or the ‘every’ of. Things are only ‘things’ or objects from the perspective of the apparently separate subject of experience that we seem to be. For this reason, infinite aware being knows nothing directly – that is, without the mediation of a finite mind – although it is the very reality of everything that the finite mind appears to know.
Let us take this one step further. As we have seen, the appearance of objects only exists – or seems to exist – from the perspective of the apparently separate subject of experience. However, the apparently separate subject of experience is an illusion. It is not an entity in its own right. It is an apparent limitation of that which truly is, namely, infinite aware being. In other words, the separate subject of experience – that is, each of us – and the objects or world that it knows are ultimately illusions. This does not mean that they are not real; it just means that they are not what they appear to be. What do they appear to be? A diversity of separate objects and selves. What are they in reality? An apparent modulation of infinite aware being.
So when we want to explore the nature of reality, we should not do so from the perspective of a finite mind that is itself ultimately illusory. Only reality’s experience of itself can be real. And what would that be? It would be no experience at all – it would be the complete absence of any finite mind or corresponding world. This complete absence of anything other than itself, this absence of separation, division, limitation, otherness, is the experience that we refer to as love. It is for this reason that love is said to be the very nature of reality. And in that love, there is nothing other than itself.
It is for this reason that we love love above all else – because it is in the experience of love that we touch reality, so to speak. In other words, the experience of love is an intervention of the infinite into the flow of our normal experience. It is an intervention of the vertical dimension of being into the horizontal line of time upon which our experience unfolds. As such, love is the experience in which we come closest to reality.
Light, as metaphor has many layers. Can it also be used to describe the nature of reality?
Since the infinite cannot know or experience the finite, what is the purpose of finite things in the first place?