If Oneness is the Reality, How Can We Not Be Complicit in Racism?

By JIM LOCKARD

Last year, in a post on my Spiritual Evolutionary blog, I wrote of racism “We are all complicit in allowing this kind of consciousness to be in power. The changes required are deep and challenging.”

Racism and related levels of consciousness exist across our society. How we come to terms with that and seek to heal it is of great importance to all of us. Changes to these patterns of consciousness will only come from changes of heart within each person; however, those changes of heart can be influenced internally and externally.

I base this on my understanding of the concept of Oneness, the idea that Spirit is only one and from that One all individualizations arise. It is a difficult concept to comprehend given that our senses, our language, and our cultural beliefs make separation seem like the ultimate reality. But the great spiritual teachers and mystics all share the idea of Oneness as the basis of all things, even though it is not readily apparent to us.

From a belief in separation, I am here and you are there; I am not responsible for you or anything about you; I am not a part of anything apart from myself, be it good or evil. So, from separation, hatred makes sense. Good and evil as separate powers make sense. A viewpoint from Oneness is different.

I am the life of life,
I am that cat, this stone, no one…
I see and know all times and all worlds,
As one, one, always ONE…
Oneness always!

~ Rumi

From a belief in Oneness – a belief that we are not individuals, but individualized expressions of One Spirit. We are like the fingers on your hand – unable to exist apart from the hand, as inextricably linked as is possible.

When I look at the world through the eyes of Oneness, only love and compassion make sense – for everything and everyone is one with me, connected like the fingers on my hand. We all share a connection to Spirit (or whatever we call Source), from which we get our life energy and intelligence and into which we think. Like the blood which flows into our fingers from our body and then returns changed, the energy of Spirit, the life force if you will, enters us, is used by us, and is returned to Source. As the same blood flows into each finger and becomes whatever that finger is, so the life force flows into us and becomes me and you. It is all one thing – it is all love energy.

“All human behavior is the expression of love. Some of it is skillful, and some of it is unskillful.” ~ Ken Keyes, “Handbook of Higher Consciousness”

Together, we co-create the consciousness of our societies at every level, from the individual person, through the family, friends, communities, states, nations, and the human race. We each contribute to the overall consciousness of humanity through our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

What this means to me is that every child is my child. My tendency to get angry at racism on the part one group or another is actually due to my misunderstanding in seeing them as separate. It is like my ring finger getting angry at my index finger – it makes no sense when you realize they are part of one hand. It is my resistance to the idea of Oneness which results in my anger toward another.

In Spirit there is no “us” and “them.” There is no individual, only individualization. There is only one thing expressing as multiplicity, as variety. Our spiritual growth is dependent upon our deepening realization of this truth, as is our ultimate happiness. Separation is the realm of fear and ignorance. Our purpose is to grow beyond to a greater idea, one closer to the truth of Oneness or Love, which is our nature. The changes which challenge us represent the shift in consciousness from separation to Oneness.

Ernest Holmes, developer of The Science of Mind philosophy, put it very well:

“There is a principle of love in the universe which is Omnipresent. Now, behind this unity, behind our ignorance, (we call it ignorance rather than sin because there is no sin but ignorance, no sin but a mistake, no punishment but a consequence, no salvation but enlightenment) there is a level of love, we will say, responding to itself by the necessity of it being what it is. God did not make it this way – this is God. Reality is God. Wherever we approach it, in whatever form, is always God. Now, if God is Love, which I most certainly believe and you do, then there is a Principal or a Presence of Love in everyone and everything, which automatically responds to us at the level with which we view it, by which we embody it and through which we see it so that it becomes active in us.

 “But from the human viewpoint there are levels of antagonism, hatred, animosity, and enmity; but these will not exist to the individual that does not resist them. Nonviolence, non-resistance, from the standpoint of Gandhi and Jesus is not a process where they agreed to stop at the level of the discord. It was a non-resistance to the discord in order that they might transmute it by an interior awareness of transcendence. Therefore, if there were enough people in the world today to know that iron curtains or silken curtains are no object to reality and function at the level of a deep understanding of love, the result would be that the lower attitudes of thought in the human mind would be transmuted into the higher and the time would come when no one would ever think of war again. We would read history and say, ‘Isn’t that strange? They didn’t know any better.’”

~ Ernest Holmes – typed transcription of a lecture on May 16, 1955