Diversity within unity

[Excerpt Be and Become, © ProCreative, Sydney 2000]

We can readily confirm that the idea of Individuality (Diversity) within Unity is everywhere apparent.

We see examples in terms of our bodies—cooperation of billions upon billions of cells to form skin, organs, bones and other body parts. All such body parts then cooperate to form a functioning body.

We see how many such bodies form families or social groups and how many such families and social groups form communities, nations, global networks and so on.

When we take a step back and look out upon the myriad forms of life on this planet we see complex inderdependent relationships. And yet within that complexity is a simplicity and order which becomes more recognizable the more one compares it with the idea that all exists as “separateness within oneness.”

We can begin to appreciate this sense of separateness-within-oneness by realizing that each are simultaneously necessary to existence. We cannot exist in absolute isolation -- a community would make no sense without individuals (that is, any whole would have no validity without its parts). AS Maharishi Mahesh Yogi observed:

there is one hundred percent diversity and one hundred percent unity, both performing their work at the same time. That is the nature of the work of creation—this is true reality. To us, one seems real and the other unreal. The reality is that both are real at the same time ...1

As pointed out in Chapter Three, we in the West take the measurable world of things —trees, trucks and tables, as being the primary reality. Once again, in terms of traditional Western society, the external physical world of things seems real, while the unknowable-spiritual world seems unreal. In the above quote, Maharishi acknowledged the validity of both the known and the unknown, with neither being more important, real or primary than the other.

All in all, wherever we look, we can see the validity of

• Diversity within Unity
• Separateness within Oneness
• Individuality within Communityl
• The Known within the Unknown
• Independence within togetherness
• One within All

The concepts provided at this site shows how nonlocal fields of potential unfold into everday lived experiences, via 'one within all' frameworks.

• 1. Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing: Exploring The frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine, Bantam Books New York 1989, page 228.