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So, what we call "community" is usually a gathering of egos, oft a pseudo-experience of communion. And I discovered as a pastor the difficulty of getting these individuals to cooperate for the highest good. So much of church life was taken with the battle of egos, often one group against another group, often one faction of fundamentalist to conservative against another faction of moderate to liberal. In individual systems, personalities go to war, one group has to be proven right, has to win, and in religion has to be the one group correctly representing God. And we can translate this easily to politics. Personalities adorn themselves to get votes, and make agreements with the rich to be a ruler, to be a very important person.
Yet, again, in politics, church, sangha, the food market, institutions of education, family units ... as being in proximity is not being-together, the group is not necessarily a communion, oft being a collective of individuals seeking to find security and recognition in an individualistic projection of the self-enclosure of each other. The group, then, being only an extension of the egos making it a group. So, how can one enjoy communion, when a likeness to self is the basis of the group, not that prior to the polarity of similarity and dissimilarity, so before the self-sense composed of relative likes and unlikes? So, the group as extension of selves becomes a collective self in agreement, a mirage, an illusion. The one true self, who we are, has no interest in seeking belonging in security outside the belonging we are prior to any collective. The groupism that fascinates egos, a haven for the self-divided to adore its own fragmented image, is no security for a being who is a knower of Truth, not a mimic of the collective, with its language of specialness, inclusion, and exclusion. True belonging expresses as an experience of belonging arising from the Ground of diversity, the Truth that stabilizes diversity in oneness prior to diversity.
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One of the more vivid remembrances of oneness was when cycling in Virginia. I was biking through a subdivision. I came upon a young boy, and spontaneously a sense of knowing him arose as a felt-sense, not an emotion, not a sentiment. I had never seen him, did not speak with him, do not recall he even saw me. I did nothing to mentally or emotionally have this sense of oneness arise. Anyway, no one can think himself or herself into a sense of oneness, of Totality.
This seeing the fundamental, essential through the appearance of this youth, deeply impressed me as a lesson in something I had rarely known before consciously. I could not, then, fathom from whence arose this. I did not have words, at that time, to frame it ~ that came later. I did know it was about Love, however. I, likewise, would not have been gifted with this insight, this knowing, had I had an agenda to love in that way at that moment.
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Such insight, a direct knowing, is beyond words, for the Being-happening cannot be worded, for beyond contrast, outside duality. Knowing oneness is a knowing of and from silence, our nature. Silence is oneness, prior to sound and its polarity silence as absence. Silence is presence, is fullness, knowing no lack, no absence. When meeting silence with silence, from silence, one knows the other immediately, not through the usual means of knowing. One knows the other, not about the other. In Grace, the other is not another, only appears other in the dance of Life expressing Itself as relationship, as being-with.
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