One — that’s you, freshly born, One and All, All in One.
One to manifest — although an autonomous process — the interaction between you and the environment — growing up requires an increasingly conscious way of manifesting, making choices, adjusting and differentiating. Inevitable and, depending on your talents and the circumstances that arise, usually quite unruly. And that necessity remains until your death or Enlightenment, depending on which form comes first (first is literal, second figurative, and can go well together according to the authentic spiritual traditions, if you are properly prepared for that moment).
One to look for — while maturing is automatic, which some people do better than others, at the end of adolescence we usually fall under the spell of the existential questions ‘Who am I?’ and “What am I doing here”? “ In our experience, this regularly presents itself as an identity crisis, but it is a normal transition from child to adult. The developmental question is here to consciously seek out yourself and face all you find without distraction (focused attention and self-reflection) — This is what I am (now), This is what I can (now) and This is what I want (now). Whatever it is, go for it!
One to unite with — if we have recovered somewhat after all these years of development to adulthood, the urge that already arose in puberty is now beginning to demand our full attention. We feel incomplete and need to be supplemented. We want to be together with the love of our life, our soul mate, our other half, in short, we want a partner in life and work, for better and for worse, and if possible also reproduce.
The goal is clear, but soon we notice that a direction is not enough, the implementation requires a lot more. No matter how important and essential that other person is in our lives, it is actually about the Other. Our deep desire to identify with the other, to surrender to the other, to merge with the other are at best only a temporary satisfaction of our desire.
The problem is that the other — and all other manifestations in our world, are changeable. They are not permanent (just like us, by the way). The Other, on the other hand, is the immutability of which we were, and will always be, an integral part (whatever it is). The desire serves as a reminder not to deny our essence, but to realize it in this life, in this form. Via the other to the Other.
One to meditate on — if you take the question Who or what am I? seriously then sooner or later the insight arises that your mind must first calm down in order to recognize its own nature. Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, a Tibetan Dzogchen master makes the essence of this so clear:
samsara is your mind directed outward, lost in its own projections
nirvāna is your mind directed inward, recognizing its own nature
Meditation is traditionally the practice of Calm Abiding (Shamatha) to calm the mind, as well as the practice of Clear Insight (Vipashyana) to see the emptiness of the mind. Emptiness here is that all phenomena you perceive sensually, including others, do not exist by themselves. This means that they always occur in the interaction between subject (the observer) and object (that which is perceived).
They are there, but have no inherent existence — they do not exist on or by themselves.They only exist in a perspective, yours here. Interesting similarity to quantum physics, in which it is stated that the observed is only there in that form at that moment because there is an observer. You as the observer are the object to meditate on, or on the nature of the mind you perceive.
One to overcome — is reification. Meditating stays a verb for quite a while, an activity with a specific purpose — to obtain calm, clarity, insight, liberation, awakening. While this broadens our perspective and diminishes our reactivity, there is still “someone” who meditates, who identifies with a path and wants to achieve a goal.To transcend this, later meditations increasingly focus on cutting through the illusion that we ourselves have an inherent existence.
To dismantle here is reification, our habit of making self-contained things or objects from all sensory perception, including our own mind. This immediately creates a duality (subject-object) that appears very convincingly as the only reality. We mistake relative reality for the absolute.
One to realize — is the nature of your own mind. We perceive our lives “with” nature our mind (pure awareness) — it encompasses and transcends all senses, including our “neurotic” mind. Realizing our original Nature requires the irreversible and comprehensive recognition of our most basic presence = Pure Awareness, time after time. The stable realization of non-dual presence.
One Is — our nature, subtle and yet so ubiquitous — we are just that One Original Awareness — that we easily overlook it for a lifetime. Everyone has experienced it, spontaneously and unexpectedly, often as the culmination of a visual (beauty), physical (sexual, sporty), auditory (music), taste (food or drink) or spiritual (meditative or religious) experience.
One Is -the state in which desire, shaped by practices (meditation) and repeated recognition through realization, has become a state of being. It has become fully aware of itself. There is nothing to do, nothing to achieve or to avoid, no hope and fear. Everything is One Taste.
One
