EXPLORING CONNECTION
Lawrence Toye - 28 August 2020
Connection.
Connection with others, with ourselves, with our surroundings.
It seems to be something we are all seeking in our own way, consciously or otherwise.
Have you ever felt a deep yearning, or even just a faint whisper within, which keeps you searching for an elusive sense of truly being... home?
My deep yearning to find a greater sense of connection, belonging and even a deeper meaning in my life grew more and more as I realised how disconnected many of us currently feel. I started to think “what might be happening to make me feel like this…?”
Much of the human race, according to ideas of transpersonal psychology, is currently living in a “personal stage” of consciousness, where there is a distinct experience of a psyche/ego (with one speaking from the “I” perspective). In this stage humans feel motivated by individual success and progress and we measure the quality of our lives by what we own and possess.
We orient ourselves in the world through a sense of separate I-dentity.
This is shifting yet still very much present.
Many Western models and frameworks of reality are also based on scientific and materialistic attitudes where so much is measured and ordered in terms of its physical properties. It’s easy to see how placing importance on this attitude and framing of reality could inform the notion that we humans are, first and foremost, separately identifiable beings.
Although there is truth in this to a certain extent, what needs to be acknowledged is that it’s not the whole picture.
By contrast, other cultures, many of those being Eastern and also a large number of indigenous cultures worldwide, are much more aligned with the idea that everything (and everyone) is, in some way, connected. Unity/union at the focus, as opposed to only existing in separation/division.
The sanskrit word “yoga” can, in certain contexts, be translated as “union” and in the act or doing of the union, what’s experienced is “connection”. In my meditation training, the emphasis is on attaining experiences of one-ness and combinescense with what many call the “unified field of consciousness”. It’s certainly been important to observe that my ego, which LOVES the Western, rational ideas about a separate and distinguishable “I”, was not the part of me that could easily embrace these experiences of connection and wholeness, where everything is so complete that there is simply nothing to worry about, think about or do.
Sounds to good and smells of hippy-like under responsibility?
…’tis true.
Which is why the work to be done is to practice holding those realised states of wholeness within our awareness as we go about our day to day lives in all of things there are to do in this experience as beings that are human.
One of my favourite Einstein quotes seems to indicate that there ARE those in the scientific world as well as in esoteric spiritual traditions that hold true certain notions of humanity’s connection to something greater.
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Not such a bad undertaking, really.
What would it take to practice just a little more compassion towards others and expanding our capacity for that compassion by bringing a little more of it to ourselves?
Links:
”What is Transpersonal Psychology…” by Johnny Stork, Retrieved from here.