Discovering the Unity of Life

Discovering the Unity of Life

Overcoming Separateness

by Eknath Easwaran

© 2024 The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781586381592

Table of Contents

The Principle of Unity

Forgetting Ourselves

Overcoming Separateness

Nine Insights into Overcoming Separateness

All of Us Are One

Discovering Who We Are

Passage Meditation: An Eight-Point Program

Meditation Passages

About Eknath Easwaran

Further Resources

The Principle of Unity

The word dharma, law, comes from the Sanskrit root dhri, to support. What supports life, according to the mystics, is the principle of unity; what destroys life is separateness, the negation of this principle.

In compassionate language, the mystics tell us that we have simply forgotten this unity. It is not that we deny it, we have just forgotten. There is a beautiful story narrated in the Hindu tradition which illustrates this point. A young prince is kidnapped by bandits, taken to the forest, and raised there, learning the bandits’ life of looting and murder. He completely forgets his princely heritage and all the royal virtues and lives like one of the beasts of the forest, attacking and killing without any feeling of conflict.

One day the spiritual teacher from the royal family passes through the forest and recognizes the young man. He has the same features as the king, the same nose, and the same style of walking, but his manner is terribly menacing. So the spiritual teacher, with great love flowing from his heart, approaches the young man and says, Your royal highness.

The young man doesn’t understand. He says, Where is this ‘royal highness’? He expects to be called you tiger, you leopard. He has completely forgotten. The spiritual teacher repeats, I am talking to you, your royal highness. The young man says, I am not your ‘royal highness’; I’m a bandit. Ask me to loot, ask me to kill, I can do it. I’m the Bonnie and Clyde of ancient India.

Not repulsed by this picture, and unshaken in his faith in human nature, the spiritual teacher goes up to the young man, puts his arm around him, and begins to tell him stories about his childhood – how his father used to carry him on his shoulders, how his mother used to sing him to sleep, how his life was in the palace. Gradually the prince begins to remember. He says, Go on, go on! The spiritual teacher goes on relating anecdotes of his royal childhood. Finally the young man says, Now I recall. I’m not bad or violent. I simply forgot. You have helped me remember; you are my greatest friend. And the young prince goes home to his father, the king.

Unity is our nature

This is your story and mine. With great simplicity, yet great sophistication, the mystics tell us that we have just forgotten. They say, You have no love for personal profit. We just smile. They say, You are not really devoted to personal pleasure. We smile and say, He doesn’t know us. The great mystics say, You really are not resentful or hostile. You really are not self-willed. And we say, If it pleases you to say so, we have no objection, but don’t say we didn’t warn you! The mystics continue to assure us that one day our eyes are going to be opened, and we will know that we have been dreaming.

If you go to Sproul Plaza tomorrow and tell people that unity is our nature, that love is our nature, that we are hypocrites pretending to be separate, impostors pretending to be selfish, the sophisticated campus crowd will say, You’d better go home and sleep it off. We know ourselves; we are honest. We know that we are no good and are just wasting our time. The mystics say that this is an illusion, a morbid spell under which we have