Beyond All Dualities Lies Oneness

There is no way around it. Beyond all dualities lies an indivisible oneness. All the world’s religions speak of this oneness. The underlying truth that the sacred traditions of the world share, despite apparent contradictions and oppositions, is that there is harmony and unity at the source of all life.

Rumi, getting right to the heart of the matter, puts it this way:

I know nothing of two worlds,

All I know is the One.

I seek only One,

I know only One,

I find only One,

And I sing of only One.

The mystery of mysteries is that all pairs of opposites flow into each other and create a wholeness that represents completion, oneness, and unity. The essential dialectic of life, with the flowing of the opposites into each other, results in a synthesis that combines and transcends all pairs of opposites.

The interplay between them creates an expansion and transformation of all of the elements, which then forms a new unity greater than the parts. This is the process that turns duality into oneness. And with this consciousness, we can spend our time basking in that realm of oneness.

The One cannot be two. Across the arrow of time, throughout the eons of history, a single process is unfolding. The world’s sacred traditions have all captured the inner significance of this Unity.

The Hindu view says, “He is the one God hidden in all beings . . . watching over all worlds.” The Jewish vantage point is, “The Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.” The Christian view holds, “There is one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”

The Sufi view says, “All this is God. God is all that is,” while the Baha’i view clarifies it all by adding, “He, in truth, hath throughout eternity been one in His Essence, one in His attributes, one in His works.” The sacred texts all say in various ways that the story of Divinity is one story, that all things are of one essence.

We can see this oneness, as well, by shifting our consciousness to the vantage point that takes in all of reality. From any limited perspective, there will appear to be many realities. But from a perspective of the whole, there is only one Reality. As ‘Abdu’l-Baha puts it, “The Reality of the divine Religions is one, because Reality is one and cannot be two. All the prophets are united in their message. They are like the sun; in different seasons they ascend from different rising points on the horizon.”

This is similar to the idea of the great chain of being, as expressed by Moses de Leon, the thirteenth-century Jewish mystic: “God is unified oneness—one without two, inestimable. Genuine divine existence engenders the existence of all of creation. The sublime, inner essences secretly constitute a chain linking everything from the highest to the lowest . . . There is nothing—not even the tiniest thing—that is not fastened to the links of this chain. Everything . . . is caught in its oneness.”