Showing posts with label Glossary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Glossary. Show all posts

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Glossary of Unitarian Universalism - Non dual Oneness



Non dual Oneness - People are socialized and conditioned by the society they are born into to perceive and understand various concepts, events, and phenomena. This process is born out of dividing and separating phenomena into parts. This strategy of breaking systems into their component parts has given human beings great power to control and manipulate those systems. This power to manipulate component parts overlooks the fact that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The drive to organize component parts in systems to greater complexity is the basis for a spirituality based on a recognition of an evolutionary dynamic up to and including what Eastern religions call “enlightenment,” and Christianity calls “salvation.” The recognition that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts is the basis for the joke in which the Buddhist monk asks the hot dog vendor, “Make me one with everything.” Forms change while the energy which contributes to the making of those forms is eternal. This recognition that forms change while energy continues is the basis of the recognition of mystics that there is no death only change. Persons are drops of the ocean and while the drops separate themselves from the whole they also at some point are reabsorbed back into the ocean from which they came. This ocean of Transcendent Energy is what is called the “non dual Oneness.” In Unitarian Universalism people covenant together to respect the interdependent web of all existence of which they are a part. In this respecting of the interdependent web, UUs recognize and acknowledge that they are, as are all things, part of the non dual Oneness.


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