"We dance 'round in a ring and suppose
while the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
- Robert Frost

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"When we Understand, we are at the center
of the circle, and there we sit
while Yes and No chase each other
around the circumference."
- Chuang Tzu

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IN A SENSE, IT IS ALL A MATTER of perception, of perspective. The ultimate Understanding spoken of in the perennial wisdom can be seen as a massive and total shift or alteration in perspective. But just how massive or total is hard to imagine until it occurs.

When I was in high school in the late sixties and early seventies, Edwin Abbott’s Flatland became popular among students. The small book was originally written in 1884, but it found new interest and several reprintings as it resonated with the counterculture and mood of the Nixon years. Flatland is a two dimensional universe inhabited by two dimensional beings who know only width and length, such as the stick figures you might draw on paper. Existing on the flat plane of the paper, they know nothing of height or depth, which do not exist in their world. Consequently they have never thought of these ‘unreal’ directions or dimensions and have no words for them; our words ‘height’ or ‘depth,’ ‘above’ and ‘below,’ as well as the ideas or concepts which these words represent to us, do not exist in their world.

The book narrates the experiences of one such two dimensional being, a square, when his comfortable two dimensional life is invaded one day by an incomprehensible creature from another dimension: a sphere. Only gradually was the square able to come to comprehend the initially disorienting experience of a third dimension. Needless to say, the great difficulty arose when the square tried to express his experience to other two dimensional figures like himself. How does one describe ‘above’ in a context where there exist only forward, back, and two directions of sideways? The square tried using existing words (‘forward, but not forward, a different forward,’) and tried using new words he had learned from the sphere (but ‘above’ was only nonsense syllables to the Flatlanders.) So the square, who knew he had had real experiences of this third dimension, found himself being regarded as an idiot talking nonsense.

The experience of the Flatland square will be familiar to anyone who has had a spiritual or mystical experience of ‘Otherness,’ of another dimension beyond our familiar physical three dimensions, and then tried to express this to others in comprehensible language. And it can be useful as a metaphor to illustrate or express how the Understanding cannot be described in any terms or concepts available here. But the shift in perspective inherent in the Understanding is even more total than the inclusion of another dimension. Rather than the mere addition of a dimension, it is a shift out of all dimensions in that it is not a question of seeing differently or of seeing new or different things, but of the disappearance of the one who sees.

In a sense, the Understanding is the opposite of the discovery of the third dimension by the two-dimensional Flatlander. In the common shared experience of this world of duality and process, what is experienced is always the triad of the experiencer, what is experienced, and the experience itself. There appears to be the doer of an action, the thing acted upon, and the action. The one who thinks, that which is thought of, and the thought. The seer, that which is seen, and sight. And so on; even the one who is, what one is, and the being of that.

But in the unity consciousness of the Understanding, these perceived discreet dimensions of otherness collapse into Oneness and in place of the ‘split mind’ perception of experiencer, the experienced, and the experience, there is in ‘whole mind’ only experiencing. No doer, no object, no thing done, only functioning. Only seeing. Only being, not in the sense of a being, but rather be-ing. All there is, is not some-one conscious of some-thing, but rather simply impersonal Conscious-ness. Consciousness is all there is, and Consciousness is the functioning, the seeing, the being, the experiencing, which is perceived by split mind as some one doing or being some thing.

How does this shift occur? How does one go from perceiving with split mind to the Understanding of whole mind? Well, the point is that one doesn’t. No one ever understands, in this sense. There is only understanding, and the Understanding is that there is no one to understand and no thing to be understood. The very essence of the Understanding is that while events seem to be happening, and deeds appear to be done, “no one does it, nor is anything done; it is pure doing.” (Wei Wu Wei) There is no individual to do or understand anything. There is no thing to be done or understood. Appearances notwithstanding, there are no discreet individuals or entities of any kind, any where. This seeking, this quest for understanding, ultimately leads to the annihilation of the seeker; to the realization that there never was a seeker to begin with, that the entire world perceived by split mind, including the perceiver, is an elaborate illusion. Wei Wu Wei:

"It is important to understand that there is nothing to acquire, but only an error to be exposed, because acquiring necessarily involves using, and so strengthening that spurious 'I' whose dissolution we require. For this merely a readjustment is needed, such readjustment being the abandonment of identification with an inexistent individual self, an abandonment which leaves us unblindfolded and awake in our eternal nature.

"To seek to persuade ourselves that we do not exist as individual entities is, however, to ask the eye to believe that what it is looking at is not there. But it is not we alone who have no existence as entities: there are not any anywhere in the reality of the cosmos, never have been, and never could be. Only whole-mind can reveal this knowledge as direct cognition which, once realized, is obvious. This is the total readjustment. And only 'I' remains."

It’s not new or even unusual to think of all this world and life as an illusion or a dream: the analogy is all around us, from Shakespeare, (“we are such stuff as dreams are made on,”) to nursery rhymes, (“merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.“) What hardly anyone realizes is that the one who might think he understands this is himself a dream character, part of the illusion. That the mind which thinks, “life is but a dream” does not itself have an existence apart from the dream; that this thought arises only within and as part of the dream.

Naturally, this is enough to put off most of the human race. Does exist. Cannot be expressed.