the Many and the One

“Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”

Experience is “layered” or “doubled” since the experience of every object is also the experience of the subject who experiences that object and the subject is known non-dually in every act of cognition: one can say that the subject is like the cloth from which all the particular objects of experience are then cut out.

The extrinsic vision sees multiplicity whereas the intrinsic one sees unity: objects are always Many whereas the subject is always One.

Concentration is a technique for the attainment of self-knowledge and, a fortiori, realization of God, that functions by artificially conforming the extrinsic vision to the pattern of the intrinsic one. That is, the commonplace manifold differentiation of experience is collapsed into a single point which, in itself, as a unity, is a fractal, hologram, or participation of Oneness as such. The isomorphism between the artificially-induced concentration on an object of the extrinsic vision through voluntary effort and the inherent unity of the intrinsic one, recognized, can kindle self-knowledge.

But more directly, God has no parts and no spatial situation. For this reason, God is therefore nowhere and, by the same token, there is nowhere he is not. In this light, it can be seen that the difference between “the world,” of which we are a part, and God is not one of space but of mode of existence. God has no parts while the world is constituted of them, of which, again, we are one. “The world” is the same thing, perceived piecemeal, as God, experienced through full participation and communion of spirit. We can’t become part of God even though we are part of the world because God has no parts, howbeit we can become God through participation in his nature, which is to say, through theosis. That potentiality of the human person has been the message and injunction of saints and martyrs and theologians and prophets since the beginning:

Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?