Peace Is Oneness

The world is constantly seeking peace in the external world as a means of ending conflict. It seems there is little recognition that peace will only come about when the external and the internal are in a state of harmony. Religion is perceived as the gateway to the world within, while science is focused on the world without. The ability to harmonize these two great domains seems to have escaped humanity’s understanding, with few exceptions. Until the Oneness of creation is fully realized humanity’s struggle will continue. Perhaps now humanity is ready to learn the essential lesson of oneness. For thousands of years men have known of this oneness and have taught the concept. It is impossible to have a harmony of the inner and outer worlds when a society believes there is only one method for obtaining knowledge. This form of oneness leads to the disasters discussed in Chapter 2. Even if western society returns to the recognition of the dual aspects of reality, the daunting task of harmonizing them remains Of the many different groups and practices of the early church, perhaps the most interesting for our purposes is the comparison between Gnosticism and the historical Church. Most striking is the basis for the belief system of each group. In the case of the historical Church, its belief and authority derive from the historical lineage of Jesus through the disciples, and the truth revealed in the Bible. For the Gnostics, belief and authority derive from the knowing within. This knowing we might think of today as revelation or mystical experience. For Gnosticism there is no external authority. In fact, external authority is to be totally avoided in favor of the internal experience or awareness. As the existence and extent of the Gnostic movement became increasingly revealed by historical Biblical research, the singular authority of the traditional Church became weakened in the minds of many. With the Enlightenment, after centuries of focus on what Ken Wilber describes as the development of the interior of the Great Nest of Being, humanity turned its attention outward to the external material world of nature and began exploring it through observation. This quadrant of reality Wilber calls the surface reality of matter which he labels as flatland. (1) Thus, modern science was born, and with it the centuries-long conflict between religion and science for mankind’s mind. Unfortunately, the external became the exclusive focus of science, to the point where consciousness was ignored by the early experimenters and behaviorists in psychology. They were so preoccupied with the exploration of observable behavior that could be verified by others independently, that they ignored consciousness because it was not subject to independent verification.