Life in the Cultlane

I’m reading David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order and it’s interesting the very strong parallels between his thought and the ideas in A Course In Miracles (and in Mary Baker Eddy). He is very concerned with fragmentation versus unity - ACIM is concerned with separation versus unity (and goes so far as to identify this with the Christian doctrine of sin).

Some quotes from the first chapter:

It is instructive to consider that the word ‘health’ in English is based on an Anglo-Saxon word ‘hale’ meaning ‘whole’: that is to say, to be healthy is to be whole, which is, I think, roughly the equivalent of the Hebrew ’shalem’. Likewise, the English root ‘holy’ is based on the same root as ‘whole’. All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation.

…

It is important to give some emphasis to this point. For example, some might say: ‘Fragmentation of cities, religions, political systems, conflict in the form of wars, general violence, fratricide, etc. are the reality. Wholeness is only an ideal, toward which we should perhaps strive.’ But this is not what is being said here. Rather, what should be said is that wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of the whole to man’s action., guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought. In other words, it is just because reality is whole that man, with his fragmentary approach, will inevitably be answered with a correspondingly fragmentary response. So what is needed is for man to give attention to his habit of fragmentary thought, to be aware of it, and thus bring it to an end. Man’s approach to reality then may be whole, and so the whole response will be whole.

…

As has been indicated, however, men who are guided by such a fragmentary self-world view cannot, in the long run, do other than to try in their actions to break themselves and the world into pieces, corresponding to their general mode of thinking. Since, in the first instance, fragmentation is an attempt to extend the analysis of the world into separate parts beyond the domain in which to do this is appropriate, it is in effect an attempt to divide what is really indivisible. In the next step such an attempt will lead us also to attempt to unite what is not really unitable. This can be seen especially clearly in terms of groupings of people in society (political, economic, religious, etc.). The very act of forming such a group tends to create a sense of division and separation of the members from the rest of the world, but, because the members are really connected with the whole, this cannot work. Each member has in fact a somewhat different connection, and sooner or later this shows itself as a difference between him and other members of the group. Whenever men divide themselves from the whole of society and attempt to unite by identification within a group, it is clear that the group must eventually develop internal strife, which leads to a breakdown of its unity…

…

So fragmentation is in essence a confusion around the question of difference and sameness (or one-ness), but the clear perception of these categories is necessary in every phase of life. To be confused about what is different and what is not, is to be confused about everything.

I’d love to drop in some corresponding quotes from ACIM and Science & Health to point out the parallels, but don’t have time right now. Suffice to say that the ideas which leap out at me here are ‘the world is really one, but at a level beyond what we can sense’, ‘illusory perception of fragmentation’ being (probably) the same thing as ’sin’, and very strongly, the idea that there is only really one choice or classification to be made in this world: between things that are different and things that are the same, and we can’t easily see this at all (possibly not at all without external help, which, however, is readily available as soon as we relax and look away from our immediate surroundings).

(ACIM/Eddy, I think, would follow this up by saying: everything that is created by God is holy and pure and one; everything created by sin or the ego is false and illusory and complicated and divided against itself; but somehow the difference between the two is not the line between mind and matter, but between two ways of seeing our world. If we choose Christ’s vision, we see God in all things; if we choose our own vision, we see God nowhere.)

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Books, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.