ONENESS AND POLARITY

Imagine it’s the night of the full moon. You’re standing on a south-facing beach jutting out into the sea, watching the sun sink slowly beneath the western horizon, illuminating sky and water with streaks of pink, red and gold. And, when its rim is touching the horizon, you turn your head and in the east you see the great white globe of the moon appearing from below the waves.

And there you stand watching nature’s spectacle of the full moon climbing the sky in the east synchronously with the sun descending and disappearing from view in the west. It’s a visual enacting of the principle of polarity. And, because you’ve seen it with your own eyes, you now know that on the night of the full moon the sun and moon appear to our eyes as equal in size. There and then they balance each other out.

I also experienced the sun and moon as equal many years ago as I lay on a beach in Turkey at the height of a solar eclipse. For some short minutes I experienced the dark shadow of the moon covering the sun neatly and completely. Once again, seen from that place and at that time the sun and moon had exactly the same shape and size. What an amazing synchronicity! If the distances between the moon and the earth, and the earth and the sun had been only slightly different there would have been no totality for me to experience. 

It’s an ingrained habit of the human mind to think dualistically - sun and moon, day and night, male and female, subject and object, self and other. Understanding these concepts as opposites we automatically identify ourself as the subject and see the other as our object. This practice creates a division in our minds between those we accept and those we reject, those we love and those we hate etc. which becomes the root of the antagonisms in our lives. We urgently need to learn the lesson that we are not separate from the other, that on a deeper level we are one, and then we might understand that to harm another is to harm ourselves.

It´s a particularly urgent message in this present time of great crisis in the world. We must move beyond the old shared illusion that we’re separate, not only from our fellow human beings but also from the other forms of life in the natural environment – the animals and birds, the fish, the trees and the plants. The number of people who realise this is growing. However in spite of annual COPs the majority of us are still choosing to pollute the environment to satisfy our expensive life-style needs, impervious to the suffering of the wild life who lose their food sources and habitats as a result. Looking at the state of the world today it’s clear that humanity as a species is in need of an urgent upgrade, or we are going to lose our habitat too and become extinct!

That there are higher states of consciousness in the universe than humankind is something I’m certain of. Why should faulty homo sapiens represent the peak of evolution ?. Animals have more instinctive intelligence and many a far higher awareness than we possess . But above all, the examples of a higher human consciousness passed down to us in the records of the lives and teachings of the great mystics  – Krishna, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus – convinces me. Osho, my personal guru wrote:

“Are not trees, and the rivers, and the mountains, and the stars, and man, and animals and birds created by God? Doesn’t this whole existence come from God? Is it not flowing from his being? God is the totality of all. Rocks and rivers and mountains are as much his creations as you are, as Jesus is. There is no distinction. All beings participate in God. In fact to be is to participate in God. Otherwise you cannot be, there is no other way to be.” 

I now understand that the word God refers to something far more vast than we were taught in Sunday school. It is in fact a name for cosmic Oneness! And understanding that we all participate equally in this Oneness would make the vital difference to our lives as then it would not be all about me but always about we. Living as individual members of our species in a society based on Oneness, the principles of cooperation and mutual support, rather than the cut-throat competition we see around us today, would rule in our personal and social lives. 

A shift towards Oneness would have the consequence of opening our hearts to others, and the human race as a whole would then become more loving and caring. We as homo sapiens would be an innovative, creative and joyful species. There would be more laughter on our planet, and with such custodians caring for it, our planet could once again become a garden of Eden!     

Phoebe Wyss 2026