Fractured Unity: Teaching and Practice

To support our global community, we want to share a teaching excerpt and practice from the Spirituality in a Fractured World course that you can do at home today. Past participants in the SFW course have said the teachings and related exercises had a tremendous impact on how they processed and responded to the difficulties happening in the world.

In this article Hameed addresses our “Fractured Unity,” introduces the practice of Diamond Inquiry, and provides an exercise to help us work with the various feelings arising for us in these divided times.

We call this first teaching Fractured Unity because it reflects what we see playing out in the world these days. Our spiritual experiences show us that our nature is one, that we all have the same beingness, the same truth that bonds us to each other. Unity is the nature of all beings in the universe.

Today, instead of this unity showing itself in the world, we’re seeing the opposite including division, opposition, and polarization. However, the more we are in touch with our spiritual nature, the more we feel the underlying unity of all people, all nations, all beings. We feel that everyone, everywhere is someone like us. They have the same mind, the same heart, and the same spirit. When we experience this unity, the division no longer makes sense. How can we be against each other? How can we harm and kill each other?

There are three main questions we are going to explore with our course community over the next several months. If we learn even one of them deeply, we are in good shape. Hopefully we’ll have transformation – new experiential understanding – in all three.

1. How do we engage in spiritual practice in this kind of time? How do we pursue spiritual practice and not get derailed by all that is happening?

The world these days happens to be in a difficult phase. Things are unstable and the difficulties feel unlike the kinds of challenges that we’ve experienced before. It’s unsettling for many people. Natural disasters, people losing their homes, and political differences that seem unreconcilable are causing enmity between people. The fragmentation is happening everywhere – east and west – appearing in different ways in different places throughout the whole world.

We’re at an inflection point, where it seems like things are devolving instead of evolving, like we may be entering a dark age. The whole world appears to be plunging into some kind of reorganization which is appearing as fracturing, fragmenting, polarization, enmity, opposition, anger, fear, and uncertainty about knowing what to do.

So, we want to discover for ourselves, how do we stay committed to our spiritual practice, how do we remain grounded amidst this reorganization when we are bombarded by disquieting news every day?

2. How do we bring the wisdom we have from our spiritual practice to bear in our daily lives and in the world? What can we do about the situation, individually and collectively?

The spiritual path first starts by learning about your spiritual nature – experiencing your spiritual nature directly – the spiritual illumination, the spiritual wisdom.

The second step of any spiritual path is learning how to bring the illumination and wisdom of our spiritual experiences into the world. How do you bring it to your life, your work, your relationships, your situation, and the world? It’s not just for us to experience ourselves and that’s it. No, spirituality contains the whole world, as we will learn. We can deal with the world from a more alive, more awake, more human – which means humane – perspective.

So, we want to find out, what does it mean to be a true human being who knows our spiritual nature and can live from that nature in the world?

3. How do we embrace the spiritual opportunity available to us by all the chaotic energy that’s being released into the world during these tumultuous times?

At times of intensity, spiritually oriented people have an opportunity to channel and use that energy in themselves to maximize and support their spiritual practice. There’s a lot of loose energy flying around the earth right now – anger, fear, chaos.

There’s a science to how you can use the energy unleashed in the world these days. As societal structures fall apart, they release energy, just like physical systems. The energy all around is entropy, disorder, chaos which is unsettling until we learn how it can serve a spiritual purpose. When we learn how to do this, we can contribute even more to the world and its healing.

So, we want to find out for ourselves, how do we work with this discordant energy so that it becomes order, practice, depth of realization and understanding?

We start with ourselves. We are not going to try to deal with Gaza or US politics. We don’t start with the big problems of the world; we start with ourselves first.

We all come from different countries, different races, and different ethnic groups, and for us and for this teaching that’s a good thing. Rather than our differences creating problems as is happening in the world around us, here we can see how the differences enrich our exploration and our community. They reflect the richness of Being manifesting the various ways it can express itself.

Some of us are scared, some are angry, and some are happy with the way things are going. Some people feel, ‘Finally I’m being heard, and my needs are being addressed.’ Many views exist and have some truth to them. We might find ourselves on one side or another. We might want to isolate and live in a personal bubble and not listen to others.

We might see everyone protecting their own interests. They are feeling the need to hunker in to protect themselves individually, protect their community or their country. People are not trusting each other and not cooperating with each other.

This adds to the fragmentation; it’s part of the dismemberment. So that’s what we want to deal with – the sides.

We are not going to take a position or a side here in the school. We want to hear from and talk with everybody. We can’t just talk to some people otherwise we are contributing to the polarization.

Now we’ll do an exercise using the primary practice in Diamond Approach – Diamond Inquiry. Over the last 50 years, this practice has proven to be a very powerful support for people to open, understand, and transform the most difficult experiences human beings face. This form of inquiry invites a natural unfolding to happen, a kind of optimizing of our experience that allows fixed perspectives to loosen as deeper truths are revealed. This embodied form of inquiry can bring soothing and regulation to our stressed-out nervous system as we settle more and more into our spiritual nature.

Let’s find out where you are. Are you scared, angry, happy, confused, uncertain, fine, exhausted, or oblivious to what’s happening? Do you feel like you don’t know what to do or don’t know what attitude to take? You might be in different places and feel different things at different times. We want to know how what’s happening in the world is impacting you individually and your communities.