Unstained Glass

Micheal Hardgrove


We were all once innocent babes. The cop and the criminal alike once reached out tiny hands for giant fingers. The nun and the whore on the corner once shined the light of sweetness equally.

What have we since become? A blend of what we inherited and what we've learned—nothing more. For which can we be praised? For which can we be blamed?
We were all once innocent babes. And we're all still innocent! Grownup babies with dirty hearts needing only to be changed.

I was once, as if my habit, sitting on my bed reading more than one book at a time. This keeps my active mind from becoming bored. Spread out on my bed this particular day, I had a popular explanation of quantum physics, a text on the ancient Hindu scriptures, and a book on child psychology. As I was reading, switching from book to book to keep my active mind from becoming bored, I was struck by a sentence in the child psychology textbook. The somewhat pompous author made this observation:

"From birth until the age of five or so, children are unable to adequately distinguish between internal and external reality."

It struck me as odd that babies should look at life so acutely.

Mystics and physicists and babies agree. There are no walls in reality.

I've wondered for a long time about that peculiar agreement between wisemen, scientists, and babies. Why should these three, who would seem to have so little else in common, agree on something as arcane as "inside/outside" unity?

Why should persons have to study physics for years or meditate or pray for decades just to reach the same outlook on life that they had before they went to school?
Long thought has, I think, given me the answer to that puzzle.

We are born rightly knowing reality and our place in it.

Then we are hypnotized into believing that lies are true.

All of us suffer what I call "highchair hypnosis." When we are very young, even before we can walk, our parents (or guardians) feel compelled to perform certain traditional rites that warp us from our natural unity with others and with reality. They, of course, don't mean to do us great harm. They're simply following "tradition."

The concept of separation does not reflect a reality in nature. There is no separation. Everything (everyone) interpenetrates everything (everyone) else.

When you see an empty space between objects, it isn't empty.

The atmosphere of our planet is pressing against every square inch of each of us with a force of fourteen-point-seven pounds per square inch. The force on a square foot of you is about a ton! The air inside you balances the air pressure outside you. But there's no such thing as an empty space.

How are we hypnotized?

It begins with our names.

We are taught that we are our names. "You are Bobby, or Billy, or Susie, or Shelly!" It's all delivered with bright eyes and smiles and excited voices and if we respond with a sound that's even close to the combination of sonic vibrations they've chosen for our name, you'd think we'd just scored the winning touchdown of a playoff game.
And, if we make the connections that present themselves naturally to our unity-knowing minds, we are punished with frowns, scowls, and shaking heads. "No! I'm not Bobby! I'm Mommy! You're Bobby or Billy or Susie or Shelley! No! That's not Billy! That's Daddy! No, puppy is not Susie! You're Susie!"

Of course, the parent or guardian doesn't mean to blind the child to unity or lie it out of its connection with life. He or she is simply passing along the misinformation that he or she was hypnotized into believing at about the same age.

It's tradition.

And thus the ego is born. Slowly and steadily our caregivers hypnotize us out of our inborn certainty that we are one with all we experience. They don't mean us harm. No adult says, "I'm going to rob this child of its inborn enlightenment." Everyone has been taught that the proper socialization process demands that a child be taught—even before it can walk—that it is separate from the world and other people. There are all sorts of justifications for this. How else will it come when it's called? Well, it's always been done this way!

The fact that it is unnecessary and harmful means little. That's the great thing about tradition. When it comes to carrying pure ignorance from generation to generation, nothing else is quite as effective.

Ego is born when we believe that we are our names. Alienation is born when we are taught that we are separate from one another and the world. Our inborn certainty of the truth of unity is so strange that it usually takes up to five years before the lie of ego takes hold. Why do our memories typically only "awaken" when we are four or five years old? As with so many things, when presented with this curious riddle, most minds accept the already in place answer:

Well, that's just the way we are, we say.
Well, it's supposed to be like that.

I disagree. I don't believe it's supposed to be like that. Our common alienation from nature and from one another is not healthy or natural. It's convenient. But it's not natural or good. It's a sick by-product of over-population.

Names grew in importance as tribes grew in size. As the tribes of the hunter-gatherers settled down into stationary civilizations that farmed their own flora and raised their own fauna, their numbers grew. And the need to distinguish between members of this enlarged tribe grew as well.

"John the Smith" and "Sam, John's son" sufficed in small villages but only for so long. Eventually, for convenience's sake, it became commonplace to give every newborn a given name and a surname. As civilization became more complex—and as families grew in size with greater food supplies and greater security—it became more convenient for parents to name their offspring at birth.

No one can say when this obsession with naming babies before they could walk began. And I'm not saying that naming the little darlings is, in itself, harmful. But, somewhere along the way, the cult of individuality grew out of the fragmentation of the tribe. And it became all-important that the infant say—and be—its name.

I'm sorry.
I am not my name any more than I am my telephone number.
Who would we be if we didn't have names?
You and I are not separate from nature.
Nor are we separate from one another.
We have been hypnotized from the highchair on to believe that those lies are so.
But they aren't.

And it is hypnosis...

Hypnosis is commonly associated with the stage hypnotists getting someone to bark like a dog or with the psychologist looking into someone's subconscious by having them "watch the watch."

But, fundamentally, hypnosis is nothing but concentrated communication. And our everyday communication abides by the same laws of suggestion that rule hypnosis.
For hypnosis to be effective in shaping a person's behavior there are two requirements:

1] fixation of conscious attention, and
2] trust

We are hypnotically programmed by anything, and anyone, that we give our undivided attention and complete trust to. When we are babes in our highchairs, we don't have enough experience to be wary. We are too in need of information and too new to be doubtful. Well-treated children are the perfect hypnotic subjects.
And, because the world is the way it is, the first two things almost all children learn are life-maiming lies. We don't end at our skins. Each of us is an inseparable part of the world and everyone and everything in it. As long as we believe otherwise, we're dying.

There have always been those who saw the Truth behind the lies:
Jesus often said that to achieve salvation one must die to self.
Buddha taught that before achieving nirvana one must transcend self.There are those who will say that who we really are is not our mind, our body, nor our world. Nonsense. More separation thinking. Who we really are is as much our world, our bodies, and our minds as it is the innermost part of us. So many, without realizing it, carry the separation thinking that kept them unenlightened into all their thinking about enlightenment.

Everything about our environment (and all other environments) interpenetrates us continually. It's the nature of reality that everything and everyone in it is everything and everyone else in it.

We don't end at our skins.
Your computer doesn't end at the edge of its plastic.
We must get beyond the archaic way of imagining life.

As we play by intellect for more and more years we become blind to the truth that everything inside-outside everything and everyone is really one. All the parts that intellect imagines and manipulates aren't real. Nothing is separate anywhere except in the imagination of the intellect.

There is one great MIND and nothing else. All that we see, all that we hear, all that we feel, all that we know is this MIND. Even our bodies are MIND.

Six-point-whatever-billion people exist on the Earth. But we're all—each and every one of us—animated by the selfsame life-giving MIND (or SPIRIT if you prefer). You can think of anyone you know (or everyone you know) and the Consciousness which gives them life is the very same Consciousness that you, and all, life. There is one LIFE and countless lives existing in It.

Humanity is like a great stained glass window. We are all of the same substance. But we've been broken apart and colored differently by the impurities and stains mixed in us by recorded experience. We've been separated by leaden concepts and traditional roles, forced to fit together in a way that insures that we contribute to a design chosen by those who shaped us. But however we're cut, however we're colored, wherever we're placed, the same Light shines through all of us.

Used by permission. For more essays by Micheal, please visit his website at http://evangelos.us/indexnext.html