01-02-2021
In 1996, I wrote “A Letter to the History Makers“, which contains the following sentence:
“We human beings are at our best not when we are engaged in abstract solitary reflection or in our individual transformation for its own sake, but when we are engaged in the act of transforming the world, in the act of history making.”
More than 20 years prior (c. 1974) when I was a 20-year old Zen monk, I realized:
“Even if the rest of humanity is in suffering, I can be in bliss alone, but unless the rest of humanity attains the same bliss, my spiritual awakening/enlightenment will never be complete.”
That is to say, we each can achieve inner freedom even if the rest of humanity is unfree, that is, in various forms of psychological enslavement, but that individual inner freedom is never complete until all of humanity is free internally and externally.
All spiritual teachings in their esoteric core teach this inner freedom, which is J. Krishnamurti’s First and Last Freedom, and yet when they become organized and are reduced to belief systems, instead of being the teachings of inner freedom, they become a tool of inner psychological enslavement.
We are each A World (or Universe), unique and singular, never to be repeated in the whole history of the Universe. That world can be an enlightened world and everything that exists therein can be experienced in the light of enlightened awareness.
THE World (or Universe) of which we partake is created through our communicative interactions. Hence, Buckminster Fuller states: “[The] Universe (World) is the aggregate of all humanity’s consciously apprehended and communicated non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.”
Your World, You as a World, is a Monad. It is a case of Monadology. The World, of which you partake through communicative interaction, is a Society. It is a case of Sociology.
We are each a Monad and exist in a Society. When one becomes awakened, the whole Monad becomes awakened, and through communicative interactions, one can sociologically influence the evolution of human consciousness.
The Monad has no window because you cannot experience the experience of another person. Yet, in the enlightened world that is you, an awakened individual, each human being who appears and exists in your world is a portal through which you can uniquely understand him or her as a World.
Spiritual awakening is a monadological phenomenon, and hence it is entirely the matter of individual responsibility. Taking responsibility is the act of taking a quantum leap from the orbit of psychological dependency on all forms of external authority (including the “God”) into the orbit of internal monadological integrity and power—that is, internal self-authority and individual sovereignty.
Transformation of the world is therefore the act of spiritually awakened and awakening Sovereign Individuals (Monads) co-creating a Sovereign Integral (Society/World).
In the past, the East focused primarily on monadic individual transformation, while the West focused primarily on social collective transformation. Today, the East and the West must meet in the act of monadic and social, or internal and external, transformation of the Self and the World—of the I as a World and the World as a We.