The Spirituality of Unity?

I was reflecting on how, many times, spirituality is often conveyed as unifying the self with all being. I remember reading William James ‘s Varieties of Religious Experience, where he describes saints who went through this conversion process, and started to see themselves as united with all nature. Shifu Sheng Yen describes this in Hoofprint of the Ox as a kind of initial understanding of emptiness, but it doesn’t go far enough to question what is the self who entertains all that experience. In fact, I recall that Sheng Yen refers to this as Big Self, meaning a self that has expanded to include all phenomena around it.

Is there anything wrong with this big, unified self?

One problem is that it is still a “self”, and it is easy to get attached to the feeling of being unified with everything. I recall reading certain poets in my undergraduate years, Coleridge and Wordsworth, who seemed to be describing the ecstasy of being one with the universe, and having no conflicts with the universe at all. I have had a similar, though rather trivial, experience in my undergrad years. I was sugar-deprived for a while (or perhaps just food deprived in general), after which I went to a Jewish bakery on Bathurst and Lawrence. There, I had bought a Danish or pastry with blueberry jam inside of it. I recall eating the pastry and immediately feeling a kind of rush, as though all the thoughts and things around me had suddenly become very transparent.  I even felt a kind of weightless sense as I was walking home. I think this is what happens if a person doesn’t eat for a while! Of course that rush subsided, but the feeling I had was not getting caught by thoughts, yet being very lucid and feeling reconciled with the world.

The other challenge with the notion of unity is that it is rare to always feel unity with all experiences. Anything one asserts has to have an opposite somewhere. If I feel unified with all things one day, where would the sense of disunity fit into that equation? Again, I recall what the Venerable had mentioned in his trip to Toronto recently: see the calm in the vexation, rather than attaching to calm itself. Unified mind is equivalent to attaching to some feeling of unity. And I write this because I am so tempted to look for that feeling of unity… because I somehow think it means that the self is dissolved. Quite the contrary, anything that I attach to is going to have a self, because attachment always entails subject and object. The implication of this is that even if what I experience is not so unified or feels fragmented and even wrong, I need to recognize that all these impressions are thoughts. They are neither unity nor disunity. If I can recognize that the thoughts are neither parts nor wholes, I can cease feeling anxious to try to unify the thoughts together into some coherent or pleasant pattern. In that way, I see past the thoughts to understand where they arise in mind, without trying to ‘join them’ to mind through some pattern.