Seeing the One in both the Animate and the Inanimate

A memory popped into mind the other day while I was out hiking: There’s this scene in a movie (The Next Karate Kid) where a monk in a monastery is slowly going for a walk, sweeping in front of him as he steps. Out of compassion for all living things, he sweeps the little critters along his path off to the side so that he doesn’t accidentally squash them with his upcoming steps.

After this memory came to mind, another duality collapsed within me: The duality of animate and inanimate objects.

There’s the idea about having compassion for all living things. The way I interpret that idea, it’s basically like recognizing the Divine in all of life, in the living aliveness.

Yet what I’m seeing is that EVERYTHING is IT. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a person, an animal, an insect, a tree, a rock, the chair, or the air. Everything is the One. All of Life is revered in all its forms, living or not.

Rather than having compassion for only all living things, what arises is having compassion for all of existence.

We begin to revere and appreciate even the air that lovingly flows in and out of our bodies, the chair that selflessly supports and cradles our bodies, the nutrient-rich soil which nourishes and provides our food, the clouds that contribute to the crucial water cycle…

Conscious?

With the collapse of animate and inanimate, this doesn’t mean that suddenly animate and inanimate objects are identically the same. Of course not. Each manifestation of the One is unique, even though it is nevertheless the One.

What we call inanimate objects don’t have a consciousness in the way that we traditionally think of consciousness. They exist, and yet they have no idea that they exist.

What we call animate objects (living beings) have a consciousness in the way we traditionally think of consciousness. They are conscious, but they may not necessarily have the capacity to, like humans, know that they are, that they exist.

Humans have this unique capacity for being conscious of consciousness, to be a vessel through which consciousness can awaken to itself.

In a way, we could say that people are more conscious than birds who are more conscious than tables.

Yet, in the same way that some people are more conscious than other people, this in no way makes anything any more or less the One.

Everything is completely and totally, equally and infinitely the One, regardless of the degree of consciousness.

The degree of consciousness in a particular manifestation of the One may certainly determine the experience of that manifestation, or even if it can have a conscious experience in the first place, sure, but that in no way alters the fact that it is an inseparable manifestation of the One, animate or inanimate, living or dead.

Everything you could possibly look at is the One, including the one looking… perhaps especially so…

All is the One. All of existence and nonexistence. All is IT.