Unity and Diversity, Part 1

Looking as Play of Contrast

Imagine the world was made of music. Imagine the constellations in the night sky were painted in caligraphic letters. Imagine your clothes threaded with poems and and the surface of the world around us was similarly adorned. What if the world were everywhere covered in images that also describe it? What would that look like? To see symbols everywhere you go, a language of synchronicity and connections, would look more like madness or dreaming, than perception in waking life. But this is how our conscious is perceiving the world around us – our whole consciousness that is. But that is another story. For this moment, let’s use our conscious minds. Though looking at the image below it may begin to draw us into some other places in ourselves.

Mihrab (Prayer Niche) dated 755 AH/1354–55 CE

I feel delight, joy, and the cool smoothness of this mosaic when I look at this image, a prayer nook of antiquity. I see revelation, I see scintillating script. I dream of divine adoration and hear the call to prayer. I look into the patterns and am drawn deep into seeing itself, the unity and diversity of all things inside and out.

Those who know me will inevitably hear me talk about Unity and Diversity as a fundemental principle of being and life. I love this concept. These two words together, combined with an “and” pack quite a punch! I was first introduced to this principle by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (MMY for short), many years ago through video lectures.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

“Yoga means ‘unity’—it means living unified wholeness in the field of diversity” -MMY

After watching and listening to many MMY talks, I have been impacted by the powerful connection he makes between unity and diversity. Given their apparent logical contrast, and our tendency to mythologize unity into an impossible idea, and the way we sort of generalize so much that real uniqueness is also made impossible, I was delighted to hear his insight. What I learned is that Unity creates Diversity and Diversity in turn enlivens such that it fullfills Unity. If you see the universe as MMY does; a changing, self aware, self-creating, coherent and intelligent thing. To Maharishi it seems the contrast between Unity and Diversity is the very play of energy and matter itself, from atom, to the galaxy, to the organism.

However, Maharishi is not the only teacher or author to expand upon this contrast between Unity and Diversity. On the other side of the philosophical spectrum, radical social critic Guy Debord riffs hard on this concept in his life’s work The Society of the Spectacle, by describing the inverted and false unity and false diversity of our hyper consumerist image and infotainment based over-culture. He calls this false unity created by an alienated consumer economy “the Specatcle.”

Guy Debord

Debord saw what are presented to us as diverse politics and divisize social forces in the modern world as as actually and the essentially same. “Although the struggles between different powers for control of the same socio-economic system are officially presented as fundamental antagonisms, they actually reflect that system’s fundamental unity, both internationally and within each nation.”

Here there is an unconscious yoga of consumerism, like a halepiño ice-cream cone that satisfies your thirst after one lick. Each lick only makes it worse as the heat kicks in, requiring the next and the next. “The image of blissful social unification through consumption merely postpones the consumer’s awareness of the actual divisions until his next disillusionment with some particular commodity. Each new product is ceremoniously acclaimed as a unique creation offering a dramatic shortcut to the promised land of total consummation.”

This land of total consumption is what consumerism offers, the temporary feeling of belong to one’s life. A false unity. Debord sees us as dupes of false sense being that is required of our economic relationships. It never quite gives us what we need. While proclaiming itself as total and free, it remains highly classist. While dividing life away from itself and our real human needs, it everywhere offers another way to distract us from actually meeting them.

“The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division underlying the real unity of the capitalist mode of production. What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what excludes them from it. What brings people into relation with each other by liberating them from their local and national limitations is also what keeps them apart. What requires increased rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What produces society’s abstract power also produces its concrete lack of freedom.” Cell phone social media anyone?

So in Debord’s view, the diversity is false and the unity is false. Debord was a materialist social thinker in a traumatized post-war Europe, for him the only Unity & Diversity worth mentioning were those that were being presented by the overwhelming powers of the economy, specifically the new consumerist economy of the USA we have since seen dominate the world.

But in the spirit of this great contrast of Unity and Diversity, let’s contrast Debord’s negative take on false unity, and the inverted view of reality it creates that is so real these days, with some more sweet yoga from Maharishi:

“It is the unified field that through sound diversifies itself into infinite diversity. … All the diverse values have their whole existence in eternal unity — and that is wholeness.” -MMY

To MMY, the dynamism of everything at play in life and in the universe is connected through unity. But why? Why unity and diversity? What is the nature of this polarity, this contrast? MMY has some real insight here. The dynamism we see around us is the product of this very contrast. That the quality of unity AND one single difference is enought to enliven and create dynamism and play in the universe. A contradiction that creates creation and is always creating:

“It is interesting to note that the quality of alertness in the nature of consciousness is due to the co-existence of these two opposite values within its structure. Togetherness of these contradictory qualities within the structure of consciousness renders consciousness wakeful, alert, and lively. Consciousness is the lively field of all possibilities.”

“Consciousness is the unity or coexistence of two qualities of intelligence that are contradictory to each other,' Maharishi continued. 'Singularity or self-referral Samhita, and diversity of Rishi, Devata, and Chhandas.” [Rishi, Devata, and Chhandas are three realms: transcendant, psycho-energetic, and physical]

I love this explaination of things. Unity finds expression because every minute expression of diversity creates aliveness and activity everywhere. An endless end, an eternal beginning, I am brought to a place where I can see and percieve differentiation and non differentiation happening all around me and especially in me. Because it is through my senses that this rich contrast is being made and always changing.