“Unity has never meant uniformity.”

The Masks We Learn to Wear

In your mind’s eye, see yourself walking toward an old friend, one with whom you’ve been close for years, then switch the scene so you're meeting a work client that you’ve never met. In each context, how might your posture be different, your expressions, and how does your clothing reflect who you are in each moment?

Often, we feel like different people when in different contexts; who we feel to be changes depending on moment-to-moment circumstances. Finding a unique place in society, most of us tune and manipulate the image other people see of us. First we decide who we want others to see us as, and then we enact it.

This “double-life” doesn’t feel good. It results in echoes of confusion and lends a sense of being an imposter in one’s own life. Most of the time this is subtle, yet a more charged restlessness constantly roils below the surface.

Our “public face” is our inheritance, given to us from adults as we develop around as children. But children also resist what they witness, which means they also learn to avoid acting in those ways that are offensive.

In other words, our responses are shaped from memory, and many different roles are incorporated into each person’s sense of self.

It is impossible to escape taking on these roles. And tragically, what we as children did not want to absorb we did anyway—there wasn’t a choice. Still, we become totally enmeshed, feeling as if these roles are our own original ways of seeing things.

The Special and
Shameful Me

This split of identity between "good" and "bad" inherited roles gives a cherishing of the self alongside internalized shame.

In other words, to hold what is unwanted within, we need an inflated self-image to overshadow it. There has to be something that can oppose and distract from those repulsive parts we picked up as children.

When Separation
Becomes a System

We are at a hugely pivotal point in history. AI is rapidly changing how people relate to technology, society, and work—and it’s just beginning. Conflict is everywhere. It seems that all scrolling has become “doom-scrolling.” So it's not surprising that feeling disconnected is the norm.

Ironically, humans together are 99.999% the same as a species—yet we often see people across cultural lines as if they were aliens. The stark reality is that our separating boundaries are not real...they are imaginary lines in the sand we draw and defend at the highest cost. In this extreme separateness, how is unity or change even remotely possible?

Identity has neither physical nor ontological reality, it's only a mental concept. There is no standalone “identity” in any single person that can be found, seen under a microscope, or located from a person’s own point of view. This simple fact exposes the truth that all of this separateness is based on a misconception.

Now, I’m not saying that separation doesn't surround us culturally, at all scales; it does. I’m saying that this narrative is simply untrue, and when we are acting as though it is true we get the consequences of that belief as though it is true. When we act as though separation is real we are making it true by believing it. But we only make the delusion true in this process.

The High Cost
of Division

I’ll share a story about delusion.

I have a brother who suffers from the USA's lack of support networks. He needs help to be sheltered, fed, and stable. He is often thrown behind bars for being mentally unwell, if not simply left in the cold.

The greatest human civil rights violation of our time in the US is the mass incarceration currently happening. With less than 5% of the world’s people, we have over %25 of all imprisoned people. So, it's clearly a big problem - emphasizing separation.

My brother isn’t violent nor is he a criminal. He feels unsafe with any figure of authority. Some of this could be called delusion, but in many ways he has reasons to believe it based on experience.

I could say to him, "Hey—they’re going to help you, they have your best interest at heart..." and his experience would say: “No way! They don’t.” And on one level he’s right. This system is broken and it is set up to make money off of him by putting him in jail.

But on another level—a physical level of reality—each and every person he comes into contact with has a human heart, a subjective experience, has the capacity to be loved and express love. We all have the capacity to be happy, sad and afraid. This is no less true because of expectations that form from experience.

If we were to look at another level...the level of fundamental consciousness that we all experience directly...each person is exactly as conscious as another. My consciousness is not bigger than anyone else's, period.

In this way we are definitely not separate. A role may promote the idea of separation but that doesn't make it a fact.

We could think of it in a more tangible way. Think: does putting someone in jail diminish their core integrity as a human being? Does it diminish their capacity for any amount of human experiencing? No.

Despite a reflex to imagine people are separate, they aren't. So, you see—it is the illusion of separation that that system stands on that makes it real. The illusion is real, not what is claims.

The Consequences of Believing the Lie

Living with the idea that separateness is a fact, we forget the humanity of our brothers and sisters of this world. It allows murder and mistrust and deception. We forget that all are the same at the source. The consequences of this are all around.

The most obvious impact is the tendency to deny the consequences in the name of distance. We can say “well, it’s not in my own home.” But it is, it’s even closer than home; it’s in our bodies and minds. Every single time we have a sense of self-centered fear, or when there is self-exaggeration or a need to defend what is MINE, at the expense of all the other people who are “external” to me this belief is being lived and promoted to the whole.

And a quick caveat I’d like to add is that none of this is a claim to say that each person’s view is not unique. It was true when Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Unity has never meant uniformity.”

Unity is the truth, not uniformity. Uniformity is when we are all doing the same thing or trying to follow the same rules, which is authoritarian and not motivated by unity.

What I’m pointing to here is that from the realization that separateness is a mental construct not a fact, it isn’t a far leap to some powerful questions:

1. What if the separateness we feel reflects what we see around us?
   

2. What if the boundaries we defend are fake and not really there?
   

3. What if the power to unify and relax into shared conscious living with all beings on Earth is achieved by dropping that attitude of separation?
   

4. What if learning to let go of this illusion is our purpose and our birthright?
   

5. What if the only power to change lies in our individual investigation of separateness?

Awakening is Not an Escape, But a Remedy

The quest to awaken has been diminished as a pursuit that denies the reality of the world around us, and disregards the big issues right in front of our faces. And yes, that can happen when folks remove themselves.

But when this is taken on as a living investigation for a shift for the whole, it is the opposite of an escape. Instead, it’s an effort to allow reality to reflect what it is, which is unified.

The whole point in finding the truth of wholeness is not individual liberation. It is liberation from the belief that you and I are separate. With that shift the whole world is invited to shift, too.

Awakening Into Cultural Repair

Awakening is a term fraught with misconceptions, but I’m using it to mean a recognition between the self that is experiencing the totality of all changing conditions and perceptions (including roles and identities played out in society), and the specific perceptions themselves.

The self that we are is not attached to and does not have any qualities of its own. Consciousness is the only real and undeniable experience we can refer to that doesn’t have any traits.

There are many practices to remember this coming from traditions both old and new. The specific way to recognize this difference is not important, because there are plenty. From yoga, to mindful attention, to contemplative prayer, to forest bathing, each of these practices expose the reactions we are programmed to have. The reactions themselves are not what’s emphasized in a true awakening process. Rather, distinguishing programming from our essential self is what matters.

We don’t need to look far to see that human beings share a lot on this planet. We share the atmosphere, the water. We also share physical requirements like nourishment, community, and warm affection. And then there are the value-based needs that we share, like meaning, dignity, safety, and belonging.

These exist beneath cultural veneers and superficial “lines in the sand” drawn between groups. A realization of wholeness is empty when it fails to include how we meet other people and how we regard their welfare.

Using the first two principles of changing one’s foundation of belief, we can make a shift to better include other people and dismantle misconceptions between us

A Practice of
Honest Self-Inquiry

To begin, make a judgement-free examination about the positions you defend in other words, the positions you experience fear around. Start by listing the top 5 roles you play in life—in your family, in your career, in your friend group, in your state or nation, and in your creative projects. Write these down.

Remember, honest inquiry is a gentle way to approach personal accountability with curiosity. So, think of this like accounting for the facts: without judging yourself, how do you show up in these areas?

Next look at the underscoring restlessness or discomfort in each. Maybe these aren’t actively taking place, but they are on the fringes as worry or nagging worst-case-possibilities. What are the stories within each of these areas that contain either a fear of losing something you have, or a fear of not getting what you want? Don’t get too analytical here, but make a few notes about how that story plays out in your head.

The point is that when we take a look at these with the intention of seeing the systems that reinforce distance within ourselves, we step into the witness that is not worried at all. We have to step out of the program in order to see it. Just like those other practices I mentioned, the content of the writing is not the point. This option is the path of change that uses the least amount of violence, selfish effort, or force. It is inquiry, and there are many ways to do it.

Below the Surface,
One Foundation

This writing exercise is one way of, as my friend Paul Hedderman calls it, “seeing what you’re not.” When we are seeing what we are not, we are being what we are. There is no way to not be what we really are.

In other words, we can’t see what we are but we are always being it.

Whether we find this truth through listening to someone pointing to a universal unity, or through reading beautiful poetry that we lose ourselves in, or through doing a process like this writing suggestion…the way there doesn’t matter.


I also guide people through a systematic way of dissolving the roles we are programmed to play out, called Wholeness Work. That isn’t the only way, though. It's just one…although it’s really efficient and gets to the root effectively.

The truth is that we are not just in the same boat in this melancholy situation that is our planet in this moment. The truth is that we are the source that illuminates any of this, and the remedy for the spell we've been under. We each are a facet of the same one diamond.

I’ll end this post with an image my favorite philosopher right now recently shared.

Our personal experience is like this: imagine a chain of pointy little islands, each a mountain in itself poking up out of the water.

These mountains are all separated by the ocean they are surrounded by. But if we were to dive below the surface, going under water we would see these mountains deeper below, where they are all much closer to each other, and not nearly as far apart as we thought.

And if we were to go all the way to the bottom of the ocean, we would find what appeared to be separate mountains share the same base—they aren’t really separate at all, they're one foundation.

This is like us: we share the same source.

Our foundation is unity. We are offered a system of uniformity of belief, which is the belief in separation, and now in our maturity we have a choice. We have a choice to reject the old illusion now. We have a choice to stand sovereign in our universality and our shared unity, and to change what the moving sculpture of life appears to us as, as the world changes and people grow.

We will either grow further in the belief in illusion, or we will awaken to the truth our source is one.