The Intimacy of Onlyness

           Every now and then I have a client who says it seems lonely that in God there is only God. Ah! But loneliness is only possible when you are one among others, I explain. If all you’ve ever known is Onlyness, there is no sense of absence to make you feel lonely.

Or I point out that loneliness is an experience of lack and God is Abundant Wholeness. There is no lack in God, not even as an idea. To be the One and Only is to be Whole beyond what can be conceived of in consciousness, in which wholeness is always relative to lack.

Sometimes, though, I used to wonder myself what it was to be the Only. I have had many Oneness experiences of expansion, where Subject and Object are both my Self. But I know from direct Revelation of God that in God there is no Subject and Object the way there always is in consciousness. Yet, I can remember what I experience in Revelation, but not recall it to my experience. As Onlyness-without-object was beyond my imagining, I left it to be revealed.

A few months ago, it dawned on me for the first time—surprisingly—that the Onlyness of God means the Onlyness of me. Somehow, even given all those Oneness experiences, I never thought of this. This realization came with what I call the “desert-island feeling”, meaning what I always imagined it would be like to be alone on a desert island. It’s what I imagined it would feel like in a post-apocalyptic world if I was the only remaining human with an abundance of resources at my disposal. Of course, I always imagined these things as with Spirit, so I never thought of being lonely or comfortless. But I had never imagined it as Spirit with Spirit—Oneness.

This is a mildly pleasant experience, but it still has for me a mild sense of isolation, too. I feel, though, that it is somehow key to the peace left to unfold for me. When it comes over me, it silences my mind. If I am All, what is there to think about?

While I worked on my translation of A Course in Miracles into plain language (see The Message of A Course in Miracles and Practicing A Course in Miracles, here) over ten years ago, the realization that broke over me time and again like a thunder clap was that all my conflict was between me and me, not between me and a god outside of me or me and a world outside of me. This was, I now understand, the outer edges of understanding the Onlyness of me. What conflict can there be if there is only me?

When I shifted consciousness, I felt the boundary between inner and outer fall away. I no longer had two realities, as it were. What was left was only inward. Expansion during Oneness experiences is inward expansion. I go further into my Self even as I seem to grow larger, because I am not really growing, but becoming aware of the Infinitude of my Self, just as in God there is only God extending infinitely into God.

It is hard to express the value of Onlyness. When I say it is only inward, I mean to convey what the word intimacy conveys best. It is True Unity, which is far beyond the emotional intimacy I sought in human relationships, which turns out to be something very different, not to be denied, but also not confused with True Unity.

I see ahead a happy dream unfolding for me, reflecting the dreamer is now Spirit, and Spirit’s dream is with Its Self.

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