Degrees of Separation

"The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw -- and knew I saw -- 
all things in God, and God in all things.” 

 (Mechthild of Magdeburg, 13th cent.)

"They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them."

(The Bhagavad Gita, 3rd cent, B.C.E.)

In their origins, these quotations, are separated by centuries, by cultures, and by miles of geography.  But they are of the same spirit.  Not too long ago, I recalled these memorable lines because I experienced some difficult communication between myself and a friend, causing us to both feel painfully the inescapable differences in our perspectives.

Quotations similar to these can be found in all of the world's great faith-traditions.  Such reminders of a fundamental unity endure because we humans know all too well how easily two friends, two partners, or two family members can become alienated.  (Not to mention the persistent barriers of nationality, ethnicity, and culture.)

Diagram of 6 degrees of separation

Over the past several years, the phrase "six degrees of separation" has entered our vocabulary. The supposition behind that phrase is that, beginning with any person, a series of six connections of some sort can be drawn linking that person to any other person.  (For example: Am I only six degrees from a movie star, if I include the cities I've lived in, and include someone who went to the movie star's high school?)  I wonder if the popularity of trying to find such 6-link chains may come in part from our living in ever-larger cities, causing us to be surrounded by more and more strangers.

The great mystics, such as the Christian Mechthild of Magdeburg and the author of that quote from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, see the world in a somewhat different way:  They say that if we see more deeply into reality, the number of degrees of separation is zero!

Here is where the critics of mysticism (whether religious or secular critics) are easily confused. Critics frequently dismiss mysticism by saying that mystics are impractical and out of touch with everyday reality.  If taken literally, a mystics claim that all is "one" seems obviously false.  For, after all, I can see with my eyes that there are two people right in front of me.  The mystics, however, lived lives just as real and practical as other people.  The difference was that they came to perceive a hidden unity that made the forms of separation shallow in comparison.

all a part of one universe
(16th-century drawing)

Modern science has put a new twist on this age-old dispute between the mystical and the commonplace viewpoints. Modern science, with its narrative of how our universe was born and evolved to us today, draws an actual, physical chain of links connecting everything  -- alienated people, animals, plants, and the inanimate.  As the contemporary Christian writer Matthew Fox explains:  " [The] very elements of which we are composed were in fact prepared billions of years ago in the stars themselves."

~~~

Do you have some way of handling alienation between you and someone else when it occurs?

(The Mechthild quote is taken from Meditations with Mechtild of Magdeburg, ed. Sue Woodruff, © 1982.  p. 42.)
(The passage [2:55] from The Bhagavad Gita is from the translation of Eknath Easwaran, © 1985.)

(The map of the universe by Thomas Digges is in the Public Domain because it is over 70 yrs. old.)