To Be A Jedi: Part 4
together; in St. Paul’s realization that in Christ there is no male and female, free or slave; and finally in the seminal duality-shattering proclamation of Christ, "I and the Father are one."
The important thing in regards to the discussion here is the effect of such insights on the people who hold them. Do they usually lose their identity? Do they just spend the rest of their lives withering away in some kind of trance state? Not at all. In fact, precisely the opposite is true. From St. Francis to Meister Eckhardt to Paul Tillich, there is an amplification of individuality. These are after all the kinds of personalities that shape entire religions. In strong contrast to the people who merely adhere to a religion and whose sole measure of it is bland sermons delivered by bland preachers, the ones genuinely aware of the unity behind the multiplicity are the ones who have the most unique, different, and original voices.
When one turns to the East, they find cultures very much in tune with experiential religion, and they live the spiritual life by what Huston Smith and others have called "direct pointing." But even as they emphasize the reality of oneness, as we have seen the accent on the individual is all but completely dropped. But in reality, where does this leave personal identity?
Taoism is an excellent example to use. For instance, one of its leading sages was Chuang Tzu, and he wrote that "the ten thousand things are one." At the time, classical Chinese was made up of roughly ten thousand words, and so that categorized about every individual thing that had a name of its own. But of course, from the sage’s point of view, all these allegedly separate manifestations were really just different aspects of the Tao, the single process which grows and shapes the universe. Where is the individual there?
Yet over the course of twenty-five hundred years, Chuang Tzu has become one of the most beloved characters in Chinese philosophy, and one who continues to be idolized by scholars and poets alike. The same is true of his predecessor, Lao Tzu. The Taoists wrote and philosophized about the illusion of multiplicity and the oneness of all things, and made fine names for themselves in the process!
During the "Power of Myth" series, Bill Moyers got very close to Aldous Huxley when he spoke to Campbell about that shining point behind the
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