Pure unity

In a profoundly living thing, the life which is there is not only present as a multiplicity of centers, in recursion. With the example of Chartres, we begin to see that there may be a special quality of such a thing, that the qualitative fact that may come into being, as the recursion becomes more and more intense, is that this thing gradually and more and more deeply, makes contact with the I. And, at the same time, it becomes more unified. As the structure approaches I in every center, then as a whole, it begins to reach a single unity.

Later, in chapter 7, we shall see this unity very explicitly in the realm of color, where we sometimes feel space melt, nearly swimming together, as if it became a single substance, not a multitude, but a many-faceted thing which glows with a single quality. But what we experience in color is simply a version of something more general, which is the ultimate experience of living structure. Living structure is unified. It is that unity which is the aim of life. It is the unity which is created by living structure.

Perhaps above all, we must always remember that a living center is living, is a being, only according to its position in a larger whole. It must help some larger whole. And if it is a being, it is helped by smaller wholes inside it, to the side of it, and far away from it.

So the being-like living center is a phenomenon, a nearly electric entity in space which gains its life by action at a distance, from the cooperation of the others all around it, from its contribution to the larger wholes with which it appears. This truly living quality is the being nature.

Thus as we begin to see living centers as beings, not as component parts, we begin to approach the idea of pure sheet-like unity, which is achieved in the space made of beings, to recognize that beings partake in living structure, to the extent that this structure approaches becoming an undivided whole, and the extent to which the beings — centers — help it to become an undivided whole.

The beings create unity, and by definition are part of unity. Each being — that is, each center — gets its life from the existence of the other centers around it within the unity they form together. But the interwoven life of these beings, all essentially stemming from the same I-like character, is then like a proliferation, an elaboration of the I. It is all I. It is all manifestation, elaboration, intensification of the same. The structure which contains ten thousand beings is not ten thousand separate entities. It is one entity, only shouting the same name, one sound, one voice, one I, one unity.

(Page 94)