The following was written by Steven Harrison as the foreword to a book entitled One Harmonic Whole by Jackie Lee Hofer. The book can be ordered here.

There is a discovery that we each must make in our lives, if we are to live in the totality of our human potential. This discovery is very simple and available to each of us, all the time. This realization is that we live in a world which is made up of our concepts, our thoughts, our conditioning.

That is it.

It is a simple realization. It is a profound realization.

Our world is a world of thought which, by its nature, divides what is whole into two. Each thought contains a subject and an object because it contains a thinker and a thought.

Thought, as expressed in language, has become the basis of our individual identities and our social realities. This deeply imbedded schism reflects itself in every word and symbol we use with the result that we are constantly moving through a series of choices in our lives, the either/or paradigm created, perpetuated and reinforced by the very structure of our thought process.

This divided viewpoint is destroying us. The division, sorting and prediction of the world by thought is indeed effective. It builds bridges, it cures diseases, it wins wars. It is a dominating force.

But, this is precisely why it does not work. Domination is blind. There are people sleeping under the bridges that thought builds. There are new diseases replacing the ones that thought cures. And, the very winning of war means that war must be waged.

The divided viewpoint is destroying the world we inhabit because it cannot see the whole. The whole is not in thought, it is not in language and it does not reside in any viewpoint, belief system or philosophy.

The whole, after all, is all of these and everything else. The whole is what we are. We only think we’re not.

As we examine this strange paradox of mind, there is a funny thing that we find. The inquiry into this conceptual world of separation doesn’t bring us to any answers. We cannot find conclusions. We cannot build new thought structures. We observe the division of thought, the illusion of opposites, and in that moment the world collapses into the timeless whole. We collapse into the timeless whole.

What will express itself from the whole? How will we live and relate? Can the totality of life, the unindividuated energy of consciousness infuse all and everything that we are? Can the world that thought built, with its violence, destruction and chaos – the world of our own minds, suddenly become free from its divisions?

Let us discover this in our lives. Let life discover us.