Infinity consciousness includes the world of finite duality, but through our religions, philosophies and sciences we have made duality into dualism and debunked infinity consciousness.

John Randolph Price

Most of human history has been functioning according to what Joseph Campbell calls "bounded community" concepts. An "us against them" exclusivism has reigned.

The time has come for the emergence of an unbounded community of unity consciousness, a planetary consciousness of we-ness and inclusiveness. Science, philosophy, psychology and religion are beginning to take the evolutionary leap from dualism to the unity-in-diversity consciousness.

Prior to Judaism and Christianity, the world was guided by animal religions, nature religions and polytheistic religions. In human evolution, perhaps monotheism played the important role of critic and catalyst.

However, in both Judaism and Christianity the dualistic consciousness reigned. God was set over against creation, over against nature, over against evil, over against humanity. Jesus was set apart from all other avatars and humans. The church was set over against the world. Spirit was set against nature, sex and matter. Judeo-Christianity was set over against other religions and philosophies. Christianity was the bounded community which was to conquer and convert other bounded communities.

Christianity claimed special revelation and preached a unique Saviour. Several major bounded religions have joined under the banner of Christianity: Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Islam.

I believe that the seeds of unity consciousness were planted in Judaism and Christianity, but that they have not yet fully flowered.

Where may we find such "seeds"?

In the Old Testament God was known as "I AM"

The mantra of the Jewish people was "I the Lord they God am one, and besides me there is no other."

In the New Testament, John saw that "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." In this context Word meant Logos, the universal reason or purpose, and it was interpreted to mean Christ.

The word "Christ" was a universal cosmological term and was that force or office which Jesus became one with, and which we are also to become one with.

Jesus identity is linked with our identity. "Who do men say that I am? Who do you say that I am?" The understanding of the answer to these questions will become the foundation of the new humanity and you will know that "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."

Paul said that "Christ in us" is the hope of glory, and that he couldn’t tell whether it is "I that live or Christ in me." What I am attempting to document is that down through the ages, mystics of all types in every spiritual tradition have discovered the seed of unity consciousness which is now flowering.

Eugene Taylor describes this flowering in America as a visionary folk psychology which flourished underground and parallel to the mainstream of science and religion which were caught up more in dualism.

Physicists have now come up with an "implicate order" which undergirds the more visible explicate order of the dualistic finite world. (Bohm)

The Kaballah was an esoteric and mystical branch of Judaism which taught unity consciousness. Sufism was an esoteric and mystical branch of Islam which taught unity consciousness. The Essenes and the Gnostics which flourished in biblical times were also exponents of unity consciousness. Rosacrucians, Masons and other esoteric groups carried on the unity consciousness theme in their own fragmented ways. The New Thought movement picked up on this tradition and has popularized it through Unity and Religious Science. New Age exponents have also popularized unity-in-diversity to such a degree that it has been absorbed into the mainstream culture in various degrees of distortion.

The god of Pythagorus , the first and most famous philosopher, was called a monad, which meant the one that is everything, the cause of all things, the intelligence of all things and the power within all things.

In the 13^th century, Thomas Aquinas declared that "He Who Is" is the proper name for God. And Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of the Is which dwells within and as each individual, shining through as Will to pronounce all things Good. He wrote "The simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God." And according to Alice Bailey, the Tibetan Master Djwhal said that the life of God, His energy and vitality are found in every manifested atom, his essence indwelling all forms.

The question of whether the mystical vision will ever be mainstream is interesting. The mainstream always seems to be a crystalized form of mystical creativity. The tension between mainstream orthodoxy and mystical creativity no doubt has a function in the evolution of consciousness. But this tension also results in the symptoms of such a "bounded culture" : wars, violence, greed, disease, competition, mental illness, prejudice, and a victim outlook per se.

If you happen to be so unfortunate as to be an insider, and you fit into the major belief system/mythology of your culture, then you may not feel neurotic, and if you have a problem and can solve it within the belief system of your social mindset, then you may feel reasonably okay. However, if you should be so fortunate as to feel like an outsider, that you do not fit into the major belief system/mythology of your group, you may feel neurotic, you may not be able to resolve your symptoms within the belief system of your social mindset, and you may feel thrust into taking the journey of individuation into the dark forest of the unconscious.

And this journey may require breaking out of all of the safety zones into the strange world of the Infinite God. You will wander off the beaten path, and you must muster up the courage to face the trials of finding your true Self, and bring back new possibilities for everyone to experience—the hero’s deed. It is a horrific, tremendous, fascinating thing to meet the Mystery, which smashes all of your fixed notions of things, and to realize that all of the gods, all of the worlds, all of the heavens and hells, even the Christ, is within yourself. You transcend the world of time, the world of opposites, and you come back into the realization of the singularity of Infinity Vision. You realize that God is a label that points to the experience of Transcendence, which is what you have been unconsciously seeking outwardly in all of your thoughts and activities. Then you are able to realize the blessing of the outsider experience and the symptom experience which thrust you into taking the hero’s journey into the dark forest, springboarding you into the transcendent experience beyond the duality of good and evil.

There is a wonderful story of the deity, of the Self that said "I Am". As soon as it said " I Am", it was afraid. It was an entity now in time. Then it thought "What should I be afraid of, I’m the only thing that is." And as soon as it said that, it felt lonesome, and wished that there were another, and so it felt desire. It swelled, split in two, became male and female, and begot the world.

Joseph Campbell

We could take this ancient story of creation from the Upanishads and reverse it and say that this certain human being, being in turmoil with stress and strange symptoms, said to himself, "I Am Not being myself, and having said it, began to feel astonished. "Am I not just like everyone else? How could I not be myself?" In a state of shock, this human began to remember and to experience the Infinite, his splitness healed and the world as he had known it disappeared.