No Boundary
by Ken Wilber

This book was a little special for me. As soon as I saw it on the coaches’ bookshelf, I knew I wanted to read it. And I was not disappointed. I remember the time I was reading it – I was doing it slowly over a month or two. At that time, I was really immersed in it. I was looking at the world through the lens of the book and everything that happened in my experience could be related to it. I find it amazing, how now, reopening the book and flipping over the first pages, I find it resonating on such high frequencies. The main theme of the book is unity consciousness. The way Eckhart Tolle put it across in a recent email was “(..) Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.” This essential idea seems to be central for all major religions. As I was reading through the first pages of the book where people were sharing their experiences of this, I clearly remembered my own, however, there is a certain resistance to it. Caution as in the mainstream culture such sensitivity to experiences are seemingly not acknowledged (here I am demonstrating a split between myself and the mainstream culture). I find affirmation in those sharings. The experience of an individual feeling without any doubt that he or she is fundamentally one with the entire universe. According to what Wilber is writing here, the unity consciousness is the nature of all sentient beings, however in our mainstream society we progressively limit our world to embrace boundaries. That creates various levels and identities – each with different boundaries – each of those having a version of an answer to the question “who am I?”.

The first and major take away that I would like to start with is the fundamental boundary – the line we draw to decide what is “me” and what is not “me”. At a unity consciousness level there is no split, the person’s identity is with the All – absolutely everything. Then there are transpersonal bands mentioned, in which a person’s identity is split from the whole, however, goes beyond their own organism. Once a person identifies with their individual organism, there is a shift in identity and a split between what is me and what is not me. One of the major self/ not-self boundaries mentioned is the split between mind and body. If one draws this boundary and identifies with only the mind, personality or the ego (used interchangeably here), then the person’s identity lies in that facet rather than the organism as a whole. Further on, another type of major split is when someone rejects parts of their ego and, therefore, ego is split into persona and shadow. The applicability of this lies in the conflict each of these levels is trying to resolve as the unknown, the strange, the alien, the foreign is often portrayed as something to be the enemy. Being sensitive to the level in which the process is happening with the client can give a good indication of what kind of practices would be helpful for this particular issue. An interesting experience I had during the last couple of days seems to be connected with this. It was the instance of loneliness – a kind that was overwhelming, like a “loneliness attack”. I noticed how I was trying to distract myself, therefore, decided to do the opposite and just lay down in the bed and really experience the feeling. This kind of loneliness feeling is something I have been fairly familiar with in the past. I did a little ritual of reaching out to the part in me that feels left alone, which happened to be a great adventure. However, later on I was sharing how that felt in a reflective space and the reflection I got was that it felt completely “cut off”. And yes, indeed, that’s exactly it. The feeling of loneliness indicates of having marked enough boundaries for everything to seem far away, estranged and unreachable. And that was such a contrast to what I was experiencing in the sharing space, which felt very connected.  I could try and assign a level to the split that I was experiencing, but I will not do that. Instead, I will just say how this experience enabled me to notice how the contracted states – ones with tight boundaries – leave so much on the outside that one becomes threatened as the vastness of the estranged outside is so much greater than what is on the inside. However, as the boundaries dissolve, one starts to experience their self as the vastness and the very territory that before could have been identified as “the enemy”.

The other bit I want to mention as something applicable is the concepts of a map and territory. Boundaries are the way we map and edit reality. They are considered illusions.  There are no real existing boundaries in the universe between any things or events, however, they are products of our mapping and editing of reality and it is probably useful to do that in order to navigate ourselves and enable comprehension, but it comes with a price – alienation. Such boundary drawing has been in place from ancient times, when initially things were given names to when they were counted and measured to when algebra was brought about, which could further classify the measurements and draw conclusions. Each of these new kind of meta-boundaries allegedly estranged humans from the nature, from the unity with it. They brought about environmental disasters as human kind had envisioned these boundaries that made them imagine as if we were separate from the rest of the cosmos. What might have happened is that we could have mistaken the map for the territory, therefore, starting to believe that the way we make sense of the world by predicting and constructing what we perceive and further analyzing that using these boundaries and meta boundaries was seen as the “realest” of the realities. However, the 20th century arrived with the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which in a way collapsed the illusions of all the previously established meta-boundaries. As it was discovered that there are no fundamental boundaries on subatomic level, all the assumed meta – boundaries that were based on an assumption of separateness became invalid. Here is where the awareness of interconnectedness and interwoven nature of everything happening comes in. Therefore, while in “the practical world” (that works on human construct and some shared laws that inform our understanding of boundaries of reality rather than the natural world or reality itself) using a mapping system is useful for maintaining the balance between order and chaos in the society as we know it, however, if we aim to become more aware of our unity with the universe, we should not mistake the map from the territory as the map will not be a perfect match, at least for now.