The 'simplicity' we are speaking of has nothing to do with being 'simplistic', but it corresponds to that 'singleness of the eye' mention in the Gospel, in the functional sense and in its most profound dimension. It suggests an instinctive, tried and tested, conscious and integrated impersonal decentralisation, collectivity, and co-operative communication.

It suggests an ease of 'Non-ambitious Identity' which has as an instinct a passion for the anonymous, the unobserved, and the unknown, hymned by Alexander Pope and many other thinkers, such as Søren Kierkegaard, who, in an inspired way, represented God as liking to go about incognito. This happens in spite of the experientially lucid tension and the consumed transcendentalism of life and of consciousness, in a strenuous communion, within and without.

There are two fundamental problems in the way of raising up human nature to this simplicity.
1. The first point of difficulty is that man must succeed in penetrating, through sensibility, and thought and their psychological processing, into an intuitive and contemplative immediacy as regards the world and the depth of reality, with pure reason and discerning sympathetic understanding.
2. The second point of difficulty lies in the fact that such a transcendence-orientated undertaking of stimulation of the consciousness and achievement of higher thinking can stir up a tumultuous and frenetic psychological atmosphere in the personality, and this deeply poisons its action and diverts it. For this reason, before this consciousness which ministers to Being can be achieved, a long series of successes or renunciations of psychological self-deception is called for.

It is only in this way that the 'ordinary man' of Robert Browning, like the 'single eye' of Christ, will not suggest contempt for others or for people in their natural state, or for their great numbers, so much liked by Abraham Lincoln or Walt Whitman, to the extent that the latter dedicated to them his glorious Leaves of Grass. It does not denote contempt for any scale of being.

Separateness is unthinkable ontologically, and the law of sharing rules with discernment, sometimes in glory and sometimes ingloriously, at all levels. Renunciation, therefore, is required of any claim on a work or idea, in spite of the Will for good being released and the identification with the whole in service of it. It is only in this way that the depths of the Self are stirred up worthily in seeming adversities. And it is in this way that the road to Joy and bliss of the soul and of the spirit, whatever the circumstances are, is opened up, with a disarming of the Self’s play-acting, with a 'unifying meekness' which is an indication of ultimate psychological fearlessness.

This blissful existential trust is a basis for experiential radiant sustainability; it is abundance and liberation of the motivation. It opens up the landscape of an inner boundlessness which rejoices in its apparent weakness and its lack of interest in power. It acts in the light of a freedom manifested in service, subject to voluntariness or will in its Spiritual dimension. It functions as abstraction and renewal in form and in the ideas by which it is possessed.

This simplicity is aware of the multiplicity of the beings, which act in parallel with the fact that 'The Self is One'. Thus it is also recognisable through discernment as being at the same time liberated from the Angst of the self-deception of the separate self, with an instinctive ease, in Its consuming and life-giving unity. The self is beyond the play-acting transience of forms. It lives as an unswervingly devoted and liberating 'isolated unit'.

Thus it manifests Being with Duration liberated from pain and the apprehension of Time, liberated from fear and distorting alterations brought about by fear and the mind. It lives in a love which is testimony to the acceptance of Wholeness, with a lucidity which surpasses thought and the mind in its anguish and goes on to express Being and Spirit.
By all this difference from the customary in experiencing, nature keeps its Gracious measure as a - virtually unobserved - way of life and proper human relations, without the bonds of selfishness.

This is, clearly, a furtherest limit of selfhood on which a long sequence of progressive fulfilments converges. The beauty both of the Limit itself and of the converging sequence together form a landscape for a journey to our Self.

Ioannis Zisis, writer

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