At Its Heart

The Universal Family is a metaphor — a simple way of describing ordinary lived human life as the natural appearance of wholeness. It is not intended to explain reality or establish a philosophy. Rather, it offers a practical language through which emotional life, relationship, creativity, uncertainty, suffering, care, practical living and the ordinary movement of daily life may be explored without assuming that anything stands outside the wholeness of what is naturally appearing.

The metaphor does not suggest that life should be different. It simply provides a way of talking about the apparent movements that may arise within the already complete wholeness of what is naturally appearing.

The Beloved Parental Wholeness of What Is Appearing

The beloved parental wholeness is simply the inseparability of what is appearing. Beyond belief, beyond interpretations of what is happening, beyond metaphysics, beyond ontology, beyond knowing, beyond being aware, beyond being a self and the interpretation of separation, beyond everything the mind is capable of defining, there is simply, naturally, what is appearing: already everything, always whole. Nothing stands outside this wholeness because nothing can honestly be established as separate from it.

The Adolescent Illusion of Separateness

Through the ordinary functioning of cognition, perception, belief and language, what is inseparable becomes reified into apparently independent things by the adolescent illusion of separateness, giving rise to the compelling impression of a separate self living amongst separate objects. Nothing has actually become separate. Rather, the ordinary functioning of the apparent mind has divided what is whole into a world of apparently separate things. The adolescent is therefore not another reality. It is simply the apparent experience of separation arising within the beloved parental wholeness that has never been absent.

The Children of What Is Appearing

The children are the countless seeming appearances themselves. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, trees, mountains, rivers, people, birds and stars all appear distinct and yet none can honestly be established as separate from the beloved parental wholeness. Every apparent child is already wholly the beloved parental wholeness appearing as itself. Nothing is outside the family because the family is simply another description of the inseparability of what is appearing.

Seen in this way, the Universal Family is not a teaching, a cosmology or a metaphysical description of reality. It is simply a metaphor for what is already obvious.