Universal Oneness: When Common People Become Heroes By Realizing We Are All One
We may appear separate and often feel separate, but the separation is not fundamental. Because we experience ourselves as one with the person in need, when we risk our life to save them, we are essentially saving ourselves.
“Why would one person willingly risk or sacrifice his or her life for another?” asks Larry Dossey, referring to seemingly random acts of empathy in which strangers go to an extreme, to help people in danger. The answer lies in the non-locality of our consciousness—we are all One. “We may appear separate and often feel separate, but the separation is not fundamental. Because we experience ourselves as one with the person in need when we risk our life to save them, we are essentially saving ourselves,” concludes Dossey.
Saving Others
On January 2, 2007, Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old African American construction worker, and Navy veteran, was waiting for a subway train in Manhattan with his two young daughters at around 12:45 P.M. As Autrey stood there, he was unaware that he was about to become involved in a sequence of events that would change his life, and that would reveal profound truths about the nature of the human mind. He noticed a young man, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, having a seizure. The man managed to get to his feet but stumbled from the platform onto the tracks between the two rails. Autrey saw the lights of an approaching train and made an instant decision. He jumped onto the tracks, thinking he would have time to drag Hollopeter away. Realizing this was impossible, he covered Hollopeter’s body with his own and pressed him down in a drainage ditch about a foot deep between the tracks. The train operator tried to stop and the brakes screeched, but by the time he could do so, five cars had passed over the two men. It was a close call; the cars were so close to Autrey that they smudged grease on his blue knit cap. Autrey heard onlookers screaming. “We’re okay down here,” he yelled back, “but I’ve got two daughters up there. Let them know their father’s okay.” Then he heard cries of wonder and applause from the bystanders.
Hollopeter, a student at the New York Film Academy, was taken to the hospital but sustained only bumps and bruises. Autrey refused medical help because, he said, nothing was wrong.
Why did Autrey do it? He told the New York Times, “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.” He said further that, as a construction worker, he was used to working in confined spaces, and that his judgment in this case proved to be “pretty right.”
Autrey was extraordinarily modest, but this did not shield him from the public’s adulation. He was an overnight celebrity, with appearances on several national morning TV news programs and late-night shows. Gifts poured in—scholarships and computers for his two daughters, a new Jeep Patriot, season tickets to the New Jersey Nets, a one-year free parking pass for use anywhere in New York City, and a year of free subway rides, among other things. Time magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2007. He was named CNN Hero, a title given for “making a difference in the world. He was a guest at the 2007 State of the Union Address to the U. S. Congress, where he received a standing ovation.
Why Risk Everything?
Why would one person willingly risk or sacrifice his or her life for another? The answer might seem obvious: he or she simply cares and has empathy or love for the person in need. But that answer is not good enough for evolutionary biologists, who want to know what purpose is served by caring, empathy, and love. What does the individual gain by acting on these feelings?
According to the tenets of evolutionary biology, we are genetically programmed to act in ways that ensure our survival and reproduction. Our empathic acts, therefore, might extend to those closest to us who share our genes—our siblings, children, kinship group—because helping them helps us genetically in the long run. Or we might extend empathy toward our tribe or social unit because we might one day need them to reciprocate. In this light, actions like Wesley Autrey’s are biological heresy. He was not remotely connected with Cameron Hollopeter—not racially, socially, occupationally, or culturally. Autrey’s genes would not have benefited if he died saving the young white man. So, according to evolutionary biology, Wesley Autrey should have stayed on the subway platform and let Cameron Hollopeter fend for himself.
Some might argue that Autrey did benefit from saving Hollopeter. He became famous, his daughters got college funds and computers, and he received cash awards and other tangible benefits. Since his action changed his circumstances and made his life and that of his daughters less difficult, perhaps there was a genetic payback in what he did. But he did not know in advance that these things would happen. And in any case, was it worth risking what appeared to be certain death? Surely not. In this dangerous situation, genetic conservation should have kept Autrey on the platform with his daughters, along with all the onlookers who thought it would be suicidal to act as he did.
Becoming Someone Else
Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, was interested in why people perform selfless acts. Influenced by the views of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Campbell observed, “There’s [a] wonderful question Schopenhauer asked. How is it that an individual can so participate in the danger and pain of another that, forgetting his self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other’s rescue, even at the cost of his own life?” Schopenhauer believed that self-sacrifice for another occurs because the rescuer realizes that he or she and the individual in need are one. At the decisive moment, the sense of separation is overcome. The danger to the needy person becomes that of the rescuer. The prior sense of separateness is simply a function of the way we experience things in space and time: we may appear separate and often feel separate, but the separation is not fundamental. Because we experience ourselves as one with the person in need, when we risk our life to save them, we are essentially saving ourselves.
Campbell elaborated, “Now, that spontaneous compassion, I think, would jump culture lines. If you were to see someone from an alien world—even a person or a race or nation that you had no sympathy for—the recognition of a common human identity would spark a response. And the ultimate reference of mythology is to that single entity, which is the human being as human.
I have never heard of a rescuer inquiring whether the person in immediate need is a Democrat or Republican, pro-choice or anti-abortion, how he or she stands on global climate change, or whether he or she favors allopathic medicine or homeopathy. The reaction to another human in need leapfrogs these issues in favor of a deeper human response. Schopenhauer realized this. As he wrote in his 1840 book, based on Morality, “Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.” He elaborated, “My true inner being exists in every living creature as truly and immediately as known to my consciousness only in myself. This realization, for which the standard formula is in Sanskrit tat tvam asi, is the ground of compassion upon which all true, that is to say unselfish, virtue rests and whose expression is in every good deed.”
I’m willing to bet that Wesley Autrey never read a scrap of Campbell or Schopenhauer. He didn’t have to. And that’s the point. When he sheltered Cameron Hollopeter in the path of an oncoming train, he was defying all instincts for perpetuating his genes. He was in the embrace of the One Mind that binds us all, the unity so clearly glimpsed by luminaries such as Campbell and Schopenhauer. At the decisive moment, from the One-Mind perspective of consciousness, Wesley Autrey was Cameron Hollopeter.
Author Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his book Evolution’s End, points out that the word sacrifice, like the word sacrament, means “to make whole.” Sacrifice, however, has taken on negative connotations, such as slaughtering an animal. But the original meaning of the word as wholeness is captured in the experience of giving oneself to another. “To become whole all parts must be left behind,” Pearce observed, “for a whole is not the sum of its parts but a different state entirely. [Meister] Eckhart spoke of ‘all named objects’ being left behind when one enters that unknown. We must go beyond the fragmentation of parts and leave the world of diversity to discover the single unity from which all springs.”
But how? Shankara, the 9th-century Indian philosopher, wrote, “Disease is not cured by pronouncing the name of the medicine, but by taking medicine. Deliverance is not achieved by repeating the word ‘Brahman,’ but by directly experiencing Brahman …” It is the same with the principle of oneness. We can read every word of Schopenhauer, Campbell, and a thousand other philosophers who have expounded on this idea, but it will not become real without experience. That is where events like Wesley Autrey’s enter. These life-and-death moments in which we completely ally our existence with that of someone else make real the principle that binds all things into unity. These experiences are more persuasive than any spoken or written words. Following these episodes, we can throw away the books, sermons, and teachings—because now we know.
When we identify so completely with someone that the distinctions between self and other are overcome, we have entered the domain of the One Mind. This prepares us for actions we would not even consider in our self-oriented, everyday frame of mind. Our future depends on our willingness to take this larger view.
Source
~Excerpt from the book “One Mind: How Our Mind Is Part Of A Greater Consciousness And Why It Matters” by Larry Dossey, M.D. Hay House, Inc., 2013~