Do not try to experience the Total, just totally experience whatever is

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Acharya Prashant (AP): Searching for Oneness?

Listener (L): Yes

AP: Surely you must be experiencing a lack of oneness if you are searching for it.

L: Yes.

AP: Where do you find a lack of oneness?

L: I know that, first of all, the lack of oneness when I experience it, it is in me.

AP: Is it there, or, is it being thought of? How do you know that there is no oneness? And, how do you know what oneness is, if you do not know it?

You see, I go out to search for ‘Tibba’. Now to search for ‘Tibba’, first of all, I must know what ‘tibba’ is. Otherwise, how will I find ‘Tibba’? How will I identify it?

What is oneness? Is Oneness just not something you have read of in the books? Is Oneness just not a picture?

L: No, I know how oneness feels within me.

AP: If oneness feels like something, who is the one who feels oneness? Surely, someone who is a little away from oneness, right? To feel something, you will have to have a distance from it.

L: I experience oneness.

AP: Please tell me something, can the tongue taste itself? The tongue can only taste something that is kept upon it.

L: Yes.

AP: Do you know the taste of the tongue? Do you know?

L2: No.

AP: To feel anything, there would surely be a distance between the feeler-the subject, and the thing being felt — the object. That means you have to have a distance from Oneness, to feel it or experience it. Now, such oneness from which you have a distance becomes two-ness.

L: I understand, but at the moment when I don’t experience oneness, then I can feel that I am missing it.

AP: But, that oneness that you are missing, was not oneness at all, in the first place. That was two-ness, a duality. It has been mistakenly named oneness.

L: Sir, you are saying that when I have felt most fulfilled, at that moment I…