How can we achieve 'Unity' within 'Diversity' if these concepts are seemingly opposite?

What can I do, when I experience more than one single truth?

How can I integrate opposite or contrasting fragments/elements of my Self, who seem at odds with one another?

How can I view dissonant thoughts - especially ones that appear after experiencing trauma - as raw potential for my own transformation and power?

How can I view others, who are split or suffering, without pity, but with *respect*, as whole, tranformational beings? 

Having to live in the daily world we are usually in Gaze 1 or 2.

Gaze 1 is centralised. Where we begin to understand the world - we are in a fusion. We are not aware of being aware. We are completley joined with The World and incapable to discern ourselves as a seperate being.

Our world-psyche from the anthropomorphic sense (human lens) is occuring mostly within a centralised psychic space of ‘Standardised Man’. (The yard stick, of a 30 year old standard cis, het, white bodied male, literally a western ‘scientific’ term and ethnocentric measuring device). Gaze 1 is joioned with this collective shadow of world-psyche, but does not realise. Everything is fused.

Gaze 2, in duality, is self awareness, self/other, subject/object, subject/subject. That is not nessesarilly comfortable - there is a tension in the dual.

Gaze 2 is a regular state of psychic-being for women, queer folks, nuerodiverse folks, black, brown, indigenous and non-auto-centralised bodies: immigrants, nomadic cultures, multi-ancestral identites, the differently abled. Those of us who are aware of watching ourselves constantly, we have some doses of trauma to thank for that. Gaze 2 includes acknowlegding voices; parts or psychic signals which are internalised. 

When we are in a transformational age, everything is dissonant on the surface. All the voices of Gaze 2 will be jostling. Often the internalisations in duality bring in doubt, fear, guilt, inner-fights. An oppressor gaze and voices which are fighting against that oppressor gaze, are also internalised. These are all part of duality. Duality is a space for shadow work and understanding which voice to listen to and which entire conversation to transcend.

Within the idea of “broken" we call forth wholeness also - there is no broken part of anything, without simultaneously defining the whole. One word defines the other. Energy evolves through the cycles of creation and destruction, there is a wholeness that remains an ever present constant, but also an evolution. This is why the spiral is such an important shape. 🌀️

All that appears broken, as ‘all’ that there is, is illusion. It shows simply what in this age, is being transformed. We are too fused with gaze 1 & 2. We need to zoom out.

The snake needs to shed her skin - there is a loud inner and outer dialogue happening between the old skins, and a new form.

TRANSFORMATION

Transformation occurs in the real unknown (UN-REAL) - in the chaos field. This is where contradiction lives. Where contradiction lives, there is only rapid change - no stasis at all, yet, if you zoom out it is in complete serenity. There is a kind of peace that exists even in primordial fires. It’s a scathing-truthful one, like a purification.

The presence of this ultimate paradox is hidden through the third option of seeing, (3rd Gaze) presented when an expansion of consciousness allows to experience the sacred. △ When the sum of two parts, two opposites, makes something altogether new, this is ‘the sacred third’. △ By its nature it is undefinable by its parts. It’s generative of the dual, and has created something greater than itself. Shadow work generate this. The Grey Way.

This Grey way, the middle, exists within everyday life, yet many of us cannot grasp it. It is not apathy, nor distance, it is a blend between darkness and lightness, creating an opening that remains fertile space of the un-manifested.

That does not mean it doesn't exist, it is just always 'coming into being'. Raw potential for creation. It’s perhaps in a moment of holding dualities - slowing down, when you can glimpse it.

As soon as it is realised, in the way we understand and experience things, the sacredness seems to disappear, unless you train your eyes to see magic -> all potential, all the time.

Unity (1) within duality/diversity (2) does exist as the 

constant raw potential,

 within non duality (3).


We could go a step further, here - as we speak of the holy third as transcending the dual, this is masculine energy. When this is is held, its becomes a realm, a vessel, and there we have the 4th. The Immanent. Which is feminine energy.

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TRAUMA, FRAGMENTATION, AND CONSTANT, RAW POTENTIAL.

We are aware of the fragmentations and disconnections inherited through the systems of oppression and imballance we find our society, our planet and ourselves within.

There is so much becoming conscious about broken systems and the broken aspects of ourselves and eachother.

Especially if you have the capacity to see in 3’s and 4’s coming into your life, we still mostly get stuck in the 2’s - in duality we can see what is broken. Painbody pulls us always into duality. And in some way this is good, because it makes us spend proper time in shadow work.

Coming to the surface are so many stories and realisations of inherited greif, inhereited disempowerment and inherited fragmentation - splitting caused by violence, shame, fear and guilt, fuelled by unworthiness and missing soul.

But what is broken is NOT the whole story. When we see fragmentation, we are seeing the dual, in the first stage of transformation.

A western colonial conditioning, one that strives us to a certain idealism, can easily force us back into the idealism of the Gaze 1. Emotional buffers pull in fear-guilt-shame projections, when we see what is broken in Gaze 2, and it stinks in a way we really do not like.

If our response to Fear-Guilt-Shame is in a punitive form of universalism* (Achille Mbembe), we get reinforced back into Gaze 1. (affirmed, fused)

By the time we see a dual nature of something, it has been bubbling under the surface as a fracture for a long time. Our collective unconsious already knew. 

Perhaps the state that we find our selves in, the psychic narratives that have developed deep grooves in our thinking and synapses are not as dissonant as we imagine, but are opposites that we need to integrate in ourselves, by calling in 3rd and 4th gazes?


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What would it mean for our personal stories in responding to this collective state of trauma and psychic fragmentation, if a constant raw potential we speak of as being a part of real transformation, is and was always there, hiding in Gaze 3.

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What if, within an acceptance of everything being broken and at odds with ourselves and it-self, there was also a radical acceptance (as sacred holding, as sacred witness) arising within this same moment, as Gaze 4.

We can accept that our current state of acknowlegding fragmentation is by default an expression of a new whole coming into being.

During experiening psychic growth that comes hand-in-hand with experiencing and healing trauma (recognising and remembering contradiction), we need embodied anchors to remind ourselves of this unity of gaze.

Gaze multiplying into the 3rd or 4th ultimatley needs to ground us, open us to the Earth, and assist us to stay embodied.

Also outside of time and space through memory, setting intentions and strategy, it can be very easily to disembody through the spiritual and bypass our own shadow, and even bypass real steps required in the material realms, for collective liberation.

Most of the real steps required for collective liberation that we bypass are about giving our own Earth Body into 4th Gaze Realm. 


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A simple affirmation for travelling through times of intense transformation, leaving the shore of the known:

“I witness myself in my wholeness.”

I experience myself in my wholeness - and in turn when I allow that of myself I allow that of others :
I experience you in your wholeness.


(‘Witness’ is the 4th Gaze: The Immanent. The Holding Body.)

THE EYES OF THE SACRED = GAZE OF 4’s = VISION RAW POTENTIAL 

To have the capacity to see all beings in their wholeness, is to be able to leave empty space to allow the existence of the sacred to be seen and to exist - this might be either a potential within a contradiction, something not adding up, potentials of chaos (and creativity, newness) - in what is broken, and in everything and everyone.


Sometimes people also call this ‘our humanity’ or tenderness.

In an age where we are witnessing targeted de-humanisation, I would like to move forward from that and step outside the human into the more-than-human. Re-humanisation is not enough - we need not only transcendence (Holy Third), but Immanence (Realm), we need re-animation: (multiples upon multiples, generative). We need a new World, as animated, and non-heirachical.

A 4th Gaze as realm, as immanence, holds space for the entanglement of relation. (where the 3rd gaze is relation (as something greater than the sum of its parts). The entanglement of relation needs to be allowed to hold generative chaos.

ANCHORS THROUGH : A PRACTITIONERS ROLE

Enlisting our inner visionary as transcendence, and releasing of inner layers of emotional buffer against entering into the real sensorial feeling spaces of the 4th Gaze, is commendable self-work.

While journalling practice is a fantastic accompaniment, we most often cannot do this ‘jumping over emotional buffers’ for ourselves during great periods of transformation of our own psyche, there needs to be a lot of time and space given to digesting the oppositional feeling parts - most often our fragments are seemingly at odds with eachother, in banished (shadow) voices.


Moving from Gaze 1, and either having to take responsibiliy for the oppressor psyche, or having to release and protect ourselves from the internalising of an oppressor psyche in Gaze 2 means an inner dynamic needs to be mediated and any buffering, residual emotional ‘over-loads’ released.

Banished shadow voices need to land on someone else, in order to get them out of ourselves while we do this work. Choosing a Wounded Healer to accompany us on the path means sometimes our projected parts will be carried by the practitioner/healer. Through that process we would need to be willing to view the healer as the bad object.


We can travel to parts and greet them in their current state, enquiring into them, what do they need and what are they asking of us?

The further we need to travel to meet these diverse parts, also to dismantle what might need to be dismantled, the more stability we will need anchoring us back home (centred) into our bodies and into our healthy ego containments.

Self destructive actions in this sense, can also be a way to free us from this internalised oppressor. It will remain a good way to do it until a better option comes along and the best way of finding a better option is to work with someone who anchors in your inherent value.

We need another being who is able to see us in our wholeness at all times, in order to anchor and assist us with our navigation system - to be calling our names back to us at the gate, so we know where and how to come back home into an authentic (multiple) Self.

Compassionate companionship is what dissociated psyche needs in order to find homebase.

This is the point of presence counselling in an Ancestral Lineage practice: the growth and depth of the psychic container, which holds the 4th Gaze. And a capacity to carry projections outside of oneself, while rearranging, reweaving.

This is what is given to each individual in sessions in praxis work.


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Sarah 

Jan 2021, re-edited in June 2025)

**’Seeing with the eyes of the sacred’ was spoken by Susan Mokelke, 2020.