The individual observer sees other individuals and neither are real, in the sense that neither are complete. The web that unites them, the substratum, is not seen or intuited. The substratum is interbeing. When the element of interbeing is there, the differences dissolve. The completion works like a cancellation, because what remains is consciousness without object. The danger is that it then appears that the universe is illusion. This is not so, because it actually does exist, though not in the incomplete way in which we observe it. So the state of apprehension of the interbeing actually carries the same danger of wrong perception as the normal perception of the world of differences. Both visions are flawed. One must not allow the world to disappear, as it were. It would be better to maintain even an intellectual or rational understanding of holism, because it would permit positive action, which is necessary in order to change our damaging influence upon the world caused by our wrong action. At the very least, spiritual practice must be based on thes understanding throughout, becasue the pitfalls, in this very subjective field, are great.
The question is whether the matrix of consciousness should be presented as a kind of forest, in which the trees have a common root system, each growing up, individually, from this unitary base, or rather like a system of objects within a common universal web. The latter is closest to representations of the universe; the cosmos of galaxies and star systems, each affected by forces such as gravity, magnetism, etc., so probably should be approved. No one cosmic body is acting independently; all are locked in a cosmic dance. This is the way in which we interact with each other, with nature, though there is the illusion of independence. The wrong vision is just this. And there is the tendency not to see the whole due to the infatuation with the individual components – or to see the whole and then not to see the individual. We fail to see the forest for the trees, or the trees for the forest. Either way, we should not search for an agent that is independent of the universe that is acted upon from within, though within and without are part of our illusion.