Unlocking the Five Functions of Reality: The Recognition Sutra's Path to Oneness

The Recognition Sutra has a life-changing passage that describes the five functions of reality, the biggest notion of reality you can come up with. Some people might say it's God, some people might say it's the capital R reality, or the universe, whatever language you're comfortable with. But the whole biggest thing, the five functions, are also five functions at the human level. Let me share what they are.

The first function looks to us like creation, but it's really emergence from the background field. So this reflects what we're learning in quantum physics, that there's this background, even within vacuums, there's a background energy field out of which quarks and other particles emerge.

So there's this thing that looks like creation, which is really just the emergence or the manifestation of reality in this plane. That's function number one.

Function number two is maintenance or sustaining. So things last a while.

And then the third function is reabsorption back into the one, into the one field. It looks like destruction to us.

So it looks like creation maintenance and destruction, those first three functions, but really it's really expression, maintenance and reabsorption, or manifestation, maintenance and reabsorption.

Then the last two are the most interesting. The first one of these last two is forgetting. This one entity, this one being that is reality, this one consciousness according to the Recognition Sutra, which is Awareness, forgets that it is what it is. It forgets that the whole thing is one being, one consciousness.

The fifth function is remembering. But this is called the Recognition Sutra. So that last step is recognizing, recognizing that I am part of this, I'm an expression of this one consciousness.

And think about what recognizing actually means. Think about that word, re-cognizing, knowing again. So in a sense, this mission that we're on is to know again that we are an expression of this one consciousness, this one being.

We are one.

And it's time to remember and recognize it.

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