E Pluribus Unum

In his June 4th call for greater harmony on planet Earth, Obama mentioned America’s seed motto, E Pluribus Unum meaning 'Out of Many, One.' [Link to speech]

‘The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words - within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum: "Out of many, one."’

The history of this beautiful universal truth (and seed realization for remembering how to reverse engineer harmony and unity within a system that has forgotten its Wholeness) which was adopted by the United States circa 1776, is commonly traced back to Moretum, a poem attributed by some to Virgil (70 – 19 BCE):

‘… color est e pluribus unus [out of many comes a single colour]’

The deepest roots of this wisdom – which could if properly understood and applied, be the foundation of a new and improved civilization, a universal brotherhood of men, women and everything else – are actually found in the Rig Veda which was written (some historians believe) 5000 years ago.

‘Ye found the light, the one light for many.’ – Rig Veda 1.93.4 (An homage to Agni – the Divine Flame or Will, and Soma – the Lord of Delight and Immortality)

The Vedic realization of the One that is equal to the Many has been recalled by Indian sage Sri Aurobindo (1872 – 1950):

‘We see that the Absolute, the Self, the Divine, the Spirit, the Being is One; the Transcendental is one, the Cosmic is one but we see also that beings are many and each has a self, a spirit, a like yet different nature. And since the spirit and essence of things is one, we are obliged to admit that all these many must be that One, and it follows that the One is or has become many . . . .’ – The Life Divine

Often E Pluribus Unum is associated with the symbol of the Eagle. The Eagle in the American Seal carries this message in its beak. This Eagle has its own esoteric significance, which is perhaps worthy of another entry, but the symbol which best expresses the unity, harmony and structure of the One and the Many is the symbol of the Sun: the Circle with its central point. Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet writes:

‘[The Circle] represents the unified multiplicity. By living the experience of the Circle we can come to know the play of the Multiple as the indispensible ingredient in the question of Unity…. In [the symbol of the Sun], all the secrets of the universe are contained; likewise, in the physical sun the secrets of the material universe and their correspondence to the Spirit are contained.’ – The Gnostic Circle

Obama heralded a day ‘when the Holy Land of three great faiths [Christianity, Judaism and Islam] is the place of peace that God intended it to be.’ He continued, ‘The Holy Koran tells us, "O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another."’ One must truly wonder how all the contentious nations, religions and tribes of the Earth might truly come ‘to know one another’ as the many faces of the same One … as many points along the same Circle of Light.

The Rig Veda speaks of the Earth’s Year, (its 360 degree journey around the Sun in 12 stages or months) as a symbol of Man’s (and the Earth’s) common evolutionary journey. A common path – the One Path we all share – towards the cultivation/embodiment of our full truth, our full consciousness and our full bliss. My life has led me towards the Vedic Idea that it is an awareness of this common journey, our common ‘playing’ field of time and space, the common geometry shared by our souls as expressed in matter that will gradually help to slough off our forgetfulness of the One Self in many forms.