One
So that they may be one just as we are, it is literally written: so that they will be one [Greek: hèn] like us. Hèn is a cardinal numeral, it indicates “one”. Translating hèn with only one thing is weak, compared to what Jesus meant, and it does not pass on the spiritual and cognitive value of Jesus’ prayer to the Father. Hèn, “one”, “they may be one like us” is the heart of Jesus’ prayer to the Father, His Son’s invocation‘s apex, not a generic one. Jesus prays the Father so that His friends and disciples on earth may be one as He is one with the Father. Jesus knows exactly what to ask the Father so that the disciples’ being one could be guaranteed in history: keep them in your name. The gospel uses the verb terèo – from the noun tèros, “custody” – “watch, guard, keep, safeguard, save, protect, look after”, and therefore also “observe”, and, again, “looking after something to protect, to defend it”. Jesus inextricably links the possibility for His friends to be one to the fact that God looks after and protects those men and women within His name, literally. Why is it so important for Jesus’ disciples to be one? What does it mean?
Denying God, man denied his true self who was one with God, that very self made in the image and likeness of God, wanted, chosen, loved, favourite by the Father as the fruit of His creative love, a fruit of endless life, with unique and extraordinary characteristics, regal and unrepeatable. Man, giving up his divine self, to be able to cope with this world’s training, has been forced to create, to build, a mind self, a virtual ego, woven in other’s expectations and patched on the wounds received, a completely fake and unreal ego, yet able to manage everything in man’s life, an ego that took over completely the divine and spiritual self. This constructed ego is a mind creature, an invention of oneself, shattered in itself and separated from the One and the Whole of God since its very birth. The ego, by its own nature, since it is born from the human mind instigated by Satan, cannot but live out of envy, avidity and being fed by competition, possession, image, conflict. Now, unless man becomes aware that this ego is completely steering his life in every dimension, and unless he will be able to consciously give up this separated ego, what will be the point of searching unity, union, sharing and peace amongst people? And, most of all, what results could be expected? When few egos get together to live in the name of God, or to accomplish a task, an humanitarian, religious or military mission, they cannot possibly do anything but envying each other and getting in constant separation and conflict. This energy of conflict and separation can only be managed for a common goal if it depends on blind obedience and articulate submission, through hierarchy and institutional forms that the aggregated egos have necessarily to recognize as superior entities. In this way the ego’s aggregates become fellows of a superior command, a leader, or general. This control’s mechanism is necessary and it works in armies as well as in monasteries, religious communities or workplaces. The ego’s aggregates’ control can manage and convey the separation and conflict energy in an common goal, but it will eventually always generate unhappy, subdued, thirsty of power and social status people, and, most of all, people unable to be self sufficient and independent.
Hierarchy’s blind obedience and articulate submission creates people literally not capable of efficient autonomy and serene interdependence. This perverse mechanism determines the fact, absolutely evident and inevitable, that the more you climb up the top of the military, politic, economic, religious hierarchy, the more people are dominated by their ego, incapable of relationships, cold, empty inside and inconclusive.
Amongst all the egos’ aggregation’s systems, the devotional and religious ones, the ones created to serve God and God’s people, are absolutely the most dangerous.
Aiming at unity as their first goal, to community as their first reference point, to unity of purpose as the first value, they will not bring any beneficial and real result to their followers, because every time one works to create unity and union of separated egos who think they are serving God, as a consequence, religious submission is generated instead of evolution of the person’s spiritual one. Nothing more than the religious egos’ aggregation generates the need for a ego-leader, a superior ego who, not really having any spiritual and loving authority over the other egos, has to make the other egos obey to him as it was God. Every effort, precept, law, behaviour, will, duty aimed at the creation of a religious community, being really a push to get the separated and always in conflict egos collaborate, has anyway an important and indubitable role in the satanic Prince’s training system. The function of the separated egos’ aggregation built in the name of God, is to guarantee, better than any other aggregation can do, the control and suppression of those egos that, for divine inspiration, wish to rediscover their divine self and reactivate the power, kingship, nobility of their nature of children of God Almighty the Father, rather than remaining slave of the human system of submission. This is the reason why Jesus, when He sent His fellows in the world to heal, to chase away demons and announce the gospel, He sent them in couples. Two of Jesus’ disciples, sent around the world, are first on a journey to learn how to give up their ego and, while they are together, only the two of them, even in the case they were two very active egos, separated and in conflict, it is hard, if not impossible, that blind obedience, articulate submission, obsessions and maniac behaviour could be generated to get social status, honours, thirst of dominion.
This is what Jesus asks the Father for His friends and disciples: to immerse each of them in His name which is One, because, so lovingly and fully immersed in His name and in the essence of God who is One, the disciples did not need anymore to deny themselves and build separated egos always at war.
Remaining one in God, forever in God, feeling every second as one in the One of God, is the most powerful and effective way to switch off the separated ego. This is what Jesus asks the Father for His fellows. He does not ask for an aggregation, not even for a generic, suggestive as well as useless feeling of being like one. He does not even ask for a psychological compulsive need of community and of being together, but to be one in the One, to not be separated anymore, first of all within. Being one as Jesus meant is a change of spiritual DNA, it is a choice to give up forever the sovereignty of one’s ego in favour of the vitality and uniqueness of one’s own divine self created by God. Denying the ego is the first act of faith in God. Only the aliveness, nobility, autonomy, the capacity for independence and interdependence of many awakened and free self can build a powerful community, a freeing community of happy and peaceful men and women.