Have you ever watched yourself when you encounter something new? What is your first inclination? Do you run it through the filter of what you already know, trying to understand it through that lens? Do you assess what it means and whether it’s useful in your life?

We naturally meet life through what we’ve experienced before. We recognize, interpret, compare, and place things into familiar categories that fit our existing understanding and beliefs. Discernment and intellectual categorization are essential. They help us understand the world and navigate our lives. 

But when we encounter something genuinely new, we need another capacity: openness.

The first challenge in encountering something truly new is recognizing it as new. Our ingrained response is to filter new information through our existing worldview and categories until it lands somewhere familiar. When that happens, we unknowingly and almost instantly reduce it to what we already understand. Whatever new thing we’ve encountered becomes a version of something we already know, and we can miss what is actually new about it.

Openness allows us to remain in discovery long enough for something new to reveal itself. There’s a willingness to be curious, to be affected, and perhaps even to discover that reality is different from what we assumed.

When we hear the words shared unity, it’s natural to relate them to experiences we already know: connection, intimacy, awakening, oneness, community, or being part of something larger than ourselves. Those associations can help us begin to orient toward what shared unity might mean. 

But shared unity holds possibilities for human consciousness that go beyond our familiar experiences of being together. If we immediately fit it into what we already know, we can miss what is actually there and what continues to emerge.

And that remains true no matter how long we’ve been exploring it.

Familiarity can close us just as easily as skepticism can. The moment we think, I know what this is, we can stop discovering what else is possible.

I sometimes think of openness as preparing the soil. We can’t force a seed to germinate, but we can cultivate the conditions that allow something to grow. In the same way, we can’t force an experience of shared unity. But we can cultivate the conditions that make us increasingly available to it.

Curiosity helps. So does a willingness not to know. A willingness to be surprised. A willingness to let an encounter affect us rather than only interpreting it through what we already understand.

Another dimension emerges when we begin exploring shared unity. Our openness doesn’t only affect what we can experience. Because shared unity requires our participation, the quality of our openness affects how available we are to what is emerging and how deeply we can be affected by it. 

We are part of the conditions. 

We can’t manufacture shared unity, but how we participate matters. Openness becomes more than a receptive state. It becomes part of our participation in a reality we cannot access in separation. 

Shared unity is a living, evolving reality. There is always more to discover. So perhaps a useful question for all of us, wherever we are in our exploration, is:

How open am I to discovering something I don’t yet know?