Everything is one. This concept has become more popular in our culture since the 1960’s and even more so recently with the rise of New Age and spirituality. It is easy to dismiss it or even take it for granted because often times it’s spoken as a platitude. I’d wager that most people write it off as hippie, New Age, bullshit; basically, anyone in Spiral Dynamics stage orange and below. See my post Spiral Dynamics overview. Whether you believe it or not, I invite you to entertain the notion for the duration of this post. Life is about perspective. Our perceptions become our experience, which in turn becomes our reality.
Everything in our experience is part of the infinite whole. No thing or person is separate from anything or anyone else. Imagine that each person is like a wave in an infinite ocean, or a star in the infinite universe. It is our self-awareness that leads us to believe we are separate. In western culture, we praise our ability to think because it elevates us above all other beings on Earth. The irony is that the act of thinking does in fact separate us, but only in our minds. The illusion of separateness is so convincing because for the game to play out as intended it must be. It is the grand design of infinitely intelligent consciousness that it be this way.
The religion that is science has greatly helped to perpetuate this myth of separateness. The human mind wants to dissect, categorize, and label. This leads to breaking down everything in our experience and then trying to make sense of the rubble. All human learning can be distilled to this exact process. Every subject in school is essentially a narrowed perspective on a particular field of human experience. The physical sciences however, lead the charge. Operating from a materialist paradigm, that the universe is made up of physical stuff, creates the foundation for our woes of separation.
About two thousand four hundred years ago, the Greeks believed atoms were the smallest pieces of matter. Our word atom comes from the Greek word atomos, meaning uncuttable or indivisible. In 1897, the electron was discovered, and thus smaller than an atom. In the first half of the twentieth century, the proton, neutron, positron, and photon all came into view. Then in 1968 the quark was discovered to be smaller still. The point of this history is that our attempts to find the building blocks of the universe will always turn up something. The sophistication or advancement of our technology is what determines how and where we can search. Once we develop the means of looking inside quarks we will discover something new. Currently, scientists are proposing points or strings as the smallest bits of matter. Conversely, the current map of the known universe exists as it does only because we do not yet have the means to look beyond.
A typical cell, for the sake of this post, is the building block of life. Cells are foundational to all plant and animal life. In a human being, a similar network of cells arrange to form tissue, and tissue arranges to make organs. Organs work together to form systems like the circulatory system, the skeletal system, the nervous system and the endocrine system. Every system functions in harmony to create the human body. Our conscious attention is identified with the body, therefore we think of the body as us and separate from other bodies. With the aid of a microscope one can observe a single human cell. With the conscious attention on that cell it appears separate, but as explained above, without human cells there would be no human. Under the microscope, the cell appears to be a universe in and of itself. It has a wall and membrane or edge. It is comprised of a cytoskeleton that gives it structure, organelles which aid in cellular function, and a nucleus containing the genetic code (the source of cell life). If the cell was self-aware, it’s plausible to say that it would think it exists as a separate entity. From the human perspective, we can see that is clearly false. Taking this a step further, visualize expanding your awareness beyond the body, beyond your country, and encompass the entire earth. This is much easier to do today because of technology. If you are having trouble with this, use Google Maps with satellite view and zoom out. Relatively speaking, humans are microscopic organisms on planet Earth. From this perspective humans are not separate, rather part of the living Earth. In fact, all plants and animals are contributing uniquely towards the totality that is Earth. Said another way, Earth would not be what it is without each living thing being what it is. Take time with this example if need be. If you can grasp this perspective it will change your life. To drive the point further, expand your awareness beyond Earth, beyond the solar system, and to the edge of the universe. Here is a wonderful YouTube video doing just that. You will notice that every cluster or grouping, be it planets, solar system, galaxy, or galaxy cluster is just a subset of a larger thing. What does this mean? Everything is relative to perspective, and every seemingly separate thing is really only part of the much larger whole. There is no smallest thing nor any largest thing. All reality goes on infinitely in infinite dimensions.
Going back to human consciousness, since our perspective is from this body, we lose sight of the bigger picture. Since the nature of conscious attention is intelligent focused awareness, a curious thing happens. The concept of ego arises. Ego is the identification with a perspective, i.e. this view, thought, or body is mine. This has been illustrated beautifully with Rene Descartes’s famous quote: “I think, therefore I am.” In fact, in the spirit of this post, it would be more appropriate to say, “I am, therefore I think.” This identification with our body leads us to believe that all things other than our body are not us. We also identify with our thoughts because science tells us that the brain is the source of consciousness. Using this logic, we perceive thoughts coming from the brain as unique to each of us. In the midst of this fragmentation and disassociation we find ourselves cutoff from everything and everyone. This has led to suffering on a catastrophic level. Not only for humans, but also for those we share this planet with. When we view something or someone as separate from ourselves, we erect a barrier. This wall allows us to perform unspeakable acts. By this means we are able to cut down forests, pollute rivers and oceans, raise animals for slaughter, and of course inflict untold violence on other humans. The root of all human suffering stems from this belief in separation.
This dichotomy of self vs. other is the foundation for the grand game being played by Consciousness, the Self, God, Buddha nature, Brahman, Allah, whatever one chooses to call It. In order for God to know Itself It had to fragment Itself into Self and other. As I’ve remarked in the past, we can only know something in relation to something else. The grand game is to explore every aspect of Self with the ultimate and inevitable realization that the Self is all that there is. In spirituality as well as Buddhism, and Hinduism, there is much talk and reference to consciousness, and for good reason. As our consciousness expands, so too does our sense of self. The Spiral Dynamics model depicts this perfectly. As our sense of self expands to incorporate other people, the planet, all life, and eventually the infinite universe, we realize that everything is one and its totality is what we are.