Please explain a little of your trippy new-age/buddhist thoughts sometime. You keep saying things like "we are all One in the Higher Reality" without any explanation. Putting caps on it also makes it sound a bit weird. Explanation sometime?

It is challenging to boil down the Vedanta, much of Hermetic wisdom, the dozen of so books in the CWG series by Neale Donald Walsch, a Course in Miracles, the dozen of so books by Deepak Chopra (notable power, Freedom and Grace), into one post off the top of my head, but I'll give it my best shot.

"We are all one" is arguably the oldest, deepest, and most esoteric metaphysical teaching there is. One could spend a lifetime sussing it out intellectually, yet grok it in fullness in the blink of an eye.

You see, we live in a world of illusion. I think the Buddhists call it "maya." Chopra calls it the superstition of materialism. Take something simple like the chair you are sitting on. Seems solid enough, right? I mean, you're probably not oozing through it or anything. But according to Einstein and a whole bunch of other smart guys, the darned thing is 99.99% empty space. More recently, physicists are saying that most of the universe consists of black matter--something we have no way of sensing.

Think for a moment about electromagnetic fields. The light we can see is only a tiny part of the elctromagnetic spectrum. We can't see magnetism, really--unless we do the old iron filings on the magnet rrick, and that's sort of cheating. Okay, sceintits recently discovered that birds--dumb little fucking birds--can literally see electromagneticlines of force with thephotoreceptor in their little beady eyes. Personally, this amazes the shit out of me. But it doesn't surprise me--we are privileged to live ina pretty amazing universe--one reason why most of the time, I am mostly radiantly happy. BUt I'm getting away from the subject here.

"We are All One" means just that--"we" includes God, the sun and moon and stars, yoru best friend, worst enemy, Aunt Fanny--the whole bllof wax. You may have heard of the Big bang Theory, which posits at one primordial moment of time, the entire universe was compressed into a point smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. You want to talk weird? That's weird. Yet this is science, accepted by virtually every physicist today (except maybe for a few mavericks).

When you accept that we are All One, the implications are enormous. For one thing, it means that no one is any better or any worse than anyone else. Take that a step further, that means that there is totally no reason to hate, fear or envy any other person. This concept makes racism, sexism, nationalism--all the "isms" you can think of--obsolete. Meaningless.

This by no means implies states or even that we are all identical. We all have our gifts, our strengths and our weaknesses. But we are all, ultimately, on the same path. Obviously, some of us are farther along than others--but so what? We all get to the same place eventually. And there's no hurry--we have eternity to get there.

Instructing by analogy is always dicey, but think for a moment of your body. You have skin cells and brain cells and bones cells--all have different jobs, all have different lifespans--yet somehow, mysteriously, they are all in constant communication with each other--and all of them--collectively--are YOU. One you.

In a similar fashion, you might say that all of us humans are cells in the body of God.

Or--to go even farther out--you might think of every "thing"--you, me, your comp, the cop on the corner, the sun, the moon, and so on--as cells in the body of the Universe.

The singularity that was the point of the big bang was one.

The universe today is separated from that unity.

If I had an apple and cut it into for pieces, would you say the four pieces are one? If I ate one and shit it out would you say the remaining three plus my terd is one? Would you put the pieces plus my terd back together and call it an apple? Eat it maybe?

We were all one seems more fitting.

This singularity of the big bang could also be a point of entry of all matter from a parraell universe or another dimension. May not even be one. Mayhaps everything passed throught the same entry point.

If I had an apple and cut it into for pieces, would you say the four pieces are one? If I ate one and shit it out would you say the remaining three plus my terd is one? Would you put the pieces plus my terd back together and call it an apple? Eat it maybe?

We were all one seems more fitting.

This singularity of the big bang could also be a point of entry of all matter from a parraell universe or another dimension. May not even be one. Mayhaps everything passed throught the same entry point.

There's a theory that I like a lot (not that I consider it more valid than any other, just preference), called Panpsychism. It's hard to explain it as I haven't studied it very deeply yet, but to sum it up, it involves the idea of the universe as an organism. In this, it seems similar to what Armsmerchant is talking about.

My thoughts probably go off in a different direction than the actual theories related to panpsychism, so take this for whatever it's worth. The human body is an organism, and the flesh is part of it. In that sense, it's all one. When removed or shed in some way, it dies, and stops being part of the one. The same with the apple, the moment it leaves the tree. There's a cycle to things, in living and dying, that changes their form in that oneness.

Does it remove it altogether? Supposedly not, since matter cannot be created or destroyed, only converted.

On an irrelevant note, the thought of the universe as one giant organism is kind of cool - the expansion of the universe as some kind of growth, dark matter as some kind of cosmic life blood, with the realities, galaxies and suchlike that stem from it being a wild version of the tree described in certain parallel earth theories. It would go a ways toward explaining "god" as we'd all ultimately be part of one gigantic organism, limited to our particular cluster of cells.

Interesting.I already agree with much of what you have to say. On some level, I sort of feel like we are all one - all composed of the same funadmental.

Thanks for the reply, I'll consider looking into some of the people/books you referred to.

One major difficulty with all of this, semantics aside, is that the whole topic is more about the soul than the mind.

And words are the language of the mind. Feelings are the language of the soul.

On a few occasions, I have attained unity consciousness. According to Chopra, "this is when the spirit inside us which is now fully awake, merges with the spirit inside objects which are also now fully awake. They become one, and there is only one spirit. We are that spirit, and the whole universe is the manifestation of that one spirit. In unity consciousness, love radiates from our heart like light from a bonfire. Our personal self becomes the universal Self, and we see the whole universe in our being.

"This is when we can fully understand the Vedic expression 'I am not in the world; the world is in me. I am not in the body; th body is in me. Body, mind, and spirit happen to me when I curve back within myself and create them.'"

This makes perfect sense to me, having experienced it--having FELT it. This summer, I was sitting in the outhouse and noticed a spider, grokked it in fullness and I knew exactly what it felt like to be that spider. It was awesome. On other occasions, I have similarly "merged" with trees.

Just recounting this sounds--well, maybe demented. But what it was, was transcendant.

People who have damaged spatial awareness centers of the brain get this feeling of being one with everything.

Studying people deep in meditation reveals this center of the brain to be purposeful overloaded by the person meditating. When this moment of enlightment occurs the spatial awareness center in the brain is VERY active. They get a feeling of oneness the same as a person who accidently drove a screwdriver into that part of their brain.

The brain is amazing and the science behind it more facinating than God, Wonderland and a soul.

The number of computations a brain must do in order to simply give a person a sense of up and down (much less orientating a body in three dimensional space) is fucking staggering. Fuck with it through meditation and you will have a hard time finding which way is up.

^ You must be getting your info from back issues of Weekly World News.

Every competant study shows that meditation improves cognitive and physical function.

I was not saying that you permanently damage the center. Maybe it does have lasting benefits and maybe not. Not really my point.

But, I DO promise you that people who damage this spatial awareness center (through an accident etc.) DO experience the feeling of connectivity or oneness, the same as people who overload this center through meditation.

I have the book I read it in at home, if you like I can find information for you about this FACT online. I know you do not like to think of meditation as fucking with parts of your physical (not spiritual) brain on purpose to illicit a response, but that is exactly what your doing.

:)

I was not saying that you permanently damage the center. Maybe it does have lasting benefits and maybe not. Not really my point.

But, I DO promise you that people who damage this spatial awareness center (through an accident etc.) DO experience the feeling of connectivity or oneness, the same as people who overload this center through meditation.

I have the book I read it in at home, if you like I can find information for you about this FACT online. I know you do not like to think of meditation as fucking with parts of your physical (not spiritual) brain on purpose to illicit a response, but that is exactly what your doing.

:)

Is this really a bad thing?

Is this really a bad thing?

I'd say it is analogous to doing aerobic exercise to improve your cardio-vascular and pulmonary functions.

"We are all one" is arguably the oldest, deepest, and most esoteric metaphysical teaching there is. One could spend a lifetime sussing it out intellectually, yet grok it in fullness in the blink of an eye.

Spiritual high five!

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To actually add something to the thread, I'm currently reading The Holographic Universe (http://www.amazon.com/Holographic-Universe-Michael-Talbot/dp/0060922583) and it touches up on our One-ness when it delves into quantum mechanics so what you're saying might actually hold water on a physical sense as well. Interesting stuff, really.

You mean, like this?

http://www.totse.com/en/fringe/fringe_science/hreality.html

BTW I think the search function is broken. A search for "universe" returned nothing...

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