Oneness

From time to time I read about the concept of oneness - most prominently in novel Siddhartha and in the Gita. I don't connect to the idea, either because I'm not clear what they mean about oneness or else it's something I just haven't thus far experienced.

It always comes up in a context where everything surrounding it rings familiar to me but just what are they trying to say about oneness?

I know what it's like to contemplate (and be moved to peacefulness by) connectedness; how every single element and action in the history of the world is inevitably and unarguably connected through the omnipotence and omnipresence of causality - something every human reliably witnesses - what? - a million times a day? Why this is pristinely obvious to some people while other brains apparently lack the functionality for this to register is a matter of some dismay. But I digress.

I know what it's like to feel bonded to every sentient creature on the planet by a state of lovingness (a legitimate word, yes); a state of love that is so overwhelming one must pull onto the shoulder of the road to recover because it is so powerful. It seizes like I imagine a heart attack would and it incapacitates. I imagine that the experience becomes more tolerable with practice.

I know what it's like to fully discover the horror of one's own duplicity; that there really is a devil lurking within us, but finally then to discover that no, we are really the angel lurking within the devil, waiting to fulfil the tide of human evolution which proposes a full and proper mutiny; a unity of consciousness and non-consciousness; of angel and devil; where we, currently the conscious angels, finally inherit the drivers' seat.

And I know what it is to feel drowned in in the eternal, to sense that the dust that is mistaken for "me" has been so for others before me and will be again for others still, when the illusion of me is gone.

Causal connectedness. Global lovingness. Unity of mind. The eternal. Do I know oneness? Or is there something else?


"You'll be in me and I'll be in you together in eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me."
- Bruce Cockburn