Oneness

If you feel like it, just take a moment to connect with everybody in the group by just looking at them in the eyes for a few seconds. If you don't feel like doing it, don't feel forced to do it. So, for a moment imagine that everybody you've looked at, you've actually been looking at yourself. Some of you might actually feel that when this happens, but even if you're not feeling that, think about that for a moment. We're always looking at ourselves, and not just the humans we look at, but all the animals as well, all the beautiful plants, and all the other, what I call, mineral objects, the mountains, the rocks, clouds, the rivers, even the other planets.

This is really all we're talking about in these talks, that we're an inseparable part of everything. We always have been and we always will be. No matter what we think we are, we're always an inseparable part of everything, the totality.

And this is what Advaita teaching and other teachings are pointing to, that we've never been just these separate objects, and if you can accept that, then what we call birth, life and death is not a separate series of moments or events and it's not even necessarily linear or sequential, it is just happening, all the time.

This is the core of the whole Advaita teaching. Advaita means non-duality, and it's the core of many of the other spiritual teachings which have different names. Over thousands of years, different people have been pointing to this. Some of the better known ones are Jesus Christ, the Buddha, Prophet Mohammed, Krishna, Lao Tzu. Many, many, different teachers. If it wasn't such a male dominated world we'd have more female names in there. The men seem to have erased those from the records.

The primary concept of this non-dual teaching is the idea of Oneness. But what does this Oneness mean? Basically it means that all of us are actually one being, one thing, and all have always been that.

We have never actually been separate things. Wherever you are, and again I'm speaking to the mind, not to your toes or your knees, because they don't actually care, this is a teaching for the mind, an intellectual approach.

When we understand what this Oneness means, it means literally all the objects in the room, the air, and lights, the sounds, tastes, smells, everything that our five senses pick up. It means everything outside, animals, plants and mineral objects. It means this whole planet, all the planets in our solar system, the sun, all galaxies, all the universes and the space and time. That is this Oneness.

We use different words: Consciousness, Totality, Source, Love, Beingness, even the word God, to describe this. So if you think of it that way, you have a clear conceptual picture of what the Oneness is. I use the word Consciousness most of the time, because it is a more neutral word.

And the science is telling this also lately. Some quantum physicists are basically saying what the Advaita teaching is saying, which is that everything is this interconnected "stuff", energy, bunch of particles.

One particular quantum physicist, his name is David Bohm said something like "Every particle always knows what every other particle is doing and where it is at any moment in time, in the infinite universe and all universes.'

Putting it simply, the particles that make up our body, our mind, what we are, this particular particle here, knows exactly what the particles are doing in every single other body, every single object, and that's happening right now, all the time. So, it's like an infinite matrix of knowledge and we can even say that it's in some way communicating all the time, sharing all this information all the time. It's sharing all this experience.

At any moment we can wake up out of this so called dream, this illusion of separation, because it's never actually existed. We have a feeling of separation, which doesn't go away even after we wake up, after Self-realization happens.

I'm sitting here and I feel the texture of the surface of this chair which is different to the texture and surface of another object I'm feeling. If I taste it, it might have a different taste, smell it, hear it, look at it. The five senses give us this information which makes us believe that these are separate objects and then this information is converted into a thought, a belief: "Ah, I feel it's separate, so then it must be separate". That's sometimes the confusion, for the seeker.

There remains (after Self-realization) or there has been, this feeling of separation, so we confuse the feeling of separation, the sense of separation with what is actually happening, with what we actually are.

We use different metaphors to try and describe that. The waves on the ocean. Every wave is unique, every wave definitely exists. The wave has never been separated from the ocean. It comes from the ocean, it is part of the ocean, goes back into the ocean. But each wave is different, it has characteristics, it behaves differently. So it's unique and different things happen to it along its journey. We can see that when we look at waves. They've never been separate from the ocean. When you look at it more closely it's very clear that it's the ocean that makes the wave arise, gives it energy, and then the wave comes back into the ocean. It's born from the ocean and it comes back into the ocean. When we look at the ocean it's very clear, there's never been these separate waves.

Another metaphor that's used is gold jewelery which is made from gold. The gold is fundamentally the same, it might vary slightly but it's still gold and yet all this gold jewelery has different shapes and forms but it's all fundamentally made from gold.

When the snow falls, we call it snow, but every single snow flake, as far as I know, is actually different, individual snowflakes, but they're all snow.

We can look at a number of different metaphors, a number of different ways of trying to understand this.