Oneness is characterized as being
awake and aware but not being controlled by
conscious thoughts or actions. There are no judgments. Oneness is
found with others when there is complete trust and the group
responds as of one mind. Oneness is having total security and
confidence, or the acceptance of being controlled by some higher
beneficent power that is a part of you and your immediate world.
Many individuals report that their happiest moments were found
during the times when they stepped into some experience that was so
overpowering that they lost any concern or control of the future. In
oneness, there is the acceptance and trusting in the
guidance offered by the enveloping power that replaces individual
conscious control. This enveloping and beneficent power is described
in the marketplace with many terms such as the power of a game or of
camaraderie, a guiding hand, luck, fortune, inspiration, or some
form of the Divine. In this book the power will be referred to as
the "inner power" to avoid confusion with the interpretations of the
other names. The inner power is assumed to have its center within
the lower heart, as described by ancient writings, and is the
source of experienced oneness with others as will be described in
Chapter Nine.
There are two very distinct types of oneness. The most common form
of oneness that is experienced by most modern individuals is the
oneness found in watching a movie or television. The initial
desire is to forget the trials and tribulations of the day and sink
into a passive open awareness dominated and controlled by
entertainment. While initially relaxing and restorative, this type
of oneness can lead to total oblivion as awareness is allowed to
diminish with the surrendering of control and judgment. This type of
oblivion is very attractive to individuals wishing to escape the
frustrations and demands of life, and it is the goal of some
religions that describe it as sinking into oneness with the "All" or
into the ocean of creation. It is the state of Nirvana
of the Buddhists. This state of oblivion can be experienced while
concentrating upon an object that requires minimal effort to
maintain the concentration such as a repeated mental word, candle,
icon or repetitive prayer and then essentially letting the
non-reactive object absorb any thoughts or feelings.
The
second type of oneness is the opposite of the above in that the
object concentrated upon is a person, activity or other
creative source that then interacts back to such an extent that it
controls the mind. You experience this, for instance, when you find
yourself in a highly animated conversation with others and the
conversation overrides your sense of control. When you submit or
surrender to this state of being overpowered, you generally can open
to the source of the inner power. This opening allows you then to
listen and respond to whatever will be said without any bias or
expectation. You do not, as in normal conversations, think about
what you are going to say or what you think they are going to say.
Instead, you find yourself in complete union with what is being said
and you respond without any conscious volition. You might, for
instance, say later that the conversation overpowered all of you
such that all of you became lost in the discussion. This type of
oneness is characterized as being fully alive but reaching and
working for more. It is this interactive type of union that
characterizes Heaven on earth.
Interactive or shared oneness is found in first love with the total
merging of mind, body, and purpose following the intense
yearning for each other. Separation becomes painful and yet the
lovers cannot possibly become close enough when they are together.
Their immaturity is reflected in this inability to fully become one,
and unfortunately, modern society seldom tells them how to increase
their union other than to falsely promise that they can find it in
sexual coitus.
First love also can be used as an illustration of the steps and
methods used in finding a union with someone. There is first an
attraction toward the other person. Then there is the
concentration on the other person
followed by fully seeing the other person without the normal
judgments.
There is then the beginning of oneness as each seeks to fully
understand the other and to be fully understood so that they start
to interact together without any barriers.
Union is then found during their
open interactions when it is discovered that, somehow, they react
completely together as one mind
as if they find some omnipresent mind that controls them both
similar to a game controlling children at play. This union can
perhaps be better explained by saying that the inner powers of the
other person become united with your own and that both individuals
therefore respond as one.
This yearning to find interactive oneness can be compared with one
of religion’s fundamental commandments of loving God and your
neighbor with all of your heart, soul and might. This unreserved
love, called agapao
in the early Greek
Septuagint Bible (300 BCE) was translated later with a
reduced meaning by modern churches to being only the act of giving
money or charity. The word "charity" (agape) unfortunately
has also been altered from its original meaning of "being
overpowered and interacting with love" to "the act of giving." Love
of God and neighbor is therefore now widely understood as giving
money to a church or a charitable institution. The best expression
of your love for someone is likewise understood as giving gifts to
the other person. The larger the gift, the greater your love. A
little thinking can quickly help the reader to understand why social
institutions teach the giving of costly gifts rather than the true
meaning of agapao or agape.
Today few people can understand true "oneness" or what the early
religious commandment of loving God with all of your heart,
soul, and might mean. Even fewer have experienced it. Part of the
confusion might be traced to the change from finding oneness with
God to appeasing or supplicating God. Similarly, there is a modern
change from finding oneness with someone with whom you wish to find
union with, to appeasing or supplicating them with gifts. There is
also the modern tendency to try to possess or obtain power over
those that you desire to find union with.
Our society, for instance, lauds romance that consists of wooing a
person, which generally means to solicit or entreat attention from
the other person. If the other person agrees to the possible
romance, they too become solicitous, and both attempt to become
perfect in the eyes of the other person so that they have more to
give to the other person. Romance is the giving of what the other
person is believed to desire. This giving can be contrasted with the
very opposite aspect of first love when each person is already
perfect in the eyes of the other as they really are. There can be
nothing of value to be given, but rather there is only the sharing
of each other’s perfection. The romantic wooing can also be compared
to the worship within a church wherein the worshippers don their
best clothes and give offerings to their god in the expectation of
the reception of gifts in return. In general, these
relationships continue with expectations of return gifts because of
the obligations associated with their giving rather than the
expectation of finding oneness.
There is another important yet little discussed aspect of oneness or
union that needs to be addressed. This is the uniting of the
future with the present. Almost everyone has experienced an
introduction to this oneness with what is commonly called a deja
vu in which the unique moment appears to have already been
experienced. Another common case is like buying a magazine for no
apparent reason only to find later that it has an article about some
project that you have planned to undertake.
Consider the simple example of attempting to remember a name. You,
for instance, might be engaged in some conversation and suddenly you
wish to bring forth a name of someone that you know. However, your
mind cannot recall the name and despite running through the alphabet
looking for some connection to the starting letter, your mind
remains a blank. Your experience in remembering names may then
surface and you tell the group that the name is not recalled, but
that it will come to you later. You then forget about it until a few
minutes later in the midst of a sentence, the name suddenly appears
and you are then able to bring it forth.
A
more complicated example of uniting the future with the present can
be experienced when you are looking for an answer such as finding
some way to hang a picture in some difficult place on a
non-conventional wall. Try as hard as you might, the normal mounting
techniques will not work, so you resolve that you will put off
worrying about it and instead trust that the next time you go to a
hardware store, you will find something that will work. Later, you
may be on another errand to the store, when suddenly you find a
gadget that will hang your picture, even though you were not
consciously thinking of the problem at that time. In this exercise
you were not looking for a specific item or name, but something that
would fill the need, and when the answer appeared on the scene your
previous resolution identified it at some subconscious level.
Consider another case. You have volunteered to assist in putting on
an amateur play and have been asked to find costumes. Within your
very small budget, you have managed to find costumes for all of the
characters except for one. To provide the proper costume for the
remaining role, you have the general image of a painted mask,
attached wings, special footwear and some ancient-type clothing. You
are looking for something in the present that can be altered to
somehow fit something in the future. You therefore find yourself
wandering into the store having a final sellout of store fixtures
and later your friend’s attic, where you unexpectedly discover the
perfect costume pieces. You know that you are successful when the
cast is thrilled with your costumes and the play becomes a success.
You have lived up to your reputation of being creative and getting a
job done.
Even though the above examples of uniting the future with the
present may appear simple and straightforward to you, many cannot
understand the hidden source of the answers as arising from an inner
power. Many people for instance, will go to their pocket listing of
names and phone numbers, go to a clerk in the store, or find a
costume supply house for their answers. They may well pride
themselves upon their efficiency and organization and look askance
at any attempt by you to explain that the answers just come to you,
provided of course, that you don’t think about it.
There is another popular experience of feeling that you should do
something or that God told you to do something. This experience is
almost always the result of conditioned brain activity that results
in further brain analysis before you take any action. The state of
oneness can be differentiated from this state by a simple fact that
in oneness you are already doing something and there is no time for
a choice or analysis. For instance, if you have to think about
whether you should buy something, it is not from an inner
power gained from oneness, but a product of your conscious mind.
There is another differentiation that is required and that is
between what you want or desire do and what you are dedicated to do.
Wanting and desiring are almost always the result of societal
conditioning and are identifiable by the pressure to be important or
pleased. The result of a dedication is seldom experienced by
thoughts in the moment, but rather by what you are already doing and
where your life is going. If you do not have a deep dedication in
life then you are driven by your conditioned wants and desires.
Some individuals are able to set a course toward some remote goal in
life and then, to the amazement of those around them, manage to
reach their goal despite severe oppositions. For instance, the
stories of children born with disabilities who then resolve to
overcome their limitations and finally reach their goals are
legendary. Likewise stories of individuals learning new skills to
obtain better jobs despite hardships are common, as are the stories
of successful entrepreneurs who started with only a dream of what
they wanted to find.
Nietzsche states that your destiny controls the immediate moment in
your life after the breaking of the bondage to your present life.
This requires the uniting of your present activities with your
future goal or to your dedicated destination in life and then
breaking free of all of those conditioned responses that keep you
from reaching your own destiny.
There are, however, a few individuals who are able to break their
bonds to their conditioned lives and trust that they will with time
and effort find the world of their dreams. Those individuals that do
manage to break their bonds and seek with vigor their destiny will
generally describe unexpected occurrences that opened new doors to
them. The unexpected happenings resulted from being in oneness with
their world such that they were able to react to the sudden
prompting or impulses that were outside of their normal responses as
was previously described.
Another
experience of oneness with the future is found when you find
yourself in a creative frame of mind. It might start, for instance,
after you have contemplated some difficult problem without any
results. You may have pushed the problem aside in your mind but much
later, you suddenly see an answer all at once, even to the fine
details as it would appear in the future. It is as if you suddenly
stepped into the future world where the answer to the problem was
manifested and you are simply observing it. As you observe the
future, you find a sense of exhilaration and eagerness and start to
convert the quick image into a present reality. However, this
generally takes much longer than the initial vision of the future.
This opening into the future can also be touched as you become fully
aware of your family and friends and dwell upon the miracle of the
relationships and your world and how it seems to extend unendingly
into the future. This world is also touched by the lovers in their
higher state of first love as they see the world that might be.
To fully
learn from someone else, there must be an opening to finding a
oneness with the source of the teaching. This is expressed, to a
degree, with the common statements that you "know where someone is
coming from" or that you "know what they are attempting to say." It
is as if you must first find validity in a teacher before you can
fully open to him or her. Teachers of children and animal handlers
know that they must first have the respect of their pupils or
subjects and that the respect comes from some deep inner state of
being or intention. Another awareness of this is encountered in
those people who speak with authority such that the listeners know
the truth of their statements without judgment.
How
is oneness found or how is the mysterious state of agapao to
be obtained?
The
answer is probably best exemplified again with the state of first
love. In first love, as opposed to romanticizing, there is the
surrender of the self unto a complete trust in the power of the
other. You allow yourself to overpower the other person and at the
same time allow yourself to be overpowered by the other person. You
become both dominating and dominated. This interesting state is
found fairly often in conversations or activities with others where
there is a clear and agreed upon goal such as attempting to
understand some philosophical point or to work in unison to
accomplish some physical task. The result is often described as
losing yourself, being overwhelmed, taken over, completely engulfed
in it, loss of self and of control, or of the feeling of stepping
into a dream. This state is characterized by the loss of
self-importance, ego, and judgment. It is evidenced with the strong
sensation of self-confidence in whatever you are called upon to do.
There is no concern for failure or of doing wrong. There is also the
need to fully give of yourself more and more without reservation.
There is a controlled aspect of the mind that many assume is the
same as oneness that needs to be discussed. This is what is commonly
called single-minded concentration upon some problem or task. Those
who learn this type of concentration can become impervious to the
outer world as they sink deeper into the object of their
concentration. You have no doubt experienced this type of
concentration as your mind centers upon some intriguing problem or
attraction.
In this state your world shrinks until only the object of
concentration exists and then if the object of your concentration is
seen without any of your biases or expectation then a deeper form
of concentration
results.
Many early cultures used this type of intense concentration as
preparation for finding oneness. Buddhism and other religions
carried this type of advanced concentration throughout many
countries where it was called meditation. The main object of
beginning meditation is to learn to bring the mind under control so
as to ignore all of the distracting thoughts that keep arising.
Meditation then leads to the ability to direct the mind outward
without the normal judgments and desire for egocentricity.
Oneness is not something that you do, but rather is the result of
what you are or what you are expecting. Oneness is found when you
lose yourself rather than in controlling yourself. Oneness requires
quickening and the inner power, but not conscious effort.
Publications 
