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When answering this question modern mystics rarely if ever pay any attention to the material world when making the claim that ‘we’re all one thing.’ They tend to consider the material world to be at best an imperfect copy of a much larger reality that is beyond our earthly body’s ability to sense, yet glimpses of this more perfect world can be attained through the application of one’s mental faculties especially when attuned to the ideal that is God through either prayer or meditation. This wonderful realm is in many ways similar to, but not identical to Plato’s perfect realm of forms. Neo Platonists later claimed that this perfect realm existed in either the Christian conception of heaven or within the mind of God where all things are naturally perfect.
Attuning one’s spiritual essence to God bring with it the ongoing process of epiphany, an unexpected flash of knowledge or clear insight that deepens the soul’s connection with God, making the relationship between the mystic and stronger than ever and increasingly personal. Epiphanies often contain the seeds of future revelations and are important steppingstones in one’s spiritual growth and eventual reunification with God. To those on the outside looking in this may even seem like an exotic blending of eastern and western thought into a new age variety or simply eastern thought such as Buddhism and Hinduism made digestible to a western audience such as within the works of Alan Watts.
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” – Alan Watts
Materialists, naturally enough, disagree, stating that the world of Atoms and Void as initially postulated by the good natured and ‘laughing philosopher’ of the ancient world Democritus represents the entirety of the universe and nothing more, there’s simply no evidence to support the idea that we’re all unified parts of a larger being or a greater whole, or that there are realms beyond those that can be sensed with the body and the tools of materialism.
Modern mystics however disagree, stating that God is the sum total of all realities, both mental and material, but as long as we remain beings of flesh and blood we are only equipped to understand the material world, but those precious moments of clear insight and epiphany as well as the experiences of dreams and visions give us an imperfect window into the other realms that surround us. To the mystic God saturates the entirety of not just the cosmos because, but all realms, because God is all things and every possibility must exist, to do deny this is to place limitations upon God which of course as any good theologian will tell you, cannot be done! But is there any material evidence to support the belief that we’re all one thing, that on the face of it seems as arbitrary as anything else?
Well, we have the big bang, the cosmic microwave background that fills our sky as the left over ‘flash,’ from it all of those billions of years ago. The big bang isn’t over, it’s still going on, spacetime is still expanding, the universe continues to unfold, all matter originated together and at the same time, so there is nothing new within the universe, all of the subatomic particles that make up your atoms are all the same age. It’s just the combinations of those particles that change with time. If you could zoom out and see the entire universe as it truly is it would be an atomic cloud of varying densities from place to place but nevertheless connected everywhere, some areas would be thin and wispy others not so much, but nevertheless it is instantly recognisable as ‘one thing.’
*Please note this is a computer simulated image of the universe in a 2 billion light year square, it is not reality, but a model of it that accurately represents reality as best as we know it.
In the image above each dot is a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies, all bound to together by gravitational forces and other influences into a universe spanning structure that is interconnected at every point, some areas are denser than others but if it was possible to poke it with a finger big enough it would recoil, warp and twist much like a spiders web.
This usefully illustrates the point that enlightened people make that there is only one thing in existence and that is the entire universe, all divisions of matter within it are arbitrary and can only be used to describe forms or patterns within the universe, even when those patterns are independent enough to take on a life of their own.
If you zoom back in again to the level of the atom it’s impossible to see exactly where your atoms end and the rest of the universe’s begin. There’s no clear lines of distinction that exist as anything other than mental constructs that we all agree to as common fields of reference such as deciding at what point a stream becomes a river and at what point it becomes the ocean and so on. It’s merely a matter of convention that we all go along with such as deciding that a boat becomes a ship when it has three masts or more. Every day you gain more atoms and also lose some, you cannot keep the atoms that you have, because they don’t belong to you, they belong to the universe. The atoms are interchangeable and unimportant on their own, and never ever touch, being bound together by fields of force generated from within, so you are not your atoms, you are instead a self-organising pattern of matter within the atomic cloud that we recognise as the universe, your atoms are locked into a slowly changing pattern of matter that you declare to be an identity, namely the ‘self,’ the thing that clings to this identity is an illusion because there is nothing else but the universe making us all one thing.
