Oneness is talked about all over the site, and there have been some quality threads about it. I just wanted to bring together some of the viewpoints expressed about it in one place and I also wanted some feedback for myself from you guys.

I would like to hear opinions on how you integrate the concept of oneness into your daily lives. My friend has not had the opportunity to "go to church" (plaigerised unashamedly from Antrocles) for several months now. No mushies, mesc in pure or cactus form has passed his lips this year and he's just about managed to scrape in a couple of RC experiences and acid but nothing revolutionary.

Coming to me now: my life has recently been the inescapable and relentless daily grind of commuting and keeping everyone in my life (including myself) positive and it all came to a head the other day. Jammed onto a packed train I looked around and was greeted with the usual frowns, blank stares and tired eyes.

I started thinking about the concept of oneness, something my friend has experienced through psychs and told me about. I started thinking how it would be greeted if I tried to tell anyone around me about it, and I started questioning its true relevance to my daily life.

I suppose I'm just struggling with some of these ideas without reinforcement from more experiences. I've been forced to focus so single mindedly on what people call 'the real world' that this whole concept and these other worlds seem very distant and at times dare I say it; irrelevant. Even allowing myself to utter that word is difficult and I know that all it would take would be one proper experience to bring it all flooding back but it shouldn't be that way should it? These subs should unlock our minds but we shouldn't be dependent on them for our views and feelings.

How do you guys integrate it all? What do you say to the skeptics apart from 'go and see for yourselves'? Is it something that is only truly relevant to our concept of death? How does it affect our interaction with strangers? How do we educate people about it? Why is it fading from my mind when I felt it so overwhelmingly?

Many questions, all of which hint at a slight despair on my part at being a 'secret psychonaut', something I'm going to address in another thread at some point. Why can't I be open about these experiences? Why can't I tell people at my work about this without them raising their eyebrows and suspecting 'drug use'?

I've got barely any internet time at the moment but I am still snatching some time to read the Nexus so will hopefully be able to engage with this! Here are a collection of quotes about oneness, any new perspectives appreciated.









---> I know that other people have put some pretty good descriptions of this out there, but I can't track them down. Damn this new layout!

Having had the experience of Oneness on a variety of occasions, I found it difficult at first to integrate the experience into my daily life. But that was at the beginning, and since then it has become much easier, and more rewarding to my everyday experience.

My general view comes from my signature, and expands out from there.

Where I find it the most valuable in daily life and in relations to others, is the fact that it shows my Ego to be false. I construct created at the moment of my birth into this particular three dimensional world. From the moment we arrive, all we know is contained in the Ego, and it is a mechanism that helps us survive and navigate in this existence. But it is ultimately false and decieving, because since it is all we have known, it tries to keep itself in control, and lead us down false paths that only support its own existence, not the greater truth of who we really are.

When I had my profound Oneness experience, I was shown that there is much more to what we believe than what our Ego constructs tell us. If we are all connected, then I can see myself in everyone I come across, they become a mirror, and all the things they do or say become obvious...a reflection of their separation from all that is. I can have empathy, and sorrow, and joy, and humor, and love for everyone I come across, because they are living their own expression of the One, learning and experiencing in their own way, contributing to the greater whole of existence. Evil does not exist, or at least not in the form we are taught. Negativity and evil are their own proper expressions of experience, for without evil there could be no good, without fear, no love (at least in our third dimensional existence). It allows me to understand evil/negativity and accept it. With understanding comes knowledge and forgiveness, and for me, peace. I can forgive my attacker, as they know not what they do, they are just acting out their programs run by their Ego, and the experiences it has accumulated over a life time. How could someone who understands that we are all one thing experiencing itself do conscious harm to itself?

It is empowering and liberating. It allows me to live in the Now. It allows me to understand others and their motivations on the most basic level, and accept them for their unique expression of life, which enrichens us all.

Let me first say great post, This sort of thing does cross my mind from time to time. Integration is a hard thing for most people to grasp let alone truly make it work in their everyday reality. Swim works in a big city, so its easy to look around and see people so self absorbed by their "reality." So absorbed they can't even look up to see where they are going, too busy with their new phones, ipods, email, or whatever. They will shoulder check you before they worry about where they are going. They dont realize that they are really me, and I'm really them. I realize this to some degree so I always try to be courteous in that sense. Most people havent had the chance, or the want to experience a sense of oneness trough an entheogen, like for instance mushrooms. The mushroom sent swim waves of oneness feelings, it was truly amazing. Something i wish everyone could experience in some way. Like you mentioned, how do you convince a skeptic without direct experience, well i think its near impossible. When people have their core belief systems, they dont like to hear things that might shatter their system. I noticed this, with fairly open minded people also, as soon as something a little too crazy comes up, i could just sense them backing away from it, before even giving it a chance. I dont preach to anyone about this stuff, a friend of mine does and he rarely gets anywhere with it. I think people need to be searching for themselves to be open minded enough to accept radical views of life like oneness. Like i mentioned above its harder for people with no direct experience to "get it," I still dont get it and have been through various psychedelic journeys. I totally know what your saying about being a secret psychonaut, you cant just go around telling everyone about the elves in spice land without them judging you, and totally disregarding anything else worthy you have to offer. People need to loosen up on the word drugs, i dont see most entheogenic psychedelics as drugs, they are sacred teachers with infinite knowledge to hand over to us. If we could just dose the whole world, it would truly be a better place.

Totally spot on Saidin, great post. I felt like i was reading my own thoughts, I guess i was being we are all one.

To really understand the nature of reality, we must look through the eyes of the soul.

There is no life without consciousness - consciousness and life are one and the same. Life is synonymous with what we call spirit, consciousness, awareness and existence. For the last 300 years people have thought that consciousness was an epiphenomenon of physical matter. This reductionist worldview says that if we can understand the behaviour of molecules then we will also understand that consciousness is an emergent property; that once molecules attain a certain degree of complexity in behaviour then from that, somehow, consciousness emerges.



I have to admit; I have thought of consciousness in connection with the spirit for so long that I forget there are people who think it has something to do with the brain or matter.

This reductionist worldview can be explained in a very simple biological way: your pancreas makes pancreatic juice, your gallbladder makes bile, your stomach secretes hydrochloric acid, and your brain secretes consciousness. So your brain somehow manufactures consciousness in the same way that your stomach manufactures hydrochloric acid or your pancreas manufactures pancreatic juice. This reductionist model is used in science and medicine, but it is a very incomplete model. It is a flawed map of reality.
There are three methods by which we can understand reality. The first is through our senses: sound, touch, taste, sight and smell. We experience reality through the instruments of observation: the eyes of the flesh. The second way that we understand reality is through the instrument that we call the mind: the eyes of the mind, metaphorically speaking. If I want to understand the theory of relativity I have to participate at least to some extent with the experiments that occurred in the mind of Einstein. If I want to understand quantum physics then also I have to have some idea of the mathematical concepts that occurred in the minds of scientists in the last century. If you look at the major revolution of the last century it is quantum physics and quantum mechanics and if you study the history of the emergence of that science you will see that this revolution actually occurred in peoples minds. The observations came much later.
With that revolution came new technology. I have this amazing little gadget: its a telephone with email and internet access. I could record a lecture on it, take photos or video on it, and send the information anywhere in the world. The information will go through walls, it will go through trees, it will bounce off a satellite in space, it will go through traffic jams, it will go through human bodies, and somebody anywhere in the world, in China or in India, can receive this information or watch the video.
This technology is based on a very fundamental premise in science: that the essential nature of the material world is that it is not material. Otherwise we wouldnt have this technology. We are able to surf the information highway on the internet because what we call the material world is really not material. This technology is a result of what we call the quantum revolution. It is the second way of examining reality.
There is a third way of examining reality that goes even deeper. Our sensory apparatus takes us to a very superficial level: this is a chair, that is a flower, that is a human being; and the quantum level takes us deeper into the mind of nature, making the world much more miraculous. So the eyes of the mind take us to a level which is a more wondrous than that seen through the eyes of the flesh. The third way of knowing reality is through the eyes of the soul, which take us much, much deeper into the nature of existence.



So, here we have it again: there is the reality of the flesh the senses, there is the reality of the brainmind thought, and then there is the reality of the experiences of the soul.

My senses tell me that the ground I am sitting on is stationary and yet we know it is spinning at a dizzying speed, hurtling through space at thousands of miles an hour. My senses tell me that, from where I am standing, the Earth is flat. Nobody believes that any more. Even when I look at an object like a flower and perceive its colour or texture, this is not its essential quality. The eye cells of a honeybee do not perceive the same wavelengths of light that you and I perceive and so a bee will have a completely different range of experience of the flower, and will see it in ultraviolet wavelengths. A bat will experience the flower as the echo of ultrasound. A chameleons eyeballs swivel on two different axes so we cant even remotely imagine what a flower looks like to a chameleon!


And, what I was talking about recently takes it even further than this even our senses in the material world are filtering so extremely that we are barely even experiencing what is available in the material world. We are barely experiencing at all when we consider what is available.

So what is the essential nature of this flower?
The answer depends on who is looking; it also depends on the instruments of observation. Our nervous systems are our main instruments of observation, and at a simplistic level our brains respond to neuron activity that translates into a binary code of electrical charges across cell membranes. So if I could look inside your brain and see whats happening I would see this vibrating electrical charge shifting from the outside to the inside of the cell membrane. How that becomes a flower, nobody knows.


Sir Arthur Eddington, a great scientists of the last century, said, "Something unknown is doing we dont know what." The more we start to understand perception, the more we dont understand it. Actually, this flower exists only in consciousness, and it exists in a place that is beyond space and time, and it exists as potential before you observe it.
There is no external world as such.



There you have it everything exists in space as pure potentiality. It only arises in consciousness when we filter to a point that we identify it through a form of collective consensus although even that shifts depending on enculturation.

Everything that we call the universe, trees and stars and galaxies - everything that we observe as the external world - is a translation of bodily processes into binary codes of photons across cell membranes in neurons. Thats why in the Ayurvedic tradition we say we are not in the world; the world is in us. We dont exist in the world; the world exists in us. We dont exist in the body; the body exists in us. We dont exist in the mind; the mind exists in us. We curve back within ourselves and create the mind, the body and the physical world. We manifest it. We are manufacturing everything: the mind, the body and the total universe. I am not speaking philosophically or talking about Eastern metaphysics - this is science.





Lets look at our Senses:
My senses tell me first of all that my body is physical, anatomical and static. But in reality, the body seems anatomical to us through our senses; the body is like a flowing river, constantly changing. The physical body that you are using to sit on a chair and read this magazine is not the same physical body that you came into the room with a little while ago. When you take one deep breath you inhale 1022 atoms from the universe.

Thats 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

Its an astronomical amount of raw material that comes into your body every time you breathe in. Every time you breathe out, you breathe out 1022 atoms that have their origin in every cell of your body. So, we are all intimately sharing our organs with each other all the time. I am breathing everything thats inside you and you are breathing everything thats inside me. We are actually exchanging atoms all the time.





It is possible today to compute the total number of atoms in the atmosphere on planet Earth. Its possible to compute what you are inhaling and exhaling in one breath. With a little more calculation, we can show beyond a shadow of doubt that right this moment you have in your physical body at least a million atoms that were once in the body of Christ, or the Buddha, or Michelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden, or George Bush.



Whomever you love, you love yourself. Whomever you hate, you hate yourself. It is all projection of ideas and, ultimately is a symbol of you and your thoughts.



You have a million atoms right now that have been in the body of every single being that has existed since the dawn of creation. In just the last three weeks a quadrillion atoms (quadrillion means ten followed by fifteen zeros) have gone through your body and they have gone through the body of every other living species on this planet.

So think of anything in the ecosystem right now - think of a tree in Africa, think of a squirrel in Siberia, think of a peasant in China, think of a taxi-driver in Calcutta, think of a small child in Afghanistan - and you have raw material in your body that was circulating there only three weeks ago. In less than one year you replace ninety-eight per cent of all the atoms in your body.
At the atomic level you make a new liver every six weeks; a new skin once every five days; you replace your skeleton every three months; and you replace the raw material of your DNA every six weeks - it comes and goes like migratory birds. Your DNA contains the memories of millions of years of evolutionary time. Thats what DNA is: DNA is the metabolism of experience. We metabolise our experience and we record it as DNA. DNA has metabolised the experience of your human ancestors, your animal ancestors and your microbial ancestors.





The insulin molecule in your body is the same as the insulin molecule not only in cows and pigs but in salmon and also in micro-organisms. What is insulin? Insulin is the knowledge of how to process sugar. Thats what it is in the form of a molecule but it is actually knowledge and that knowledge comes through eons of time. Everything that we call a molecule is actually a physical expression of experience. So we metabolise experience, we record it in our bodies and then we transfer it to the next generation. And so our DNA remembers the memories and experiences; what we in the East call karma.
Karma is the accumulated experience of the past - it takes all that karma: your karma, your ancestors karma, all the karma of creation, and then it passes it on - but the actual raw material of the DNA comes and goes every six weeks like migratory birds. So the carbon, the hydrogen, the oxygen is replacing itself every six weeks. If you have replaced your entire body down to the last atom in less than a year, you are certainly not your body. My body which I brought to England with me last year is gone: its dead, it doesnt exist in this form any more; but it is everywhere else. Its circulating in other life forms; my physical body is recycled in the earth, the water, the air, and the planet is recycling itself incorporating my physical body. So what I call myself couldnt possibly be my physical body.





In one of his plays, Shakespeare says, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." Shakespeare was a great seer. There is an Indian expression that says, "The body is just the place that our memories and our dreams call home for the time being." We continually replace our bodies, and we know how we do it. So, if the physical expression is nothing other than memory and dreams, how do we reinterpret the memory and dream experience into the physical body? How do we exorcise the ghost of disease, because disease is actually a disordered dream state in consciousness that is manifesting in our body?
What if we could see the body as it really is?
What would we see? We would see first of all that it is made up of atoms, the atoms in turn are made up of subatomic particles, and these subatomic particles are not material things, but fluctuations of energy and information that are flickering in and out of an infinite void at the speed of light. If I could see my body as it really is, through quantum instruments, what I would see is that 99% of my body is empty space and that 1% that appears to be material is also empty space; that the whole thing is made out of nothing. As I go beyond the appearance of molecules, I enter a subatomic cloud, I go beyond the cloud, I end up with a handful of nothingness; and then the crucial question that scientists today are asking is, what is the nature of this emptiness from where we all come? Is it just a void or could it be the womb of creation? Is it possible that nature goes to exactly the same place to create a galaxy of stars, a cluster of nebulae, a rain forest, an ecosystem, a human body or a thought?



Do trees, galaxies, our bodies, the furniture and this thought all come from the same place? Because in the end, as we go beyond the flickering of electromagnetic phenomena, where photons are flickering in and out, what are they flickering in and out of? There is an emptiness from which they seem to appear, they hang on for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second and then they disappear whence they came. And it seems that everything that we call form and phenomena, that we call observer and observed, is all coming from the same place, including our own thoughts.
The world is a discontinuity, and every experience arises because of the discontinuity. So, what does discontinuity mean? Let me give you an example. If I go to see a movie I see on the screen a continuous picture, but when I go to the projection room I find out that there is a series of still frames with little spaces in between. If I move the reel fast enough, I cannot see the off: I can only see the on; so I experience in consciousness a continuity. But the reality is that the movie is a discontinuity. When I see a television programme, I see an image moving from one part of the screen to another part of the screen, but nothing actually moves. Only electrons and photons flash in and out in a certain sequence, and because I cannot see the off, but I can only see the on, then I experience it as a continuity. Scientists believe that perception is possible because of this discontinuity. All the form and phenomena of the universe expresses this on-ing and off-ing, and our senses are such that they can perceive the on and not the off. Yet without the off we would not experience the on.
As you are reading this, for a second, just turn your attention to who is reading. In that split second of shifting awareness, what you feel is a presence, dont you? As you are reading, you become aware of who is reading. Well, that presence is your soul. Its not your mind that might be saying, "Oh, I think Ill have a cup of coffee." There is a presence, and that presence is in the on/off of your thoughts: there is a thought flickering on and off and in that off there is a presence. In that presence thoughts come and they go. So a thought emerges, it hangs on for a fraction of a second, literally, and then it goes. Then of course through association it leads to another thought, and that comes and that goes. In that presence emotions come and go. In that presence the perceptions of the world come and go. In that presence the molecules of your body come and go. In that presence everything that happens comes and goes.
Only the presence remains, and in Eastern traditions we call that presence the ever-present witnessing awareness, or consciousness. And in Eastern traditions we also say that the window to that presence is in the space between your thoughts. And that presence is an ever-present witnessing awareness in which all comes and goes. So when you were a baby your body was different, your perceptions were different, your thoughts were different, your emotions were different, but they all happened in the presence that is there right now and was there at that time as well. When you were a teenager, everything was different, and when you are an old person, everything is different but the presence remains constant.

This is your identity at the soul level in which everything else is transforming and changing its form and phenomena. If you hang on to this presence, it might be your ticket to freedom. This presence is the only thing that is real about you, and if you go a little deeper into this presence you will also recognise, not intellectually, maybe, but definitely at the level of experience, that this presence is beyond birth and death. That even birth and death are the on and off in the presence."

Sorry for the long- drawn out rant. Thats my ideas on oneness.

Wow, great post DMTrippin!

Loved your analogy of the "on" "off" like a movie...your whole post resonated with me very strongly.Find that space in the Now, as there is no other moment...that off space between thoughts, therein lies eternity.

Thanks for taking the time to type all that up

I agree DMTrippin, AMAZING post! Full resonation on almost every point here as well!

Thanks a million you guys for the postive feedback!

holy s@*t DMTrippin2space. That is fantastic. how do you know about the atoms in my body also have been in george bush's body. where did you get these statistics, just curious. thanks for writing that!

love.

Every single solitary thing in this universe is recycled. Without exception. Therefore the air you breathe out, will be inhaled by a tree or bush or plant, and then be re-released as oxygen to be inhaled by someone else. This happens constantly, eternally. The food you eat, the water you drink, provides the nutrients and reconstructs the cells in your body constantly, all is in flux, everything is changing.

You are breathing the same air as Aristotle, Caesar, Shakespeare, Ghandi, Bush. The atoms that made up their bodies, could very well be a part of you now. We are all sharing this experience together on the most fundamental level, the atoms in our bodies. We are all interconnected in every possible way.

There is just one of us here experiencing itself as separate entities.

EXACTLY!

SWIM writes alot. And one of SWIMs last 5 gram mushroom trips he meditated the entire time in solitude and pitch black darkness for 3 hours (give or take a few minutes. It all came to SWIM in the visions.