I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately. One of the greatest enlightened sages to ever live, Ramana Maharshi, was once asked, “How should we treat others?”
He replied, “There are no others.”
To a lot of people, this won’t make any sense. But when you look closer, what he’s pointing to is that what you really are deep down – consciousness itself – is not different for any person.
The consciousness that is shining out of my eyes is exactly the same consciousness that is shining out of your eyes.
It is all one. Literally.
The reason most people don’t see this, apart from the enlightened few, is because we have been taught from the time we were little babies to regard ourselves as separate and distinct from everything around us.
But this isn’t how we start out.
When a baby is born, they have no sense of me vs other. Their experience is just a whole bunch of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and touch.
They’re hard-wired to have preferences. They like the sound of their mother’s voice and dislike loud noises. But they don’t see themselves as separate from these experiences.
Then people start pointing at them and saying this weird sound that they eventually come to know as “my name”.
A mental construct of them as a distinct and separate self then starts to build.
This is very convincing. The mind is extremely powerful at clouding over the blatantly obvious fact that everything is one.
And this is reinforced and reinforced by society to the point that it really feels like we’re a separate self, distinct from everything around us.
Then some people start to question this through various means.
Maybe they see that it doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of neuroscience that there’s a special place in the brain where our “self” resides.
Maybe they come across the teachings of an enlightened person and start to examine what experiential evidence there is for this self.
Maybe they have a spontaneous awakening where they see this clearly with no clear “path” to this realization.
Whatever the case, these awakenings are taking place in greater and greater number all around the world. There really is a great rise in both the realization and discussion of this topic.
So what about you? How would your life change if you were to see clearly that everything is one and there is no true separation? How would the world look if a great mass of people started to realize this?
As the late comedian Bill Hicks once famously said, “What’s going to happen to the arms industry when we realize we’re all one?”
In love and light,
Will.
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