We Are All One

What does this mean in today’s world? How can we understand how this idea fits into the reality we now inhabit? Is it a religious idea, a scientific one, or a greeting card sentiment with no real applicability?

It brings to mind concepts like these:

Global Village

No man is an island.

Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.

All nature is Buddha nature.

But how do we get our minds to really comprehend these ideas? There are two images that I’ve found helpful in understanding how the diverse and multiple nature that is our material reality is really an experience of Oneness.

Shards of the Shattered Vessel

In the Kabbalah, the body of spiritual wisdom that is central to Jewish mysticism, there is an image that can help us understand the concept of We Are All One, as described in The Essential Zohar, by Rav P.S. Berg:

In the beginning, the Creator was alone in an unmanifest universe. There was nothing but the Creator and so although its nature was Love and Giving, this nature was unexpressed. There was nothing to give to, no object to love.

Out of the need to express this, a vessel was created. This vessel’s nature was to receive. It received the outpouring of Love that was the nature of the Creator, and so completed that nature. Within the vessel, however, like a recessive gene, was an element of similarity with the Creator. The vessel also wanted to give. Since it was created out of the Creator’s nature, it shared that attribute.

And so, out of the dichotomy of its nature it pushed back against the Love. As soon as it did so, the Love was withdrawn—the Creator was instantly reflective of the vessel’s workings. This withdrawal of Love left the vessel so empty, so desolate and bereft, that it immediately opened itself to the inflow of Love again. The surge of Creator’s love coming into it all at once was so powerful that the vessel shattered, an act that Kabbalah compares to the Big Bang that created the Universe.

All of reality, all of life that we know, is the fragments of that shattered vessel.

Using this image we can see what it means to say that We Are All One. This puts into a more accessible form the image of the Big Bang, which is all about hydrogen and antimatter, ideas that are far from our personal experience.

But even there, within the images of astrophysics, we find the same idea. The entire universe was created in a microsecond of manifestation, exploding outward from nothing, into a space that was created as the explosion occurred. The Big Bang didn’t splatter matter outward into space; it created space as it created time, matter, vacuum and experience.

The net result is that we are made up of the same elements and vibrational patterns that compose the stars. The most beautiful galaxies contain identical elements to our own planet and our own bodies. In a basic sense there is no "outer space", no vast and terrifying darkness. We exist in a much more intimate relationship with the universe than we know.

With these images we can see the essential unity of the universe, that all material and vibrational reality is an outward expression of the single originating point. These are “big” images, though; esoteric philosophy and astrophysics, though interesting and revealing, don’t seem to have much to do with our personal lives. The next image, a more mundane one, helps to bring that abstract idea down into our realm of day to day living.

Light and Prisms

In science class we learned about prisms. You shine a light through a prism and get a rainbow or, in more scientific terms, a spectrum of colors. The nature of the prism is to break the white light down into its component wavelengths and spread them out. This is how an actual rainbow forms, the drops of water in the atmosphere acting as the prism for the sunlight. It’s a beautiful thing to see. Myths have been created about it, it seems so significant a process.

It’s also a useful analogy for the idea that We Are All One.

If we can imagine this process going one step further, it will become even clearer. First think of the white light as the unity of all things, the source of it all.

The spectrum then becomes the seeming breaking up of the one into the many. The one source multiplying itself into a diversity. We can clearly see that it’s still the same one thing, just being expressed in this way by means of an optical mechanism.

It doesn’t mean that we’ve somehow divided up the light and it no longer exists as a unity; there it still is, shining into the prism. In fact if we extinguish the light, the spectrum disappears. Without the one, the many facets cease to exist.

To stretch this metaphor further, imagine that the colors, after separating in the prism, solidify into a material form, like crayons in a box. In this fashion, human beings take on a particular physical form based on their specific energy vibration, their unique color.

Seeing the relationship in this way clears away some of the confusion regarding the mystery of our individual yet joint nature. If I can see that there is just the one process, I can feel the singular experience that is my own nature, as well as my connection with all the other aspects of universal energy.

Just as the spectrum is expressed in the box of crayons, so can we see our sense of ourselves as solid individuals existing within the larger reality of our vibrational nature (the spectrum), and that reality with its varying frequencies also existing within the even larger reality of the one “real” light.

It’s an interesting idea to play with, the box of crayons. I get to pick out what color I am. I can apply all the ideas of color theory to my life—color harmony, color clashes, complementary colors. I can use this imagery to explain why I get along so well with some parts of reality, some people and situations, and why I seem to be eternally in conflict with other parts. But within all this I can still hold onto an understanding of the Oneness behind it all, even behind the clashes. I know that no matter how “far apart” we are in the crayon box, we all come from the same one Light.

We Are All One

An idea this grand, that We Are All One, is something that on a deep level we already know and understand. Our minds are always looking for ways to image things, and so these analogies are useful for our conscious understanding of this idea.

Once we get hold of this idea, we begin to see it everywhere. Life is not only a vibrant living expression of who we energetically are; it is a shared venture, an exploration on the part of the universe into its own nature, through us. Each one of us adds our own unique “color” to the living palette, and by expressing our full and wonderful nature, we add to both the diversity and the unity.

We are each like a miniature Big Bang, exploding outward into a void that was created at the same moment that we were, that is waiting to receive our full expression; an expression that illuminates the whole of reality with its own unique light and at the same time reflects back our shared nature. When we express our own true nature, we light up all of the world and enable the world to expand outward into new realms.

By Margie Waters

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