The other day, out of the blue, my Amazon Alexa asked me a question: “Would you like to hear a daily one-minute meditation?” While my wife and I use Alexa and her sisters to play music throughout the house, the question seemed to come out of nowhere. (Maybe based on my spiritual book buying?) Regardless, I said yes.
Now, at 8:10 each morning, Alexa interrupts the silence, or any music that might be playing, with a meditation on our kitchen device. Some days I’m in another room and hear the voice in the distance but cannot make out the words. But the other day I heard her loud and clear—and she was using the G-word. Alexis, or more precisely the woman talking on Alexa, was repeating a mantra:
God and I are one. I am one with God. God and I are one. I am one with God.
I found the message about our “oneness” with God, echoing the words found in John 14:20, strangely soothing. Maybe because, deep down, I knew they were true.
We sometimes don’t see what is right in front of us.
Do you remember Michael Singer? He authored several popular spirituality books a decade or two ago, including The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment. Now a wise elder, Singer has a podcast and the other day he was talking about our relationship to the Divine. He pointed out that we are right in the midst of the Divine, yet do not realize it, making these comparisons:
- We are like a fish diligently searching for water, not realizing we are already immersed in it.
- We are like a person knocking on a door, begging to be let in to the house of the Divine. Only we don’t realize we are already inside the house, knocking on the inside of the door.
“The most important discovery of all time.”
Ede Frecska, M.D., is the chief of psychiatry at the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Budapest, Hungary. He is also a co-author of the book Inner Paths to Outer Space. In a chapter titled “The Shaman’s Journey,” Frecska writes about a common theme found in eight different wisdom traditions:
Christianity: “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” (attributed to Jesus)
Sufism: “To know yourself, at the deepest level, is to know God.”
Islam: “Those who know themselves know their Lord.”
Judaism: “He is in all, and all is in Him.”
Confucianism: “Those who know their own nature, know heaven.”
Taoism: “In the depths of the soul, one sees the Divine, the One.”
Buddhism: “Look within, you are the Buddha.”
Hinduism: “Atman [individual consciousness] and Brahman [universal consciousness] are one.”
You may have seen some of these quotes as standalones before. But there’s something profound about seeing them all strung together on a single page. Different religions. Different perceptions of God. All coming to the same universal conclusion: God is within us.
Now if you asked the average man or woman on the street where God is, you would probably get a blank stare, or a finger pointed to the heavens. How has the notion of “God within” not permeated all of us?Frecska hints that it has to do with our lack of self-knowledge. Unless we are inspired or prompted to search within, we can never come to this revelation. But:
If we descend into the depth of our psyche, we will arrive at something common in all of us and everything. We discover this by consistently looking inward until within becomes beyond.
Frecska points out this power is contained within all of us. He writes, “Any of us, even the most unfortunate member of the human species, carries the whole cosmos inside and has the potential to reach it, to tap into it.” He calls this ability to find God within “the most important discovery of all time.” Which may sound like an overstatement (what about electricity?), but within the context of spirituality, it just might be true.
The mystics knew about the state of oneness with God.
The mystics, like Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Ávila from the Christian tradition, and the Sufi poet Rumi, believed in the direct experience of God. They saw the separation between you and me and God as an illusion. They believed true reality is a state of unity, where you are intimately connected with the divine, a feeling of oneness that can be achieved through chanting, repeating a sacred mantra, contemplation, or prayer.
The idea that God permeates our entire being, and can be accessed by each of us, has appeared throughout the ages, more recently in the works of Thomas Merton, Mirabai Starr and Richard Rohr. Two current books continue to emphasize our oneness with God and the belief God is with us at every moment.
In Zen Executive, Jim Blake, the former head of the Unity Church, writes “the presence and power (of God) pervades the universe, connecting humanity and all living things.” He continues:
God is the force of love and wisdom that underlies everything. Present at every point in space at the same time, God is an intelligent presence that is everywhere. Being itself, not a being. The very essence of humanity is God and we all possess the spark of divinity.
And, as mentioned earlier, the idea of “oneness” is not limited to the Christian religion. In the new book Women Who Wear Only Themselves, Arundhathi Subramaniam writes of a female guru she talked to in India. The guru describes her experience of being one with the Hindu God Shiva:
In the state of oneness, there is no ‘I’ and no ‘you.’ There is no physicality. No mind, no thought. The individual does not exist. There is the realm of experience, and then there are glimpses of a dimension beyond experience. It cannot be put into words.
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