Living Within Oneness

In the early days of my journey, I found myself refusing to change, fighting everything and everyone with resistance. My separateness consumed me. I was unique. All I saw were differences. While I was in this state, a dear counselor gave me a book…I did not understand why she shared this book with me at the time but now looking back on it, I can see why. She saw my dilemma, and she also knew how to help me break through that predicament. To be honest, I did not read the book right away, the title “Friendship with God”was enough to make me dismiss the suggestion, but eventually I did pick up the book, more out of curiosity than anything. But sometimes curiosity is all we need to shift our momentum. After all, if curiosity is what kills the cat then perhaps it is what can kill our egos too. This week, I wanted to share an excerpt from the book called, “Friendship with God”, by Neale Donald Walsh. 

“You do not have to disappear as an individual in order to experience Oneness. That is the great fear, of course. The great fear is that Oneness will mean sameness, and that that separates you from The Whole will disappear. Thus, you will disappear. And so, the struggle against Oneness is a struggle for survival.

Yet Oneness will not put an end to your survival as an individual expression of The Whole. Rather, it will allow it. 

Right now, you are killing each other out of your love for yourself and your beliefs, and your hatred of others and theirs. You have it constructed that in order to survive as an individual person, race, religion or nation, you have to make sure that no one else survives. This is your myth. 

Living within Oneness, you will not have to fight for survival, but will guarantee it by not fighting for it. This simple solution, which has so long evaded you, will change everything. 

You will stop fighting for survival the day you realize that you cannot fail to survive. You will stop killing each other the day you realize that there is no “other”. 

Life is eternal, and there is only One of Us.

These two truths render pointless virtually everything you have done in your life. When understood, they will transform your life, turning it into a glorious expression of the grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are. 

Life is eternal, and there is only One of Us.

These two truths summarize everything, and change everything. 

Life is eternal, and there is only One of Us.

These two truths are all you will ever need to know.” 

I don’t plan to explain my interpretation of this reading, but rather leave you with it. Let those words sink in. See where the resistance is. See if it lands with you, and if it doesn’t, that’s okay too. All I can say is I am grateful that I was given the gift of Oneness, because this shift did change everything. It was the change my soul had been yearning for all my life. It eliminated the myths I had believed. And it is available to each and every one of us...if we are willing to reach for it. 

“In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.”

- Eckhart Tolle