Seeing the Oneness of our Reality – Part Three

This is Part Three of a Five Part Series of Seeing the Oneness of our Reality. See previous installments:  Part One, Part Two.

In this five part series, we will explore the meaning of Oneness – the concept of one interconnected consciousness that gives rise to all beings and matter. There is no self and the other, they are one and the same. In my opinion, it is the understanding and experience of Oneness that is the key ingredient necessary for us to progress forward as individuals and for society to solve its biggest problems. Think about it, progress on any of the major issues we face – rising poverty, food and water shortages, climate change, rising energy prices, growing inequality, deteriorating education standards, immigration etc – are all stale-mated at the current time because we have become hyper-polarized as a society in terms of us versus them, what’s mine is not yours, and winning is everything. Yet, collectively, we have enormous technology, intellectual, and financial resources to solve or at least significantly mitigate almost any problem, if we would only cooperate. But if we think we are separate and different from “the other person or group”, that cooperation will be a long time in coming, if ever. In this five-part series, I’ll take you on a tour of what the latest information form the world of Science, Spirituality, and Psychology is revealing about our true reality. These things have been spoken about by ancient spiritual traditions for thousands of years, but our modern world took a detour around 400 years ago and is now finally catching up. Hopefully more will awaken to our underlying interconnected and shared reality and we can finally move forward to realize our true potential. -JK

Part Three
Spirituality, Mysticism, and Philosophy

The Hindus 5,000 years ago taught in their religious texts that the world was an illusion, a dream spun by Brahman, God, or the universal con-sciousness. The Hindus call the one consciousness Atman and Christians call it the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is said to connect all humankind to each other and to God. Sounds like The Field doesn’t it? Author Gregg Braden, in The Divine Matrix, describes how the Rig Veda—a 7,000-year-old Hindu text—speaks of a power or field that underlies all creation:

In what’s perhaps the the best-known text, the Rig Veda, there’s a description of a force that underlies creation from which all things are formed—the force that was there before the “beginning.” The power, named Brahman, is identified as the “unborn” … in whom all existing things abide. Further in the text it becomes clear that all things exist because “the One manifests as the many, formless putting on forms.”

What this passage points to is how the ancient Indians saw that Universal Consciousness—The One or God—was one unifying essence that resided in all beings and things (the many). Quantum physics is showing the same connection—a field of possibilities and inter-connections. In a similar vein, Chinese master Lao Tzu around 600 BCE wrote in the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao is called the Great Mother: empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds. It is always present within you. You can use it any way you want.”  The mystical traditions point out the oneness that connects all things. Fritjof Capra in his groundbreaking book The Tao of Physics put it beautifully:

In contrast to the mechanistic Western view, the Eastern view of the world is “organic.” For the Eastern mystic, all things and events perceived by the senses are interrelated, connected, and are but different aspects or manifestations of the same ultimate reality. Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world is seen as an illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentality. It is called avidya, or ignorance, in Buddhist philosophy and is seen as the state of a disturbed mind which has to be overcome.

The Buddha summarized his philosophy on why our minds get disturbed—or in his words, why we suffer—in The Four Noble Truths:

The Existence of Suffering – The ever-present human condition, due to the mind’s constant processing of sensory data.
The Origin of Suffering – The pain we feel when we experience change (changes in our physical or emotional state, or anything that our senses pick up and which leads to thoughts that reflect a change in circumstances).
The Cessation of Suffering – Our ability to accept (to control our thoughts) that all change is constant and dynamic and that once we release ourselves from attachment to what is changing, we achieve liberation.
The Path to Cessation of Suffering – The Noble Eightfold Path, which begins with understanding and internalizing the first three Noble Truths and then progressing through a series of ways of being in our lives that ultimately leads to Enlightenment.

The Noble Eightfold path is:

Right Understanding
Right Thought
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Concentration

Of course the Buddha said much more about how to live our lives. One example in particular shows that he alerted us to what is now (2,500 years later) being witnessed by quantum physicists. The Buddha in the original Pali Canon spoke about the concept of Interdependent Origination (from Samyutta Nikaya):

When there is this, there is that. When there is not this, there is not that. From the arising of this, that arises. From the ceasing of this, that ceases.

The Buddha was essentially saying that nothing is permanent or absolute. Specifically, no beings or phenomena exist independently of other beings and phenomena and all beings and phenomena are caused to exist by other beings and phenomena. Moreover, beings and phenomena perpetually arise and perpetually cease because other things and beings perpetually arise and perpetually cease. Nothing Is Permanent.  In quantum physics, it is believed that at the subatomic level, matter does not exist as a firm, permanent, unchanging structure. Rather, as Fritjof Capra explained in The Tao of Physics, it has a “tendency to exist” based on probabilities:

At the subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows “tendencies to exist,” and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways but rather show “tendencies to occur.” … At the subatomic level, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into wave-like patterns of probabilities, and these patterns ultimately do not represent probabilities of things but rather probabilities of interconnections … As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated “basic building blocks” but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitutes the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can only be understood in terms of the object’s interaction with the observer.

Sounds like a 21st century scientific description of Interdependent Origination does it not? Our world is highly interconnected; it’s not static, but rather it’s energy flowing and we (the observer) manifest (the way we affect probabilities) things into being by our thoughts and emotions. Welcome to the future.

Past Life Regression

Past Life Regression is essentially about the concept of Reincarnation. Through hypnosis, a trained psychologist is able to lead some people (not all can be successfully hypnotized) back in time through their memories to remember details of lives they have lived in the past.  Now, if you’ve been raised in a tradition that believes there’s something inherently sacrilegious about this belief, you likely don’t know that a number of Christian Church Fathers believed in and wrote about reincarnation (I discuss this further in part four). There’s actually a great deal of evidence to prove that there’s nothing unholy or irreverent about this phenomenon; in fact, quite the opposite is true. The various psychiatrists who have conducted thousands of regressions in controlled settings with all details recorded—and in some cases videotaped—can attest that reincarnation exists. Dr. Brian Weiss, the former chairman of the Psychiatry department at Mt. Sinai Medical Center and a Columbia University and Yale Medical School graduate, is the most prominent of the psychiatrists working in this field. Weiss regressed his first patient in 1980 and says he has regressed over 4,000 patients since then.

To illustrate a profound example, Dr. Weiss tried helping his first patient, Catherine, overcome traumas in her life with conventional psychiatric treatment. When those failed, he decided to use hypnosis. He has explained that hypnosis is just a way to bring someone into a hyper-focused state of mind. The person’s body relaxes, and their concentration level is enhanced. This allows them to remember traumas that have occurred in their lives previously. When he first set out, Dr. Weiss was just expecting to hear about distress that had occurred in Catherine’s childhood (in her present life). However, once into the session, she started to recount details about herself, people, and places that had taken place hundreds of years ago. Catherine described her former names, details of where she lived, how she lived and died, and more. Weiss later verified that the details she related were historically accurate and Catherine herself confirmed that she did not know of these details in her present life, nor had she been to any of the locations.

This first session was very dramatic for Dr. Weiss, but he was still a bit uncertain about what he was witnessing. That is until Catherine spoke of something under hypnosis that eliminated all doubt of the existence of an afterlife for him. He says that during their session, his office suddenly became icy cold. She said, “There are two people here to see you: your father and your son.”  Dr. Weiss recounts that this was surprising as she did not know any background details about his life—he didn’t even have diplomas hanging in his office. In addition, this occurred at a time before the Internet when it was not easy to look up details about an individual. Catherine proceeded to tell him facts she couldn’t have known:

Your father is here, and your son, who is a small child. Your father says you will know him because his name is Avrom, and your daughter is named after him. Also, his death was due to his heart. Your son’s heart was also important, for it was backward, like a chicken’s. He made a great sacrifice for you out of his love. His soul is very advanced … His death satisfied his parent’s debts. Also he wanted to show you that medicine could only go so far, that its scope is very limited.

All this stunned Dr. Weiss deeply. There was no way Catherine could know any of this information. His newborn son, Adam, had in fact died of an extremely rare congenital heart defect merely a couple of weeks after his birth. Only a few people close to the family knew of Adam’s condition and death. It also turns out, at around the time of Adam’s death, Weiss was deciding whether to stay on his chosen path of psychiatry or accept a residency in internal medicine. Adam’s death frustrated Weiss by highlighting for him the limits of modern medicine; hence he firmed up his decision to stay focused on psychiatry. Thus what Catherine told him was all the proof he needed of life after death. The sessions with Catherine also unearthed an additional revelation.

Catherine started to channel the thoughts and messages of beings called “Masters”—highly evolved souls who are currently not incarnated into human form (in fact Catherine told him that it was the Masters who told him the details about Weiss’ life). Through his dialogues with Catherine and many other patients, Weiss has been able to ask further questions of the Masters about many different aspects concerning, life, death, reincarnation, how lives are chosen, the purpose of our lives on earth, how our progress as souls is judged, what it’s like in the spirit world, the existence of other civilizations, and much more. Insightful Indian journalist Subhamoy Das has done an excellent job of summarizing in a book review some of the communication from the Masters showcased in Dr. Weiss’ first book, Many Lives, Many Masters:

“Our task is to learn, to become God-like through knowledge … By knowledge we approach God, and then we can rest. Then we come back to teach and help others.”
“There are many gods, for God is in each of us.”
We have to be on “different planes at different times. Each one is a level of higher consciousness. What plane we go to depends upon how far we’ve progressed …”
“We must share our knowledge with other people. We all have abilities far beyond what we use … you should check your vices … if you do not, you carry them over with you to another life … when you decide you are strong enough to master the external problems, then you will no longer have them in your next life.”
“Everybody’s path is basically the same. We all must learn certain attitudes while we’re in physical state … charity, hope, faith, love … we must all know these things and know them well.”
“Everything is energy … Humans can only see the outside, but you can go much deeper … To be in physical state is abnormal. When you are in spiritual state, that is natural to you. When we are sent back, it’s like being sent back to something we do not know. In the spirit world you have to wait, and then you are renewed. It’s a dimension like the other dimensions …”
“The fear of death … that no amount of money or power can neutralize”… remains within us. “But if people knew that life is endless, so we never die, we were never really born, this fear would dissolve.” We have “lived countless times before and would live countless times again … and spirits are around us to help while in physical state and after death, in spiritual state.” We and our deceased loved ones would join these guardian angels.
“Acts of violence and injustices against people do not go un-noted, but is repaid in kind in another lifetime.”
“Everything comes when it must come. A life cannot be rushed … we must accept what comes to us at a given time … life is endless … we just pass through different phases. There is no end. Time is not as we see time, but rather in lessons that are learned.”
After death “we get to the spiritual plane, we keep growing there, too. When we arrive, we’re burned out. We have to go through a renewal stage, a learning stage, and a stage of decision. We decide when we want to return, where, and for what reasons … Our body is just a vehicle for us while we’re here. It is our soul and our spirit that last forever …”

There are many other psychiatrists working in the past life regression field, but if you haven’t looked into this area for yourself, start with Dr. Weiss’ Many Lives, Many Masters. Trust me, it will alter your outlook on life.  The main takeaway on past life regression is that the detailed accounts of past lives that people provide are very compelling. They are able to provide vivid details of events, places, and people they could not possibly know about in their current lives. In some cases people have even started to speak in ancient languages—perfectly. What are they tapping into?

Clearly, if our universe and existence were based purely on classical physics, these phenomena could not exist. For people to connect to these memories, they are either tapping into their soul and those memories are residing within them, or they are tapping into The Field at large—or Universal Consciousness—and bringing back details from there. Either way, it is consistent with the energy matrix that we’ve spoken about earlier in this chapter and demonstrates that there’s a connected web we’re part of and that our minds are the key drivers of our existence. The messages from the Masters also show us that what various spiritual traditions have spoken about for centuries is consistent—that we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.

And that ultimately, we are here to experience and learn Oneness, that we are all one and the same and connected to each other and the Universal Consciousness, or God. We express that understanding through compassion, forgiveness, and love for our fellow beings, and when we attain that understanding, we achieve Nirvana and the release of having to be reborn. This takes hundreds of lifetimes to achieve. When we don’t achieve that understanding, we suffer karmic consequences (either short term or long term in this life, or carried into successive lives). What we inflict on others is reflected back to us so that we may gain insight in order to change our thoughts, actions, and emotions. We are free to choose how we act and think at all times, and as such—just as quantum physics shows—we create our reality through those thoughts. If we keep our minds focused on love, compassion, and forgiveness, we attract those things back into our lives. E=MC2—thoughts are converted into our physical reality.

Near-Death Experiences

There are thousands of cases of near-death experiences that have been recorded over the years. You no doubt have read or heard about at least one, which is often an out-of-body experience where the person is floating above the operating room table where their body is lying. They’re able to describe minute details of transpiring events that they should not have been able to do since they were clinically dead. Other accounts report how the person travels through a “chute of light” and arrives into a peaceful spiritual environment. In some of these cases, the person describes being reunited with previously deceased family members, and perhaps other major figures from their life.

For some people, these accounts are enough to convince them of the fact of our spiritual existence. But for others, especially doctors and neuroscientists, there’s a belief that these experiences are just hallucinations of the brain during traumatic events. So taken alone, NDEs have not been able to provide “conclusive” proof of the existence of God, or Universal Consciousness, or the non-physical reality of the Universe. But in 2012, we were presented with the near-death experience of Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon who has practiced at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Alexander has conducted extensive neuro-research and worked in the areas of stereotactic radiosurgery (laser-guided radiation to specific parts of the brain). He has also helped in developing MRI procedures targeting neurosurgical procedures. In addition, he has co-authored over 150 papers and peer reviewed chapters for medical journals. It’s important here to note that before his near-death experience, like many of his neuroscientist peers, he did not believe in the validity of NDEs and their implication of a spiritual afterlife. In Proof of Heaven, he writes:

I’d heard many stories over the years of people who had strange experiences, usually after suffering cardiac arrest: stories of traveling to mysterious, wonderful landscapes; of talking to dead relatives—even of meeting God Himself. Wonderful stuff, no question. But all of it, in my opinion, was pure fantasy. What caused the otherworldly types of experience that such people so often report? I didn’t claim to know, but I did know that they were brain-based. All of consciousness is. If you don’t have a working brain, you can’t be conscious … Or, so I would have told you before my own brain crashed.

Eben Alexander’s fateful day occurred on November 10, 2008 (at age 54). He developed a severe case of bacterial meningitis in the brain, was in a coma for seven days, and his entire neocortex (outer part of the brain), was nonfunctional. Dr. Alexander comments in his book that in certain cases, such as cardiac arrest, the person’s neocortex is deactivated temporarily but is not fully shut down or overly damaged. The person may still be getting enough blood flow after being revived in time. But in Eben’s case, his neocortex was completely shut down, so it becomes difficult to explain how he could have consciously known what was going on or what he was experiencing through his brain—because it wasn’t functional, he simply could not have had that awareness accordingly to physiology. His fellow neurosurgeons who were working on him on the operating table confirmed it.

Dr. Alexander’s NDE experience and what happened to him was therefore not a brain-based hallucination, but something else. His consciousness was not tied to his body or brain; it was separate. This is a classic case of Soul as Spirit. During Dr. Alexander’s NDE experience, he recounts how he traveled into a place of extreme beauty and vivid colors. He was met by a beautiful girl he didn’t know, and she traveled with him and told him that he would learn many things during his time in the spirit world, but that he would not stay—he would return to his physical existence. Later, Eben didn’t understand why someone from his family wasn’t there to meet him and act as his guide. The young woman was very nice to him, and radiated a tremendous soothing influence on him, but he had no idea who she was. It turned out that Dr. Alexander, who was adopted at birth, had three siblings from his biological family, all of whom he had never met. There were two sisters and a brother, and he ended up meeting the family only a few months before he fell into the coma. While the reunion was joyful, one of the sisters wasn’t present—she had died ten years earlier.

Once he was out of the coma and had fully recounted and recorded his NDE, the fact that he hadn’t been greeted by a relative introduced a bit of doubt in himself about his NDE. A few months after his brush with death, his biological family sent him a picture of his deceased sister. As Dr. Alexander studied the photo, everything fell into place. The woman in the photo was the same woman who escorted him through the spirit world. He in fact had been met by a family member—he just didn’t know it at the time. As part of his journey, Dr. Alexander says he was taken to meet with God, the Source itself. He describes entering “an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting.” All the messages were transmitted to him telepathically, via thoughts. He describes learning and absorbing knowledge deeper and more quickly than anything we humans are capable of. The physical nature of our brains slows down our ability to process information, but in a spiritual state, we operate at the speed of thought, which is much faster.

Eben says it will take him a long time to fully comprehend what he was taught, but it seemed to boil down to one thing—Love. Love is without a doubt, the basis of everything. Not some abstract, hard-to-fathom kind of love, but the day-to-day kind that everyone knows—the kind of love we feel when we look at our spouse and our children, or even our animals. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous or selfish, but unconditional. This is the reality of realities, the incomprehensible glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions. Dr. Alexander goes on to acknowledge how difficult it is for us in our human form to live out this eternal truth. To love everyone on a daily basis as if they were our own family, that they were in fact us.

The brain—in particular its left-side linguistic/logical part, that which generates our sense of rationality and the feeling of being a sharply defined ego or self—is a barrier to our higher knowledge and experience. It is my belief that we are now facing a crucial time in our existence. We need to recover more of that larger knowledge while living here on earth, while our brains (including its left-side analytical parts) are fully functioning. Science—the science to which I’ve devoted so much of my life—doesn’t contradict what I learned up there … The unconditional love and acceptance that I experienced on my journey is the single most important discovery I have ever made, or will ever make … I also know in my heart that sharing this very basic message—one so simple that most children readily accept it—is the most important task that I have.

Yes, we can choose to doubt even Dr. Alexander’s near-death experience as credible “Proof of Heaven.” He in fact, prior to his NDE, was a rational scientist—dedicated to the materialist worldview—who did not acknowledge the existence of a non-materialist spiritual realm. Looking at it as an isolated case, we can chalk it up to mistaken remembrances of what actually happened, or that his neocortex really wasn’t completely shut down, or that the medication he was on affected him in some way. But looking at it in the context of yet another slice of information pointing to the existence of a soul, of reincarnation, of an energy matrix along with the other things we have already discussed, how can we not at least give pause? It appears quite compelling how the common intersection from all these phenomena—which come from completely different areas of our existence and from various people—point to the same revelation of our reality as spiritual beings having a physical existence. And as spiritual beings, our goal in life is to see past the ego’s mistaken insistence of a separation between all of us and all things. When we accept this view, we cannot look at the world the same way again, and we must alter our thinking to be in line with our true reality.

~Jay Kshatri

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