by | Oct 29, 2012 | Uncategorized


In the last 90 years, our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe has been turned on its ear. The line between two-ness and one-ness is getting really blurry.

  • Light is two things (wave and particle)… or, light is one thing, expressed as wave and particle.
  • Energy and matter are two things… or they both express one thing.
  • A quantum particle can be two places at the same time. Is it one… or two?
  • Falling into a black hole, stuff simultaneously slips past the event horizon unscathed, and is at the same time dissembled and radiated out as subatomic particles (LINK). Is stuff two… or is it one?

It’s weird out there!
The very concept of two-ness is being eroded from under us; which in turn, assaults our most cherished skin-boundary assumptions. Maybe we are not bounded by our skin-bags. It is beginning to appear that the very idea of separate, discreet, me-you entities, are not the best way to describe reality.
When we lived in the distinct-entities world we could think of ourselves as a stand of oak trees. I exist as one oak tree; you exist as another. I am over here; you over there. We might be very close to one another; our branches perhaps even intertwined; however, we are two distinct entities.
But this reality is getting harder and harder to hold on to as our physicists update the nature of things.
Our oak-tree metaphor stops working.
We might better think of ourselves as an aspen grove. Aspens can cover many square miles but the whole grove is but one tree. Each seemingly separate tree shares the same root ball. Every leaf shares the same DNA. Hike through miles of aspen, and they will look like separate entities, but like so much of the reality we live in, separateness is illusion. The aspen is not many; it is one.
When Paul says that “we, being many, are in fact, one body…”
It is appearing that he intuited something a long time ago… that is true!
Our physicists are making a compelling case that the connectedness our spiritual forebears intuited is a more accurate way to describe reality. You and I are more one than two; more connected than disconnected.
Now that just feels weird!
Since infancy when we sensed our separateness from mother’s breast, the idea of separateness has been our ever-reinforcing framing narrative. Day after day, year after year, our five senses push us to experience reality in separateness terms.
But quantum weirdness now tells me that everything we know is wrong; something our spiritual ancestors intuited a long time ago

Share This