The idea that you and me are more one than two is weird! But weirdness is going around these days.
I went to a science-focused school so there was a lot of talk about the emerging quantum world. To pass my classes, I had to grapple with the theory of special relativity. But more than that, I really wanted to understand it. I tried to chase that silly thing down for two full semesters. I talked to everybody I could talk to help me “get” it.
I couldn’t.
After hours questioning some of the most brilliant minds on earth, one graduate teaching assistant finally told me to give it up. “The problem is,” he said, “you’re trying to intuit this thing and that just won’t work. It’s not intuitive.”
With all the classes and discussions I’d had, I could parrot back the theory; I could recount the cases for it… but couldn’t “feel” it. This guy told me I understood everything there was to understand, but beyond that I’d just have to play with it; work with it for a while. “This thing,” he said, “just won’t intuit.”
So I gave up.  That was 1979.
Since then, I’ve listened to hundreds of lectures by cosmologists, physicists, and people just using the theory. I’ve watched Star Trek  replicators make “tea: earl-gray” out of energy. I’ve imagined people beaming from matter to energy and back again. I’ve just been around the theory. I’ve heard people work with it, talk about it, build on it.
And these many years later… it just doesn’t seem strange any more.
I can’t intuit it any better than I could, but it has become one of life’s givens. Matter and energy just are the same thing. That strange idea seems normal now.
And that’s the way deep fundamental brain-changes happen. At first, strange ideas just seem strange. Our brains do everything they can to spit them out. But after we work with them a while, they become part of us.
That’s the only way the idea that you and I are not two, but one… will ever get inside us.
We will keep imagining ourselves bound in discreet separateness no matter what the quantum physicists tell us; no matter how many aspen groves we walk through; no matter how many times we read Jesus and Paul.
But over time; as we hear and re-hear the idea; as we work with it; as we build on it; it will settle into us.
In some real way, I am you and you are me. We are both manifestations of the same underlying oneness. The crazy, granola-hippy idea that we are “one with the universe,” just won’t be that weird anymore.
That’s the way these things go.