There are many, many kinds of spiritual experiences, but one of the truly powerful spiritual experiences is a oneness experience.
A spiritual oneness experience is essentially when someone feels interconnected to everything–they feel at one with everything. In the deepest kinds of oneness experiences, it’s not exactly experienced. Or rather, the person is so deeply surrendered that the “I” who perceives experiences is gone. So the idea of an experience doesn’t arise until the “I” returns again after the deep moment or moments of oneness. At this point, the ego says, “Hey, what was that?” and then the person realizes that they had a sense of total unity with life.
So yeah, this is a pretty significant moment.
Unlike awakening (which can have oneness experiences or not), this experience comes and goes–usually as much as the ego leaves and then returns. It tends to inspire a deep yearning towards spirituality. It’s that deep drive for the Divine, however, that is the great gift of a oneness experience or any spiritual experience.
Because without awakened energy pushing someone to transform, most individuals must develop a powerful dedication to let go of their ego. Otherwise, people tend to stay in their habits and ego patterns.
So while oneness experiences–like any experiences–come and go, the deeper opportunity is to be free of the ego and at peace with all of life’s experiences.
Non-attachment to the Spiritual Oneness Experience
Now, there’s a tricky part to this, and that’s if your ego liked this experience. If your ego likes this experience, it tends to want to have it come back. It gets attached to the experience.
When a person becomes attached to this or any other experience, they are already back on the road to suffering. Now they’re trying to make the experience come back, and usually, that means going back to whatever they did/were doing when they have the first one. This desire to replicate an enjoyable experience is understandable, but it is a form of desire and craving. That craving is inherently a rejection of where the person is now as the person hopes to recreate a past event.
But it was in the present moment that this reality of oneness was perceived. It was in the present moment that, for whatever reason, the person’s grasp on their identity and sense of separateness loosened and a little bit of light shone through. In that moment, they realized that they were one with everything.
Oneness and Giving up More of Yourself to the Divine
Understanding that We Are All God
Another way that people express the oneness experience is that they feel like they are God.
Now, what is God? For the sake of this blog post, think of God as oneness. God is the ocean. We are a droplet in that ocean. Understood in that light, we see that each individual is God, but…so is everyone and everything else. Nothing is left out.
This is a key point because some people get confused. They realize that they are God, but then that understanding becomes singular. It becomes, “I am God,” to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.
Then it gets worse. The person anoints themselves as God and potentially savior to other people. They believe that they now know “the one true way.” More misunderstandings follow.
Humility After Oneness
However, if someone is lucky, they turn to humility instead of aggrandizement. It really depends on the person’s ego. In humility, the person realizes that they are inherently and inextricably part of oneness. If the person is really lucky, they turn within towards their illusions and attachments instead of towards manipulating external situations to try and recreate their oneness experience. Illusions and attachments are what perpetuate the idea of separateness, and in dissolving those, greater depths of oneness are realized.
And it should be understood by anyone reading this blog that the initial experience or experiences of oneness are really as much as the person can perceive at the time. They are not the whole of spiritual oneness. Additionally, no human being can experience the totality of oneness. This is not what we aim to do on the path to spiritual freedom where we dissolve all attachments. Instead, we embrace our humanness and sincerely dedicate ourselves to dissolving our illusions to perceive life and reality as fully as we are able.
Spiritual Humility and Life Under God’s Grindstone
More Thoughts on Spiritual Oneness
Once again, whatever the experience of spiritual oneness was, it is over, and spiritual oneness is not an experience to be attained. Oneness is a reality that can be realized in multiple ways and at multiple depths as a person opens more fully to the truth. Spiritual inner work is employed as a method of helping to clear away attachments and come deeply into the realization that all is one and that we are totally free beings.
How Oneness and Duality Can Co-exist (recording)
Melting Invisible Issues and Moving Into Oneness
Losing a Sense of “I” and Individuality
(Updated 4/5/2020)
2 Comments
Many of us have had a brief absorption in universal unity, with no sense of separateness. Unless we were advanced in spirituality, or actively engaged on the mystical quest, the awe of oneness which had we felt was as inexplicable as it was profound. It was impossible to sustain it when we tried to understand it; sometimes it may even have been frightening. We had seemed to have lost hold of “reality.” We actually had a glimpse of true Reality, the nature of being itself.
It is quite an experience to have the ego separation drop away for a space. Thanks for the comment, Ron.