Ending the Feeling of Separation. Experience Oneness
Watch on YouTube [https://youtu.be/V2uRK6LoTqw]
Today’s post is a bit of a departure from what I’ve been posting lately, which has been mostly walk-and-talks with friends and acquaintances in nature.
For a number of years now I have been occasionally posting on Insight Timer [https://insighttimer.com/rodjanz], a meditation app used by millions of people around the world. For most of my life I have felt led to learn to pray and meditate, and this app has been really helpful to me as I’ve tried to do that.
I also really enjoy creating meditations and sharing them with others. I know it’s a bit of an unusual thing, but I genuinely enjoy it, and Insight Timer has become a creative outlet of sorts for me.
All that to say, today’s post is about a reflection I put together for the app, and you can expect more of this type of post in the future. The reflection I’ve attached is based on two unusual spiritual experiences I had (aren’t they all unusual?). The first one I share in the reflection, and the other I’ll share with you below.
The first experience happened on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where I used to work. I was walking down the street when someone who was clearly very drunk nearly stumbled into me at 9:00 in the morning. It was a surreal moment, because instead of judging that person, my almost immediate response was, "I'm just like him.” I might not be drunk at 9 AM, but I have my own addictions. Mine are a little less obvious to some, but I have them nonetheless. Instead of feeling separate from this person, I felt a strange sense of similarity, a recognition that we weren’t so different.
That phrase, by the way, just like me, is a really helpful one when it comes to addressing our tendency toward judgment.
I believe we’re all addicts to some degree, whether we realize it or not. We all do things to numb or medicate the pain we feel and the trauma we’ve experienced. We all suffer. We all have pain. And we’re all trying to cope. But it’s not all doom and gloom. It’s also our nature to experience happiness, and we all know what joy feels like.
That encounter was eye-opening. In that moment I felt a sense of oneness with that individual, and through him, with all of humanity. We all suffer and we all experience joy. We’re human. We all do our best and cope in the ways we know how, some healthy, some not.
Since I’m on the subject, I want to mention that meditation is one of the things that has genuinely helped me deal with addiction. One of the steps in recovery is about improving our conscious contact with God, and it has helped me enormously.
So this meditation is partly born out of meeting that person on the street and my unexpected reaction of oneness.
The other experience, which I don’t mention in the reflection, happened when I was praying outside, probably about 20 years ago. I was standing beside a pond near the Houston Trailhead in Langley, BC, a place I used to visit regularly to pray and meditate. On this particular day I decided to simply stand and be still. Almost immediately I saw a small flash out of the corner of my eye, and what followed I can only describe as an overwhelming feeling that everything was connected. I didn’t have language for it at the time, so I simply called it my “oneness experience.”
Interestingly, when I got back to the trail, I heard the words in my mind: Be still and know that I am God, from Psalm 46. It was a God moment. My knees buckled and I nearly fell over. That experience is one I’ve been unpacking ever since, and I think I will be for the rest of my life. The idea that all things are connected was new to me then, and I still believe it’s a mystery, perhaps even a gift given to me by God or the universe to contemplate for a lifetime. I am so grateful for this gift.
The fruit of that experience is this: when I remind myself that all things are connected and simply say the word one, I feel a deep sense of connection with whoever I’m with, and all judgment immediately falls away, even in traffic! Some contemplative teachers have said that this realization of oneness is love. Having practiced it and experienced it, I have to agree. As judgment diminishes, it really does feel like a form of love.
If you watch the video or listen to the audio, please let me know what you think. The video has some graphics that I hope will add to the experience. I’m not really interested in theological debate, but I would love to hear your thoughts about your own experiences with awareness and what comes up for you when you engage with the reflection.
May you experience what it feels like to be connected to all things. May that knowledge enrich your life, as judgment diminishes and you discover a dimension of love.
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