Are we all one?

Watched bits and pieces. May or may not have gotten the point.
There is no doubt that we are all combinations of stuff that has the same cosmic origin. That is probably the reason that people consistently, throughout history, have tried to explain a sense that they have that they are connected to something outside of themselves. Many years ago, a high school buddy used to quote from “The Aquarian Conspiracy” and some of the quotes reflected these ideas. We thought he was kind of weird, but he is still one of my best friends. It may be true. But the problem is we really have no way to know it is true by our current epistemological standards. So all we can do is sort of imagine it. When I was in school, we would get high and somebody always started to to jabber about how, if you got small enough, you would not see divisions between what we perceive as discrete objects in reality. That all of reality is just a big cloud of matter and electromagnetic phenomena that has areas that are more dense than others. And that of course is correct.
But our particular consciousness gives us information about external reality as if it is clumped into discrete objects. Technology has allowed us to sort of make ourselves able to perceive reality from a different point of view, to be sure. And it is fascinating.
But in a pinch, you have to stick with what you know to be true with a safe level of certainty. Otherwise you are guessing, and unless you have to do it, guessing is risky when confronting the challenges of existence.
I do not know what to make about fear driving consciousness apart…I always was a slow study.
But unless people take these ideas and try to organize them into some weird political philosophy that results in a world dictatorship or something, I think it is a perfectly fine religion. You will probably see Sam Harris at church on Tuesday.

No.

No indeed.

Yes we are all pretty much the same even our sense of being unique is not unique as it is shared by everyone else. There are only so many elements that make up the material universe and only so many forms of energy and these can be reduced to simple particles such as protons and photons. If you peer behind life’s gaudy veil there is no this and that, no here and there and no before or after. Most of what we experience and fight over is simply an illusion but it seems quite real for all that. For that reason we should take some care over how we behave to others.

…Physics and psychology have damn near bugger all to do with each other. No, we do not affect the movement of celestial objects by feeling things. Get over yourself.
Balls of gas hurtling through space don’t give a shit how scared you are. They keep moving because they have momentum and space is empty.

Yes dear.
It’s just a ride…..

Haha, just watching the second video, I seen the clip of Jim Carey, I can’t be certain, because I haven’t spoken to him, but I imagine that the experience he’s describing was brought on by DMT.

Or some form of medication I mean, meditation.

@josie The weakness of the clips I posted it that we have not yet proven string theory to be true. It is incredibly elegant mathematically, but when you get down to a theory of everything, you must totally define it before you can predict anything with it and thus begin to verify it by the scientific method. But we are moving ever closer to doing that. We will have an answer, and it almost certainly will shatter our material view of the cosmos, because we already know that almost all the solid mater around us, including our own bodies and brains, are empty space.

@ragingloli & @whitenoise Thanks for weighing in.

@flutherother If there is a grand unification law (which there has to be) then all is one. That;‘s inescapable.

@Fyrius Proof, please.

@Pazza And as carnival rides go, it on Hell of a compelling one. :-)

@ETpro – I’m not yet convinced that anything exists outside of a singularity, my own personal layman’s opinion is that space and time are both just perceptions.

As for fear, there is a very good argument that fear drives society as a whole, and that the way the whole system is set up, the PTB needs everyone to be held in fear to maintain their control.

I’m with Mr. Hicks on that one, I think everyday we have a choice between fear and love, and fear being the prime driving force of society drives people away from each other into a sort of ‘it’s me or him’ dance, or, ‘if I don’t get it, he will, and I’ll be left with nothing’ dance.

So if people are conscious, and fear drives people to become separatist, then you could say that fear drives consciousness apart.

Science has traditionally followed a reductionist point of view, but recently the holistic paradigm has yielded some very interesting results. For example, it is a gross oversimplification to interpret Darwin as survival of the fittest. Within a species, organisms may act for the benefit of the social good. Selection can work on both group and individual levels. There are also interesting relationships between species. Removing a predator from an ecosystem may wreak havoc on its former prey. Gaia theory addresses the relationships between organic and inorganic realms.

I would not go so far as to say that we are all one or that there is a cosmic consciousness, but something is lost in talking about individuals in isolation. To study in great detail a single ant or bee is not to know anything about ant colonies or beehives. We are all parts of larger things (and I mean this in a very physical sense), which are in turn parts of still larger things, wheels within wheels.

@ETpro
Hold it, now, you’re the one who has something to prove. You’re the one touting emotional telekinesis.

But very well, let’s do an experiment. You round up everyone you can convince to help, and I’ll throw a pie at your face while you all imagine something really scary.
If six billion tiny xenophobic humans can move the freaking stars, then a few dozen scaredy-pants should be enough to cancel the momentum of just one thrown pie.

If phobias can only supposedly move the thing they’re scared of, we could repeat the experiment with a group of queasy arachnophobes and a spider. That might be somewhat mean, though. We should buy them a pie afterwards to make up for it. One without your face print in it, I mean.

And if it turns out that it doesn’t make a difference, can we please stop trying to shoehorn magical thinking into legitimate scientific issues?

@Pazza It could well be that we are still in a singularity. Any thoughts on how science might test that hypothesis or what we could predict then observe, given the difficulty in observing a singularity and the quantum effect of observation itself?

@LostInParadise Excellent points on the inter-relatedness of life and even inorganic matter. That’s something Dr. Suzanne Simard covers in the Mother Tree link in the OP.

@Fyrius Ha! I thought you would argue that the burden of proof is mine, but I assert that I am only asking a question, not preaching a gospel. I’ve had no grand epiphany revealing my oneness with you and pies in the face. I am up for the pie experiment though. I’m not unlike Will Rogers in that I’ve never a pie I didn’t like.

The whole problem with the oneness postulate is that it is so extremely difficult to test. If we create the reality we sense, then our expectations would be met by each of your thought experiments, would they not? Yet it is clear to me that there is a Grand Unified Theory (GUT). I cannot offer a mathematical proof there is, but it seems very consistent with the way things work. It is, after all, where the reductionist approach you seem so willing to embrace should eventually lead, no?

This isn’t just idle daydreaming, though. While direct observation of unified gauge symmetry, should it exist, is far beyond the reach of energy levels we can produce today, there are very serious physicists and mathematicians at work using our largest colliders to search for peripheral effects in proton decay, dipole moments of other particles, and properties of neutrinos that might indicate that some version of unified gauge symmetry does exist. Hopefully, if and when that is done, we will be able to sort out which of the competing GUT models, if any, holds water. Till then, it’s fun to play what if. At least, it is in my reality, which of course, if I am right, doesn’t really exist,

I dunno. I was for the moment limiting myself to the xenophobia-induced expanding universe conjecture, without addressing the “all is one” stuff.

To briefly turn to that part: spiritual mumbo jumbo aside, whether “all is one” or “all is individual bits of stuff” is a matter of where you imagine the boundaries between things – whether this bunch of molecules belong with that bunch of molecules, or not – so you’re free to just forget the boundaries for a moment and see the whole world as just a big complicated lump of stuff. I don’t know if that makes me “one with” you, but it would mean – in somewhat less vague language, if I may say so – that my body and your body are part of the same lump of stuff. (Albeit still two parts that are roughly a quarter of a planet apart.)
This isn’t hard to test, it’s just not the sort of thing that tests apply to. It can’t be true or false.

But make no mistake – that doesn’t mean that, since we’re “all part of the same whole”, that that whole must somehow be a consistent system where things work together towards a shared goal. That sounds like it’s implied by “all is one”, and if you’re not careful that idea might sneak along into your mind without you even noticing it didn’t buy a ticket. But it’s a completely separate assertion, and it’s one that definitely isn’t justified by what we know about the world. It’s still the same chaotic mess, with just as much discord and strife, imagined boundaries or no imagined boundaries.

As a side note that should go without saying, there are things that are a matter of perception, and things that aren’t. I do still believe everyone is subject to the same external reality no matter how they individually experience it.
If I could create my own reality by perceiving things differently, I would have magical powers and a light sabre. And I could eat a million cookies without having to buy any or getting chubby. Alas, these things are not just in my head.

@Fyrius Well said, my able adversary. Your world is real to you, and mine certainly seems to me to be both real and separate from yours.

If your world really is separate from mine, then it’s amazing that we can still communicate. There has to be a fair amount of overlap, at least. ;)

@ETpro – Don’t think we’ll ever be able to conclusively prove we are/were living in a singularity, in my mind, there is only one, and it is everything, the reason I use the term singularity is because I can’t get my head around distance.

The analogy I have in my head goes as follows.

Say you want to travel from A to B, and you give that distance a number say 1 meter.
Now, so far as I can tell, you can cut this into an infinite number of slices.
So you start to slice, and as you slice, you start to stack up the slices in a neat little pile, one on top of the other. Obviously, the stack never gets any higher, since every slice is infinitely thin. Now, if you wanted to travel along this distance from A to B, you would have to pass through each of the slices to get from one end to the other, but as you step from one slice to the next, to the next and so on, your not getting anywhere. So I can’t see how this universe has volume as we perceive it.

Now, some may argue that you can’t slice this distance into an infinite number, because you would stop at the planck length. Well fine, but how do we know for sure that the planck length has a length? Can we prove it? If the planck length is zero, so is everything else. Also since size is relative, if there was only one fundamental particle in the universe with planck length, how would you measure it? how big would it be? you would need something to compare it to, since all seems to be ‘one’ there can only be one cosmos, one reality with only a perceived volume.

In any case, I see space as a field of energy, and a particle as a vortex in that space, the most basic of these vortices as a torus, I see charge as one vortex spinning in one direction, and another spinning in the opposite, I see the particle zoo as ‘broken’ or ‘smashed’ vortices, as, as far as I am aware, these particles don’t last long, and I see radio waves as pressure waves traveling through this field.

Example of a pressure wave
Example of a torus vortex

In my mind, this explains both gravity and mass, gravity would be caused by a density variation in the field, where particles are pushed into lower densities of the spacial field, making the observable effect of gravity a push not a pull, mass is brought on by the gyroscopic effect because the energy spinning in the vortex resists any external forces which try and send it on a different path. Also the acceleration observed due to gravity, as any spacial density change would be a gradient.

It would also explain capillary action, why water is seemingly sucked up by a rag or paper towel, as the spaces between the fibers of the paper contain areas of slightly less dense space, the slightly higher density space outside the paper towel pushes the water up into this less dense space.

If a particle is indeed a vortex manifest from space, or the spacial energy field, or the ‘source field’ as I’ve recent heard it called, then there is no separation from the field and the particle they are one in the same as would all the other particles, hence ‘we are all one’.

(I could be wrong of course…....)

I think the only way to experience/observe the ‘one-ness’ of the universe would be to go on a trip of sorts. People have used psychedelics for millennia, more recently people are reporting that dimethylamylamine sends the ‘tripper’ to a place where they interact with entites and feel ‘one with the universe’, Jill Bolte Taylor did a TED talk to share her experience of ‘one-ness’ through a stroke, was she truly ‘one with all’ or was it just a side effect of the miss-firing of her brain? She doesn’t seem to think so. I guess we’ll never know unless we experience it for ourselves.

Anyway, that’s the universe according to Pazza (a mildly deranged mechanical engineer)

Your argument against volume reminds me of Zeno’s paradox The way to resolve the paradox is through calculus. Traveling at constant speed, an infinitesimally small distance can be traversed in an infinitesimally small amount of time. Conversely, in any finite amount of time there will be travel through a finite distance. Unless you are going to freeze time, you have to allow for travel.

@Pazza I have the same difficulty as you in imagining what distance really is. It is a fundamental question as this article describes.

The weirdness of quantum mechanics has inspired a lot of New Age wackiness. I found a reference to this book, which promises to be rather amusing. Quantum entanglement has been used to posit instantaneous communication, which would support the idea of us all being one. However, instantaneous communication is not possible

Confused….

“Say you agree to send out two beams of light to your two friends who live on opposite sides of the galaxy (you live in the middle). Ahead of time you tell them that if one of the beams of light is red the other will be blue. So you send the blue beam to your friend on one side and immediately she knows that your other friend is recieving a red beam at the same time. Aha! You say, my friends have now communicated at a speed faster than the speed of light and violated relativity, but no real information has been passed between them.”

Why not just send one beam to one friend and switch it on and of really quickly?

As for calculus, ‘not a clue…..’, (no brain for math). Although, I’m not convinced that time isn’t just a perception either, since distance and velocity are required for time, and time and velocity for distance, these don’t make any sense to me in a singularity. But then again, in a dream, none of these exist either, yet you still perceive all three in a dream?

Also, if we do live in a singularity, with no volume and no time then everything that has, does, and will exist all exist in the same instant, which is now.

One other analogy that popped into my head about time, or our perception thereof, goes like this:

Time is always described as linear, and so can be described as a line, well, if you looped this line into a circle, then the past becomes the present, becomes the future, which runs over and erases the past and so on. If you then reduce the diameter of the circle until it has a diameter of zero, then again, past present and future become one in the same instant, which is now.

So if everything exists in a singularity, then everything is one, there is no separation other than that which we perceive, and if everything is one, then it follows in my mind, there can only be one singularity.

Maybe the ‘big bang’ was a manifestation of what you could describe as the first perception.

Like the universe suddenly said, “HOLY SHIT, I’M HERE!?!”

@Pazza We do know the distance of one Planck length, though. So your slices have a finite lower limit. Therefore, @LostInParadise is spot-on in stating that the solution to Zeno’s Paradox also erases the supposed paradox of traveling the distance of a one-meter rod sliced into many pieces. Nonetheless, I love your idea about the Big Bang. :-)

@flutherother Thanks for the link to the Scientific American article. Very interesting.

@LostInParadise I bet that if you don’t let it seduce you, that book is fun reading.

@ETpro – Is there anything out there like a video or a talk that can explain in lay-mans terms how we arrive at the planck length? Or how we measure it? Or is it just math based?

Also this is a very interesting lecture by some guy I’ve never come across before called Nassim Haramein. I am starting to find geometry fascinating.

One of the other things I can’t get my head around is why there are eight notes in an octave, there may be a very simple explanation of which I’m not aware of, but what I find fascinating is that if you take a circle of diameter 1, place another circle next to it, and array it around the first, you get six circles around the perimeter and one in the middle which totals 7. In octaves, you have seven notes and the 8th is twice the frequency of the first. Now back to the circles, if you take a new circle with a diameter of twice that of the first (2), place its centre on the original circles centre, its perimeter runs through the centre of the 6 diameter ‘1’ circles around the perimeter of the first central circle.

Whether this is significant or not I have no idea, but it kind of reminds me of the ‘as above, so below’ expression.

Interestingly with regards to the lecture, people who use psychedelics like DMT always describe seeing abstract geometric patterns, and also describe that illusive ‘one-ness’ feeling.

Geometry, fractals, and how maths seem to inform everything in the Universe is truly fascinating. For instance, did you know pineapples have sections that form spirals running in 3 directions, and the spirals are almost always a set of Fibonacci Numbers.

Here’s the best layman’s explanation I could find of the Planck Length and how Max Planck derived it. The fact the universe is wired up with physical constants is why we find so many natural phenomena falling into line with maths, whether they be fractals, pineapples or octaves and circles.

Finally, here’s a video that helps us get our human understanding around the range of scales around us, from the Planck Length up to the size of the known Universe