{"id":34158,"date":"2020-04-09T00:01:45","date_gmt":"2020-04-09T04:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themysticalunderground.com\/?p=34158"},"modified":"2020-05-21T19:49:46","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T23:49:46","slug":"oneness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themysticalunderground.com\/?p=34158","title":{"rendered":"Oneness"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the meditation I lead at the beginning of my yoga classes, I often teach the Hamsa mantra, an ancient practice that dates back at least a couple of thousand years. It\u2019s said that Buddha practiced the Hamsa mantra so I tell students that we\u2019re joining a long tradition of meditators when we do the chant. Hamsa is a Sanskrit term that means \u201cI am that,\u201d or \u201cI am all that is.\u201d Essentially, it means that we are all interconnected at a deeper level. In fact, the word \u2018yoga\u2019 in Sanskrit means union\u2014union of all beings.<\/p>\n

That oneness or interconnection of all things might sometimes be hard to grasp when our experiences in the everyday world seem to show just the opposite\u2014that a lot of things appear disconnected.<\/p>\n

Yet, this philosophy has been around a long time. One of the precepts of shamanism, which goes back tens of thousands of years and has been handed down by primitive cultures throughout the world, is that consciousness exists in all things, including rocks and trees, and everything is interconnected in a web of life. That\u2019s similar to Indra\u2019s Net in Hindu mythology. It\u2019s said that one tug on the god Indra\u2019s net ripples throughout the Universe, everything being interconnected. In the Western World, 2,000 years ago, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: \u201cEverything is connected and the web is holy.\u201d<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s an underlying principle of humanity, but how does it hold up in the world of science? Interestingly, that\u2019s the subject of an article here<\/a> in Scientific American<\/em> entitled, \u201cWhat Would Happen if Everyone Truly Believed that Everything is One.\u201d The sub-title goes on to say: \u00a0\u201cResearch suggests a belief in oneness has broad implications for psychological functioning and compassion for those outside of our immediate circle.\u201d<\/p>\n

The article cites a couple of studies on the subject of oneness conducted by Kate Diebels and Mark Leary. In their first study, they set out to find how many of us actually believe in the \u201coneness of all things.\u201d They found that only 20.3% of participants had thought about the oneness of all things “often” or “many times,\u201d while 25.9% of people “seldom” thought about the oneness of all things, and 12.5% of people “never” had thought about it.<\/p>\n

The researchers also created a 6-item “Belief in Oneness Scale” consisting of the following items:<\/p>\n