One

I've always been drawn to the concept of oneness, the idea that everyone and everything is just a small part of a greater whole that is bigger, more important and more incomprehensible than all of its parts.

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This simple conviction, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, has naturally guided me to the belief that capitalism and individualism are dead-ends, that they can only lead to the demise of human society. For me there's a big difference between seeing society as merely a collection of individuals doing their own thing, chasing after their own happiness, and a society in which each individual understands, truly and deeply understands that they're only one small part of something greater. On a practical level, in our age, this amounts to the difference between seeing taxation as theft and seeing it as a contribution paid for membership of society. In a world where all individuals play their own game, the whole is less than the sum of its parts; we wage wars, allow for the existence of abject poverty and destroy the planet in the name of amassing private wealth. That's the world we live in now. I often wonder what the world would look like if more people ascribed to the principle of non-duality or non-dualism, the belief that everything and everyone is part of the same whole.

Another way to come to the realization that everything is one, that everything is connected, is to realize that nothing can exist without its opposite, that we define things by their opposite, and that opposites are in fact part of the same continuum. Life and death are opposites, yet every atom in my body is not alive; only the whole of all the atoms in my body form a living thing. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Light and dark are opposites, but they can not exist without each other. No night without day, no life without death and no extreme poverty without extreme wealth. I remember this cartoon that showed two mothers, both holding their child by the hand waiting to cross the street. Across the street there was this beggar, and one mother said to her child: "If you don't study, you'll end up like him." The other mother understood that we're all in this world together and she said to her child: "If you study well, you'll be able to help build a better world for him."

Our extremely individualist and materialist society is, in my opinion, extremely unhealthy and we could do with some non-dualism. Instead of constantly pointing out how we're different from each other, it would serve us well to recognize all the ways we're exactly the same. We're all human beings. We all live on the same planet. We all have the capacity to experience joy, sadness, pain and bliss. And we all know that we're nothing without our fellow human beings. I'd like to invite you to watch the video linked below; it's a nice and easy introduction to the idea of non-duality by one of my favorite YouTubers. In it he quotes another favorite of mine, Alan Watts, a British writer and speaker known for interpreting and popularizing Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audience, and I'll leave you with that quote:

"So then, here's the drama. My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are that there is the central self, you can call it God, you can call it anything you like, and it's all of us. It's playing all the parts of all beings whatsoever everywhere and anywhere. And it's playing the game of hide-and-seek with itself. It gets lost, it gets involved in the farthest-out adventures, but in the end it always wakes up and comes back to itself. And when you're ready to wake up, you're going to wake up. And if you're not ready you're going to stay pretending that you're just 'poor little old me.'"

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