Are we separate from God?

As I wrote in the chapter 3 of book Love and Survival, the vision of unity consciousness and oneness is found in virtually all cultures and all religions. God or the Self is described as omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. As described in the Old Testament, "The Lord is One." If God is everywhere, omnipresent, One, then we are not separate from God.

What we experience as different names and forms is God or the Self in varying disguises, manifesting in different ways. All divisions are man-made. The word yoga is Sanskrit for "union." A central precept in Hinduism is "Thou art that. . .. The universe is nothing but Brahman." According to Jesus, "The kingdom of God is within you." Buddha taught, "You are all Buddhas. There is nothing that you need to achieve. Just open your eyes." The Arabian prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam, wrote, "Wherever you turn is God's face .... Whoever knows himself knows God." Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, wrote, "The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the [separate] self."

The writer Aldous Huxley called this the "perennial philosophy." This vision is at the heart of compassion. From this perspective, "Love your neighbor as your Self" is a statement of fact, of what is, rather than a commandment. For those who may not yet realize this truth, this commandment is also a signpost pointing the way to a path that can help them experience the Self. As written in the Upanishads over 2,500 years ago (translated by the poet W. B. Yeats and others):

That is perfect. This is perfect. Perfect comes from perfect. Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect.

May peace and peace and peace be everywhere.

The Self is everywhere , without a body, without a shape, whole, pure, wise, all knowing, far shining, self-depending, all transcending; in the eternal procession assigning to every period its proper duty.

This experience is sometimes described as Oneness or at other times as complete emptiness, void; more precisely, as both. This paradox - everything and nothing - is at the heart of the transcendent experience, "an immediate, nondual insight that transcends conceptualization," for it is our concepts of how we think things are that often keep us from seeing and experiencing how they really are.