What if there’s only one, indivisible, one?

Have you ever considered that there may only be One? One reality, one thing, one singularity? Could there simply be one and not two?
Could we all be connected as components of that One?

Many saints and sages have touched this non-dual reality.
There is a diagnostic tool I use to assess my well being. When I catch myself splitting life into more than just that One, I know I am losing my way. When I speak of “us” and “them” instead of “we”, I know I am spiritually ill.

Let me explain.
Just as splitting the atom unleashes a force at once powerful and destructive so too, when I divide the oneness of things, conflict and destruction will follow.
Take good and evil for example. If I accept that all is one, then evil is a mere smudge on all that is good in me and the world.
When I split off that reality from one into two, then before long I see others manifesting all the evil and despise them, whilst I and “my people” are the pure, good and righteous ones.

Enemies are born from division.
Is this why one of humankind’s earliest prayers, recorded in the Hebrew scriptures declares, “Hear O Israel the Lord your God the Lord is ONE”?

It seems the more we focus on our unity rather than splitting, judging and labeling everything, the calmer and more integrated we become. We South Africans who invented the word “Apartheid” should know this.

As a geographical example ask how Africa was damaged by colonists who carved up the continent? The lines drawn on the map have become wounds in our African psyche.
In every realm, it seems that “One is the way, and the way is One”.
There aren’t two or three or ten thousand. In reality there is just the one whole, in whom we live and move and exist.

Our forefathers and mothers gave this One reality different names, Camata, Nkulunkulu, the Atman, God, Allah, Great Spirit, Mother Gaia. Not separate entities, merely cultural names for the unified reality. The sages say, “There are many different fingers that point at the moon but there is only one moon.”

Recently I was in conversation with a man whose wife died after fifty years of marriage. “I feel like half a person”, he grieved. I recalled how the Bible speaks about a man leaving “his father and mother to be joined to his wife, and the two become one”. Fifty years of marriage made my friend and his beloved a unit. No wonder he feels like half a person!

If it is true that all of life’s experiences are lessons of the Spirit, then marriage, and friendship, are great teachers.

If it is also true that there is only the One, then those things that lead us to unity like my friend’s marriage, are the blessings of God. Those dark moments that divide and split us are not the spirit of life, but rather the oppositional energy which brings death.
There is only this reality in its totality and unity.