Oneness is different from merging. You don’t have to merge with something. This is a realization of the pre-existing unity of all things. You don’t lose the transcendent quality; you just gain the whole universe along with it.
– Adyashanti
People have all sorts of ideas about oneness or awakening: it’s about bliss or ecstasy (it’s a shift in paradigm, or simply a noticing, more than anything else), it gives lasting happiness (there is a conscious allowing of any emotion and experience, an alignment with the allowing that’s already there), it’s a me or I merging with something (it’s an awakening out of identification with the images of me and I), it will solve my problems (the human situation doesn’t necessarily change), it’s permanent (permanency is a story about a future), it’s something special (it’s just what’s already here noticing itself), it will heal wounds and eliminate beliefs (wounds will still surface, beliefs may even surface with an invitation for inquiry), it’s an end point (it’s equally or more true that it’s a continuation, and a beginning), it’s out there in others, past or future (it’s a projection of what’s already here), it means there is special knowledge (there may be a knowing of what we are – that which all experience, including identifications and images of me and I, happens within and as – but that’s it), there is an absence of bias (our ordinary earthly, human, cultural and individual biases are still there, and they may be recognized or not), people who awaken become teachers and make good teachers (it seems as or more likely that the vast majority does not take a public/traditional teaching role, and having the skills of a good teacher is not automatic).
I have these ideas too, otherwise I wouldn’t recognize them or be able to write them down, so I can take each of these to inquiry and see what I find.