I saw a quote from Jac O’Keefe saying “the oneness state is….”. while others emphasize that oneness is not a state.
So is oneness a state?
As usual, the answer may be no, yes, and it depends.
ONENESS INHERENT IN REALITY
Most fundamentally, oneness seems inherent in reality and not a state.
The physical universe is a seamless system evolving into everything within this universe, including us and our life and experiences. As Carl Sagan said, we are the local eyes, ears, thoughts, and feelings of the universe.
And if we look with some sincerity in our own first-person experience, we may find we are oneness.
We may find that our more fundamental nature is capacity for all our experiences – for the world, this human self, and anything else. And that we are what our experiences happen within and as.
The world, to us, is one. We may not notice it, but that’s our nature whether we notice or not.
So in these ways, oneness is not a state. It’s inherent in the universe, and it’s inherent in our more fundamental nature.
ONENESS AS A STATE
We can also see oneness as a state.
When we notice our more fundamental nature, it’s a state of noticing. It’s a state of oneness noticing itself.
Within this noticing, we notice we are capacity for time and space, and time and space happen within and as what we are. So here, the oneness noticing doesn’t seem like a state. A state happens within time, and time happens within what we are.
And yet, from the perspective of time, noticing oneness – or oneness noticing itself – can certainly be a state. It’s something that can come and go. It can come and go and come again over years and decades. When we notice more easily, the noticing will also come and go to some extent depending on where we have our attention.
ONENESS AS A STATE AND NOT
Oneness is inherent in reality and what we are.
When oneness notices itself, it recognizes that time and states happen within and as oneness. So here too, we find that oneness is not a state.
And from the perspective of time, noticing oneness can certainly be a state. We can shift into oneness states for a while, then shift out of it, and then back into it differently, and so on. And when we shift out of it, it’s an invitation to notice our remaining unquestioned beliefs and identifications.