Part One — We Are All One

You are not a drop in the ocean — you are the entire ocean, in one drop.

Before anything else, you have to get this one idea into your bones, because everything else in this book grows from it. We are all one. Not as a nice saying. As a plain fact.

Go back far enough — a billion years, more — and trace your family tree all the way down. Your parents, their parents, back and back and back. Keep going. Eventually you reach a point where my ancestors and your ancestors are the same ancestors. Go back further and we are not even people yet, we are simply life, and further still and we are all just particles from the same source. So when you really look at it, you and I were one thing to begin with. Everything you see — every person, every animal, every tree, the ocean, the stranger who annoyed you today — is just a split, a branch, of that same original one. We only look separate. Underneath, we never stopped being the same thing.

lim_{g → ∞} sources(g) = 1

Trace the branches back far enough and every separate line collapses into a single source.

Once you feel this — really feel it — everything changes. Because if we are all one, then:

When you hurt another person, you are hurting yourself. The anger you throw at someone is a hand slapping its own face. This is why resentment poisons the one who carries it — there was never anyone else there to poison.
When you help another person, you are helping yourself. Kindness is not a sacrifice. It is the left hand helping the right.
There is nothing to compete over and no one to look down on. Judging another person is just one wave in the ocean sneering at another wave. It makes no sense once you see the water underneath.

You do not need a billion years to feel it, either. Think of the last time you snapped at someone you love — a partner, a parent, your child — over something small. Who actually carried the bad feeling for the rest of the day? You did. The anger you threw out came straight back into your own chest. That is oneness, in the smallest, most ordinary moment. And the reverse is just as true: hold a door for a stranger, let a tired driver merge, and notice the small warmth that rises in you. You were not being kind to them. You were being kind to yourself wearing another face.

This is the deepest reason behind everything else I believe. Why respect others? Because they are you. Why forgive? Because the grudge is against yourself. Why give? Because there is no real line between you and the person you are giving to. Oneness is the root. The rest of this book is the tree.

As the line often attributed to Rumi puts it, you are not a drop in the ocean — you are the entire ocean, in one drop. So treat everyone and everything as if it were you. Far enough back, it was — and it still is.