The number one is a unique number. Let me count the ways. I guess I’ll start at one.
1. One is the only number that when multiplied by itself remains itself.
2. One is also the only number that when divided by itself that remains itself.
3. One is also the only number whose square root is itself.
The square root of nine is three, the square root of four is two, but the square root of one is one. Always has been, always will be.
Champion athletes like to lift their pointer finger and declare that, “We’re number one!” It implies, of course, that the team they vanquished is number two, a loser. Imagine how far our culture will evolve when we can move past win/lose scenarios to win/win scenarios on a regular basis. In those days the champion’s expression might get replaced by “We’re all one.”
The number one points to a higher reality. In marriage, even the law holds that two become one. In Christianity three – God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit – somehow become one. Ditto in Hinduism, where the one God has three aspects – creator, preserver, and destroyer.
On a less spiritual level, the colonies, which defeated the British on our shores, came to together in 1789 to create the United States. The 28 countries that linked up on another continent formed the European Union in 1993. In both cases, both groups realized the power that comes when many entities merge to become one.
As a boy, I enjoyed a spectacular movie in spectacular Cinemascope, “How the West Was Won.” As an adult I came to understand the phenomenon how the East is One. At least in so many parts of India, Japan and China, for example, spiritual teachings speak of a Oneness out of which all has emerged, and into which all evolves and returns. Moreover, all diversity is seen to be part of that same Oneness. Below are several quotes about oneness; it’s hard to find quotes about twoness, with the exception of this comic gem from Woody Allen: “Students achieving oneness will move ahead to twoness.”
From the Vedantic wisdom tradition of India, Swami Vi vekananda said: “All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.” In the “Bhagavad Gita,” the handbook of Yoga from that same tradition, we read Krishna saying in chapter nine, verses 16-19, “I am the ritual action, I am the sacrifice, I am the ancestral oblation, I am the sacred hymn, I am also the melted butter, I am the fire and I am the offering. I am immortality and also death, I am being as well as non-being…” From the Sufi tradition of the Middle East, the fabulous mystical poet Rumi said, “I am a lover of the universal and the universal lover. I am you in love with yourself.”
From the poetic tradition of America, Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself:” “I am the clock myself.”
From the rock ‘n roll tradition, the Beatles sang in “I am the Walrus,” “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
English-born philosopher and popularize of Zen, Alan Watts wrote, “You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.”
From the Islamic tradition, Ibn Arabi wrote, “I belong to God, as has often been shown; yet I also belong to myself. He becomes himself through me. I live in him, and I live in myself. I have two aspects, he and I, divine and human. But he is not I, and I am not he. My actions are the theatre in which he expresses himself; to him I am a vessel.”
Even scientists have glimpsed that oneness; Albert Einstein wrote, “At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet gazing in amazement at the cold and yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable. Life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor eternity, only being.”
Even an aviator/adventurer such as Charles Lindberg, the first man to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, felt it, writing in his autobiography: “Watching satellites and staring at the stars, I seemed to lose contact with my earth and body and to spread out through the cosmos by means of an awareness that permeates both space and life – as though I were expanding from a condensation of awareness previously selected and restricted to the biological matter that was myself.”
