Hmm …

… Don't Make Me One with Everything - Scientific American Blog Network. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… psychologists Kate Diebels and Mark Leary … define oneness, among other ways, as the idea that “beneath surface appearances, everything is one,” and “the separation among individual things is an illusion.” Diebels and Leary found that 20 percent of their respondents have thought about oneness “often or many times,” and many report having spiritual experiences related to oneness.

My takeaway from the mystics is not that one becomes absorbed in all, but rather that each of us may come to experience how each participates in all that is. The notion that we are made in the image of God makes sense only if it is understood as accounting for the uniqueness of each of us, and that our uniqueness does not isolate us from the rest of being, but unites us to all of being.