All Is One: Cliché or the Only Thing That’s Actually True?
Why everything from trauma therapy to quantum physics keeps pointing to unity.
Separation is useful, but not ultimate.
Diversity is real, but not division.
The Many arise from the One, and the One expresses itself as the Many.
The phrase “All is One” can sound simplistic or mystical at first glance. But when we look through various lenses—biology, psychology, physics, spirituality, poetry, ecology, even mathematics—a remarkable pattern emerges: again and again, the deepest truths point toward interconnectedness, coherence, and unity. Let’s take a closer look.
Biology
Biology teaches us that all life is intimately connected through the great tree of evolution. Every living organism on Earth shares a common ancestor. Our DNA is 98.8% identical to that of chimpanzees, and even bacteria and humans share essential strands of genetic code. The cycle of life (breathing oxygen exhaled by trees, eating food nourished by soil) makes us part of one vast biological web. The same carbon atoms cycle through plants, animals, oceans, and stars. We are not isolated beings, but differentiated expressions of the same living tapestry. Life isn’t separate species but one single organism with many faces.
Psychology
Psychologically, the boundaries between self and other are far more porous than we imagine. Mirror neurons fire when we see another in pain or joy, suggesting that empathy is not just a learned behaviour, it’s embedded in our nervous system. Carl Jung spoke of the collective unconscious, a shared psychic field underlying personal experience. In trauma therapy and group dynamics, the emerging field of interpersonal neurobiology shows that our minds are co-regulating; your calm can soothe my panic, your presence can anchor my disorientation. We are psychologically entangled. What touches you, touches me.
Physics
Modern physics throws a wrench into any firm belief in separateness. Quantum entanglement reveals that particles, once connected, can influence each other instantly across vast distances, as though space itself is an illusion. Time and space lose their solidity at the quantum level. The universe began as a single point of infinite density, the Big Bang, which means everything, from the farthest galaxy to the cells in your hand, is made of the same original stuff. As physicist David Bohm proposed, what we perceive as distinct parts are actually enfolded aspects of a deeper, undivided whole.
Spirituality
Spiritual traditions across cultures have long pointed to the illusion of separation. In Advaita Vedanta and other nondual paths, the self and the world are not-two (a-dvaita). The drop of water realises it was never apart from the ocean. Mystics do not believe in unity, they experience it. In this view, distinctions between knower, known, and knowing dissolve. What remains is pure presence: consciousness not confined to any one body or identity. “All is One” is not dogma; it is recognition.
Poetry
Poetry does not argue for oneness, it reveals it, through metaphor, rhythm, and resonance. Walt Whitman once wrote:
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
Poets notice the sacred embedded in the ordinary. A falling leaf carries the story of its tree, the tree carries the soil, the soil carries the stars. A single kiss may carry the ache of generations. A poem sees that each part contains the Whole. Language fails the intellect here, but the heart knows what it means.
Ecology
Ecology is the study of relationship. It reminds us that nothing, no creature, no system, exists in isolation. The health of a rainforest depends on fungi. A coastline’s resilience relies on the roots of mangroves. Humans depend on pollinators, oceans, microbes, and each other. Yet we have built a civilisation on the myth of separateness. That myth is killing the biosphere. To remember that we are the Earth, not owners, not observers, but one living expression of it, is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity for survival.
Social Justice
Much injustice arises from the illusion of division, us versus them, worthy versus unworthy. Systems of oppression are built on the premise of separation. But movements rooted in love and solidarity remind us that liberation is never individual, it is shared. As Martin Luther King Jr. said:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere… We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
“All is One” becomes an ethical imperative. When we harm the Other, we harm the Self.
Mathematics
Even mathematics, the most abstract of human tools, points toward unity. Systems theory and fractals reveal recurring patterns at every scale of reality. The Mandelbrot set mirrors itself endlessly. In set theory, the universal set contains all others. Behind multiplicity lies a hidden coherence. Unity within diversity is not just philosophical, it’s mathematical.
In the End
“All is One” isn’t a slogan or spiritual fluff. It’s a cross-disciplinary truth glimpsed through the microscope, the telescope, the soul, and the poem.
Separation is a useful lens. But it’s not the final truth.
Diversity is beautiful and real. But division is illusion.
The Many arise from the One, and the One dances through the Many.