What's the difference between unity and Oneness? Would you use these two terms interchangeably? I'm not a native speaker of English. There's only one word for both in my mother tongue, but I love having the choice in English. To me 'unity' suggests harmony and a very strong bond, whereas 'Oneness' is conscious identity. A marriage, for example, could be a long-lasting and fulfilling unity of two people without the epiphany of eternal Oneness ever reaching them. But I could be wrong. I've googled both words and found some articles on Christian blogs about the differences. According to them, Oneness is reserved for Oneness with God. Although I'm not a Christian, I would agree that Oneness is ultimately identity with the One. However, I believe that we can find this identity with, or rather IN, each other and don’t need to have a preconceived notion of God to do so. Let me know your thoughts! #spirituality#love#oneness#unity#nonduality@philosophy@spirituality
@cp@mkmiller63@philosophy@spirituality Great article! I'm not a Christian but I agree with the threefold nature of the One: 1. Father: The will and creative force behind everything that exists (the universe's desire and capacity to be, so to speak), 2. Son: Human representations or rather approximations (!) of Oneness, that is humans who are realising their true, divine nature. 3. Holy Spirit: The subtle creative energy that pervades and powers us all. I would personally describe it as 'matter before materialisation'. Don't know if this makes sense. Again, I am not a Christian and I don't mean to offend anyone with such un-Christian definitions!
@Mattthias@philosophy@spirituality Yeah, I considered that when I wrote my first drafts. The problem is when I hear/read 'nonduality' I automatically think Advaita Vedanta and I need a more culturally neutral term. (Just a personal thing, I'm sure others don't necessarily hear/read it like that. 🙂)
As an English speaker, oneness feels like a made up word.
From a religious / philosophical / scientific perspective what it means to be 'the same' is completely non intuitive and nearly impossible to define outside specific contexts. Even within a context like Christianity your millage will vary depending on who is doing the writing. So i treat it like a jargon term, any use that isn't paired with a definition is just spiritual nonsense.
@RyanChartier@philosophy@spirituality Ah, thanks, that's helpful! In German (my native language) both unity and oneness translate into 'Einheit', and as you might know or be able to tell, Einheit is a direct translation of oneness, so maybe I'm biased. I have personally been using Oneness (capitalised) to talk about exactly that unintuitive sense of being identical with someone or something that the word unity doesn't quite seem to describe, imho. Unity sounds more like union to me. So I guess I'll have to accept that it might sound made up or jargony to some. 🙂
Your intuition is correct unity and union are the same word. They imply a coming together of separate parts for a common purpose. The problem is that the most common need for a word representing a stronger sense of sameness are generally religious people. So words like oneness come of as religious nonsense to those who lean atheistic or outright anti-religious.
@theoneintheother@philosophy@spirituality I've had enough negative experiences with religious language that I'm ready to be done. The abuse it enables by linguistic isolation, nah.
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