Carl Sagan, Astrophysicist:

“We are all star stuff.”

Professor Brian Cox, Particle Physicist:

“Every atom of carbon, every living thing on the planet is produced in the heart of a dying star.”

Sergio Toporek, Artist:

The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star.”

Dr. J.S. Bell, Quantum Physicist:

“No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.”

Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist:

“Organisms can never be totally unrelated to one another, since it is all but certain that life as we know it originated only once on earth… Go backwards, no matter where you start, you end up celebrating the unity of life…”

The Beatles, Musicians:

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”

Russell Targ, Physicist and ESP researcher and Dr. Jane Katra:

“… connection has been demonstrated repeatedly on the microscopic quantum level in experiments where pairs of photons (quanta of light) are sent off in opposite directions at the speed of light, but retain a connection, even after traveling many kilometers, whereby a change in the polarity of one photon observed by a researcher in Basel causes a corresponding change in the other photon observed by a researcher in Zurich.”

Joanne Elizabeth Lauck, Author of The Voice of the Infinite in the Small:

“… small changes in dynamic systems produce changes of great magnitude… small events emerging out of this wholeness give rise to nonlocal events, because all is connected.”

Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist:

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

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Scientists and artists agree.  We are all one.  They just use different vocabulary.

In my tiny life, I have only found the experience of connectivity demonstrated twice. Once, when my father died in hospital across town from where I was working and I “felt” his death at the minute of his dying. I “knew” it. And the other, when my brother collapsed suddenly in Michigan from what was later determined to be lung cancer, and I lost my balance and fell simultaneously in New York City.

Of course, there are the little syncronicities: thinking of someone and then seeing them a few moments later or dear ones calling each other at the exact same minute, or saying the same thing at the same moment, thinking the same thoughts simultaneously, etc.

It is not just family and those close to us that are connected to one another in this life (and perhaps in previous lives), but all of life is tied to one another, born of a dying star, born of star-dust material. And yet so often we see the “other” as foreign.  As Einstein so eloquently said, this is the “optical delusion” of our consciousness.

We are all connected. Not by cell phones and computers and the social networks, but by the very building blocks that compose us. And, if we can rise above the everyday pettiness, a Herculean feat to be sure, and feel the one consciousness that flows through us all, we could tap into a limitless ocean of empathy, and a unity of being.