"You are unique. You are one of a kind. No one in the whole world in all of history will ever be like you." Many people have heard something along these lines at some point in their lives.
But how true is it? I'm about to argue, to an extent, that all of us are not as unique as we think.
Sounds negative, because we fear loss of identity. Without identity, who are we? We cease to exist in a sense..
For us all to be molecules making up the greater whole is not a bad thing, however, once you get your mind around it. With no identity, we are all one, there is no 'aloneness.' And there is no need to fight over details like creed, race, gender, sexual orientation, religious or spiritual beliefs, et al.
What I'm getting towards is that the material world and we as physical people do not matter as much in the Ultimate. In day to day life in the physical sense, yes, the world is real, the inhabitants are real...we need to eat and do all manners of other things to survive. Beyond that...we are vessels for the abstract, nothing more.
Say you hate someone. You don't hate them, you hate what they do. If you never met them in your life..just another stranger in the miasma of others wandering the street, and then you crossed paths with them but they did you no wrong, you wouldn't hate them. Yet, same person right?
Same thing with love. If you have a dear lover, and they hit their head or become possessed or they start popping strong mind altering drugs and commit truly wicked acts, it's still them right? Maybe? Further, if your mind were to be wiped of all the better memories of when they weren't wicked...you would see them simply as a wicked stranger. The body..a shell. Remember the Matrix? If you have seen this movie, any unsuspecting person could get taken over by an outside force, an agent, it wouldn't be 'them' anymore.
Some of us are more prone to influence of one kind or another...this is analogous to saying certain clay jars are shaped differently and are more inclined to one purpose over another. Yet we all have the capacity to hold lifesaving water or sheer poison. We are all born empty, and I suppose we die empty. Full circle. I bet even Hitler was innocent and pure at least when he was first born. Mother Theresa could've been 'worked over' to the point where she was a vindictive monster. There are good gateways and bad gateways, we must be alert to their influence.
This is why it is beneficial to hate the 'sin and not the sinner' as the expression goes. Or know if we love someone, the light we find is not just in them but anywhere it is allowed to shine through in others.
Therefore, in the grand ultimate sense we are not unique. Getting into nit-picky details, sure I guess one could say we are unique, but if I plucked two peaches from a tree at the growers and shuffled them into a pile with hundreds of other peaches, it would be kind of hard to find those peaches again. So the final idea is we are far more similar to one another than different, and we all have potential to rot or thrive, just like the peaches. This is part of the balance of all things.
