The Narrow Road to Oneness

How forgiveness and collaboration lead the way to Oneness

I’ve been thinking about how similar fear and faith really are. Ernest Holmes, the founder of this philosophy I teach, put it like this: Fear is just faith misplaced. The stuff we are afraid of, that we worry about and prepare against; we are actually believing in those possibilities enough to create the negative energy of fear. Which, in fact, is faith in what we don’t want.

Now before you assume this is another post about positive thinking – stop. Usually, we spend a great deal of time building the case and gathering evidence for the things we are afraid might happen. One can attempt by the force of their will to think differently but until the source or trigger underneath the fear is dismantled, I’m going to surmise that most of us will face those core fears again in one form or another.

So, consider this, there are cues our personality gives us to unearth what’s underneath our fears. Anger, fear’s close friend, is almost always a sign of unhealed pain. Anger is just an easier reach. When we become willing to look at what we are carrying instead of throwing our anger at the most convenient target, something begins to shift. I call this dropping the rock. A term borrowed from a little book by Nicole Johnson entitled Dropping the Rock, The Freedom to Choose Love over Judgment that recounts the moment in the old story where a crowd ready to stone a woman for her mistakes (aka sins) is asked to look at their own first, “Let those among you without sin cast the first stone”, and one by one, they open their hands and let the stones fall. When we drop our rocks we don’t lose anything, no, instead our hands are empty and available for something else.

That something else is Oneness. The spiritual principle that we all start out the same and then the Universe individuates itself in billions of different ways. Every person, from those we care deeply for, to those we disdain come from the same source.

Now I want to be careful here, Oneness isn’t just a fancy word for empathy. Empathy is a beautiful stop along the road, but Oneness is a much bigger place for us to reside. Oneness asks us to recognize ourselves in everyone, not just the people we love and like. Super easy when everything is copasetic, the real heavy lifting is when relationships are strained, or a conversation seems hopelessly divided, or you’re dealing with someone whose world view is vastly different from yours.

Researcher Brene’ Brown offers a hard truth when she writes about how people opt out of difficult conversations because they are afraid of being wrong or not belonging once they say the hard thing. Most of us choose comfort first, stepping over what’s right in front of us, under the guise of getting along. And every time we do that it costs us the thing everyone really wants, connection.

Certainty is another comfort zone we place ourselves in. When we are certain about something it’s hard to listen to anything else. Fear loves certainty – it gives fear a tool to shrink us down and lock us in place. But here’s the good news: awareness is curative. The moment we notice fear trying to paint us into a corner, we have started taking our power back. When we are angry or shut down by certainty, well these can be cues that there is something that wants to be healed.

So how do we stay open when everything in us wants to shut down? We risk being seen. We allow ourselves to be vulnerable. We have the courage to show up honestly and authentically. Vulnerability is the willingness to be real and say things like, I don’t know, I was wrong, or I’m afraid, and I’m staying anyway.

I’ll be honest — I’ve had to practice every bit of this myself lately. There have been decisions I’d have made differently, conversations that didn’t land the way I hoped, moments where staying open felt almost too much. I’ve dropped my rock and picked it back up more than once this month. What I’ve learned is that the way back — every single time — is forgiveness. Forgiving myself first and then forgiving whoever else is standing in the story with me.

The path toward Oneness is narrow. There isn’t room on it for the judgments, the resentments, the fear we’re used to hauling around. They’re just too much weight for us to carry with us.

This is why real collaboration is never just a management technique — it’s a spiritual practice. It means slowing down enough to actually listen, releasing the need to have the answer, and trusting that something wiser can show up within the space of honest and vulnerable connections. Holmes wrote that when we change our attitude, we stop limiting the flow and let it move through us more freely. What could have been a loss becomes an opening. What we stay closed to, we lose access to.

If you take one thing from this: the next time you feel that flare of anger, or that tightening of fear, try treating it as information instead of an instruction. Ask what it’s protecting. Ask what it would take to open your hand. And if forgiveness is the word that keeps surfacing, for someone else, or for yourself, trust that. It’s usually the shortest road back to the connection you were longing for all along.

A closing note: the poem “Instructions Before Visiting Earth” by James McCrae came up in conversation with friends this week, and it’s worth seeking out on its own — a gentle reminder that we’re only visiting here, and that the point was never to get it perfect.