Even though none of us is ever separate from the Divine, for thousands of years humans have been living as if we are, not understanding that which lies within and beyond our distinct beings, yet has enormous influence on our lives.

We can see that a split opened up in the collective psyche before the dawn of history from the Proto-Indo-European roots of human and Divine, which are *dhghem- ‘earth’, root of Latin humus ‘ground, earth’, and *dyeu- ‘to shine’, root of Latin dīvus ‘godlike’ and deus ‘god’. These etymologies show that our forebears conceived of humans as earthlings in contrast to the divine residents of the heavens some 5,500 years ago, as Calvert Watkins explains in The American Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

East and West then developed in quite different ways, despite being unsullied by the light pollution most of us suffer from today and having a common linguistic heritage. On the one hand, the Babylonians in Mesopotamia looked outwards at the heavens, developing the mathematics to enable them to make predictions of solar and lunar eclipses. In contrast, the Rishis in the Indus valley ignored the night sky and looked inwards, discovering an utterly different world, one in which Brahman and Atman (as God and Self) are one, never separate from each other.

Apart from mystics—who discreetly live in Oneness, in union with the Divine, free of the sense of a separate self—for the most part it is taboo to heal the split soul. As a consequence of feeling separate from the Immortal Ground of Being that we all share, humans have invented religious and monetary immortality symbols to assuage the fear of death. These not only distort the entire world of learning, disturbing harmonious relationships with each other, they also inhibit us from facing the near-term extinction of our species with equanimity.

However, while it is one thing to reveal schizopsychosis as the root cause of our sick society, it is quite another to find the cure and apply the remedy. For this cannot happen through any act of so-called free will. Because we are never separate from the Divine for an instant, it is only the Divine that can enlighten us and heal our wounds.