Judaism, as well as many other religions, appears to speak of God as separate from us. In our prayers we often ask for help from “above” to give us what we need for material and spiritual sustenance. But Kabbalah and Chassidus say that God is all there is—Infinity itself, Ayn Sof, without end. So where are we humans in all of this? How can we understand our place in this endless realm of space?

We are used to seeing ourselves as physical creatures who walk on top of the earth. We usually see the world from our own unique perspective, where everything we experience appears to be outside of us, separate from us in every way. All people are separate from each other, the material world is made of different substances, and this can occasionally cause us to feel very distant, even isolated sometimes, from everything else.

But as soon as we consider that we live within our planetary ecosystem, relying on the whole process of air and water and soil on the planet to feed and support our lives, we have to acknowledge that we live in symbiosis with everything that exists here on earth. Our survival literally depends on the continuous sustenance of the planet.

And then, going one step further, our planet can only survive by continuously spinning on its own axis and traveling around the sun. According to astrophysicists, planet earth is traveling at a speed of 18.5 miles per second (30 km/sec), simply to travel around the sun! And the sun—in fact, our whole solar system—is, at the same time, traveling around the Milky Way Galaxy, at a speed of 143 miles per second (230 km/sec)! All of this is happening all of the time, throughout every moment of time.

With all of this occurring without any effort from us, we have to realize that this could not possibly be happening by chance. In reality, nothing is happening by chance—even everything that we create here on earth comes not by chance, but from our own thought. We have to think of an idea before it can come into being. Everything we humans have ever made, from the brilliance of space flight to simply making a cup of tea, comes from our own thought before it can exist. How much more so, then, must the universe have conscious thought to create everything that exists in space?

This is the paradox and the beauty of Kabbalah, which reassures us that even though we didn’t create the planet, or the sun, or the galaxies, we humans are made in a way that we can come into harmony with the Oneness of it all. How awesome is that?! We are creatures existing on just one of the planets in this vast universe, and yet we can each have access to experience the harmony of this amazingly interconnected Oneness!

However, we can only attain this experience when we understand what real harmony is. And this is not as difficult as you might think. We each have the capacity to create it between ourselves, simply by showing respect and compassion to everyone and everything on earth. It requires that we make a commitment to remember not to do any harm to others in the same way that we wouldn’t want any harm done to us. This is often given as the “golden rule” that exists within all religions. When we maintain this compassionate approach toward everyone and everything in life, we can eventually develop the holy intention of loving our fellow human beings as we love our own self. And then, when we are ready to open up our mind and our heart to this clearer vision of our world and everything that exists in it, we can find that the wisdom of the universal Oneness will gently open up more access to the light, so that we can see the loving, harmonious connection we actually already have with each other and with the universe itself.