[Below is a touching share from yesterday's Awakin Circle in Santa Clara, prompted by a reading on universality.]

Hi, I'm Jackie and when I was about nine years old, I decided that we were all one. I knew that every place in the world could be home intellectually, but I knew that I wasn't going to experience that -- that things far away seem strange, and that I really wanted to live someplace different. I just determined that I was going to do that. And when I grew up, we did.

It is different to experience the oneness of people and the wholeness of the whole world than it is to know it intellectually. And to know that people are the same underneath, although they are different. That the sameness is just as important -- if not more important -- than the differences.

I think I experienced it the most when we were in Tanzania and I had a 10-month-old baby who went into a seizure in the middle of the night. We were traveling and we didn't know what to do. We left the place we were in and went outside two Tanzanian men stopped in their car and said, "Can we help you?"

They took us to the hospital.

And the next day they came back to see that the baby was okay. These were just two strangers in a car in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

It makes you realize the oneness of all people.