“Connected” might be a good word or it might be a misleading word, depending on what it conveys to you.
I saw things differently one day; prior to that, and a significant portion of the time subsequent to that as well, I saw things from a more commonplace perspective. The more commonplace perspective isn’t wrong, exactly, so much as it simply isn’t the only way to comprehend something. In some ways it’s like those big portraits that are composed of much smaller photographs, and after years of only seeing a large collection of photographs one day you see (literally in this example) the big picture. It doesn’t, at that point, cease to be a bunch of smaller individual pictures though, nor was it ever wrong to see it as a bunch of smaller individual pictures. But once you see it the other way, you suddenly have a different, equally valid, answer to the question [::points at one of the smaller images::] “What is that”? And so you say “It’s Thomas Jefferson. Not in and of itself, I mean it is obviously a reproduction of a woodcut of the Declaration of Independence, but it is also Thomas Jefferson, and so is everything else on this entire page.”
I’m babbling. Sorry.
“Connected” — are all the limes and the oranges of the world connected?
It’s…uh, sorry, gotta babble again.
“Omnipotent” tends to imply (to me at any rate) that there is an actor, an intelligent individual entity with a will and an intent taking action, action that cannot be opposed.
I can see how Caesar Augustus could be described as omnipotent. I can see how one could argue that Caesar Augustus is nothing of the sort (“Can Caesar make the oceans freeze over with a single gesture?”). The term makes sense because it is falsifiable, yes? OK, but is the universe omnipotent?
Consider the premise that the universe is here (or just “is”, since “here” doesn’t contribute much to this sentence) “on purpose”; that, while there is neither a disembodied comic-book SuperBrain floating around in mid-Cosmos nor a paternal bearded God on a Throne somewhere to be the “location” where GodConsciousness is (as opposed to where it’s not), our consciousness is a manifestation of the larger all-encompassing conscousness which is GodConsciousness.
Not in the “whole as sum of its many parts” sense like the Thomas Jefferson pic made of little pix (which are different from it and have their own separate meaning), but in some ways similar to that.
More the way that society is made up of you and me and other individuals. Society, you could say, is an abstraction; I can tap you on the shoulder, I can’t tap society, and if I remove all individuals from the set there’s nothing left over to point to and call “society”. And yet society is in you and me and the other individuals; our perspectives, belief systems, concepts for making sense of things, the language we use to describe meaning to ourselves and each other, and the meaning that things and events have for us due to context and purpose — it’s all social. And so you can’t easily remove society from the individuals and point and say “Aha, here’s the nature of the individual unto itself”.
Now, if that’s making good clear sense to you, hop out one more level. If “I” am an individual person — a valid sense of self, describing something that’s entirely real — and “we” are society, an equally valid sense of self, an abstraction, yes, but a damned real one nevertheless, and one without which you don’t really understand the prior level, kick it up a notch and conceptualize a sense of self that is all-inclusive. That Which Is. Of course “it” is conscious, insofar as you are conscious and it is you. “Omnipotent”? In comparison with what adversary or barrier?
Oh, why not? Sure, I’ll use that word. The universe could be other than it is and is therefore not what it is as a consequence of being unable to be other.