We can see the great paradox of the universal spiritual journey from the etymology of separate, which derives from Latin se- ‘apart’ and the PIE base *perə-¹ ‘to produce’, which is the root of Latin parēns ‘parent’ and pārēre ‘to bring forth, produce, give birth; appear, become evident; obey’.
Thus, to return Home to undivided Wholeness, from which we have never left, it is necessary to separate ourselves from our parents, as the primary purveyors of our cultural conditioning in our sick society.
As Joseph Campbell points out, the first stage in the spiritual journey is ‘Departure’, where depart derives from Latin dē ‘from, apart’ and PIE base *perə-² ‘to grant’. But the third stage ‘Return’ is the most difficult of all. Because we are all on unique journeys in life, most are not necessarily destined to become Panosophers, with the complete realization that we are all interconnected.
Most significantly, while, as individuals we find Inner Peace in Nondual Wholeness, we cannot cocreate World Peace while fighting each other for a slice of the finite monetary pie, commercializing our offerings.
With abrupt, irreversible climate change about to make our beautiful planet Earth uninhabitable, the only choice we have at the end of time, if we had a choice, is to share our resources, supporting each other as well as we can as we rapidly approach the death of our biological species.
Probably before 1425, separten ‘to remove, detach completely; divide (something), sever the connection or association of’, from Latin sēparātus, past participle of sēparāre ‘to pull apart’, from se- ‘apart’, from PIE base *se-, and parāre ‘make ready, prepare’, from PIE base *pere-¹ ‘to produce, procure’, root of parent.
As adjective, from 1600, ‘disconnected, detached, kept apart, divided from the rest’. Separate was also used as a past-participle adjective in Middle English ‘cut off from the main body’, also, of a spouse, ‘estranged’. The meaning ‘individual, particular’ is from 1670s, on the notion of ‘withdrawn or divided from something else’, hence ‘peculiar to one but not others’.
The doublet sever, from Anglo-French severer, from Old French sevrer ‘to separate’, was restricted in French as ‘to wean’, i.e. ‘to separate from the mother’.