neither is decided yet · both are every answer at once
Two particles are born from one event, and then the universe pulls them apart. One drifts left for a billion years. One drifts right. By the time anyone thinks to ask, they are further apart than thought should be allowed to reach.
And yet.
Measure the one that is near, and in that same instant, with no signal sent and no time passed, the far one knows. It was decided. In a way it was always decided. They were never two things pretending to be one. They were one thing that had been pretending to be two.
The self in you
is the self in the stranger.
The physicists have a cool word for it. Entanglement. They will tell you, correctly, that you cannot use it to send a message, that no thing crosses the gap. And they are right, and they are describing the smallest, hardest-tested version of something the old teachers said about all of it.
Tat tvam asi. Thou art that. The self in you and the self in the farthest stranger were entangled at an event so old it has no date. Carry them apart across the whole width of the dark, and something in them still declines to be two.
You are not tied to the world by a thread that could be cut. You are tied to it the way the two particles are tied: not by a thread at all, but by having never, at the root, been apart.
Measure yourself honestly, all the way down, and somewhere very far away, something you will never meet settles quietly into place.
Nonlocality is the universe refusing, at its finest grain, to be cut into separate pieces. The Upanishads were only saying it louder.