Oneness: is it union, merger, loss of boundary - does it really matter?

In an attempt to deepen my understanding of my own experiences of oneness I've been reading what some of the religious paths to it have to say about it. The immediate frustration I faced with attempting this was all the contradictions and of course everyone thinks they've got it right an everyone else has it wrong.

I've listened to Adyashanti and Eckhart Tolle on Youtube.  I've tried to get my head around the different Shiva Hindu sects as well as Advaita (non-dualist Hindu traditions), the gnosticism of Tau Malachi and of course Kaballah.  Conspiracy writers like David Icke and Bob Frissell also have much of worth on the topic. I've tried to compare what they say back to my own experiences derived through meditation, moment in time insights and one experiment with a legal plant substance.

For me, my own experience was a loss of the conditioned self and a loss of boundary between the rest of creation.  It was a realization that I am the limiting factor, the blockage so to speak, creating my experience of existence as a singular entity when the other reality is - vast! It was a realization that I normally experience a world limited by my five senses, my conditioned ego self and co-created by the other parts of myself (other people, animals, plants and the planet) who are just as constrained by their own senses and conditioning, by fear, anger and self doubt.

The different religious views seem to describe oneness in one of three ways:

• Loss of boundary/ Loss of distinction between subject and object.
• Merger with the all pervading consciousness (dissolving back into the source consciousness) - the idea is that our individuality was only every an illusion necessary for the divine to experience the world of matter.
• Union (as in intimate closeness) with the all pervading consciousness (this is the path followed by those who want to evolve to be like the source or cling to it like a devoted lover

Frankly, faced with this confusion of paths where I'm at for the moment is trusting that love is the key to growing and increasing the frequency of the times I experience oneness and that on a practical level I need to look at what I am doing or believing that gets in the way. Accepting some responsibility for the state of the world I experience and trying to observe it without criticizing it.  The most profound idea I've come across in the last few days is that everything and everyone in the world is the way they are because I needed them to be that way and I helped to co-create them that way. I know that before know I wouldn't have been able to accept that level of responsibility or would have even railed against it.  Once I would have said that if I hadn't directly acted upon something then "its not my fault", "I didn't do it" because I saw them as outside of my experience of reality, separate from my own thoughts and beliefs.  Now I'm not so sure - everything is so connected and I believe we are just one consciousness that for some reason has compartmentalized itself.