We see ourselves as individual entities immersed in an external world. It isn’t necessarily natural to identify ourselves and the environment as one in the same, however that is the idea I would like to discuss presently. Imagine you were to draw a boundary around yourself separating you from the outside world. Where would you draw the line? At the outside of the skin? At the lining of the gut? If we zoom in to the level of single cells we see everything is just floating in a fluid. Human cells, bacteria, nutrients and other garbage are all mixed together. We are not only in the universe; the universe is in us. Even the atoms and molecules making up the cell membrane are separated by electrostatic forces. Nothing is actually touching. The body is fluid; there is a perpetual exchange of matter between you and the environment with no clear delineation between the two. You’re never really the same thing from day to day. You are more like a nonphysical wave pattern characterized by the continual expression of dna. The human body is less so a distinct entity and more so a symbiotic relationship of human cellular machinery amid an ecosystem of other microbes.
If you’re ‘in there’ and the rest of it is ‘out here’, then where is the boundary between you and the outside world? Look deeply and find that one can not be found. See then that any definition of self is naive and narrow in scope compared to the wholeness of creation which is the one true identity, below and beyond form, the mother we share.
In each of us there exists the implicit assumption that we are separate from our surroundings and understandably so. The mind constructs its own boundaries in order to preserve its identity. Can you imagine a world where the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ are never used, but instead using only ‘us’ and ‘we’ to communicate? Consider this: no one person exists alone on an island acting solely in a vacuum. Everything we do and have we do with the cooperation of other humans. We in fact depend on all plant and animal life and each other to survive and thrive. This fact is self-evident but I think it is easy to lose sight of as long as we are acting in our own self interest. We know it intuitively when we remind each other that ‘the world doesn’t revolve around you.’ Maybe pronouns evolved in language not just to distinguish individuals but to divide labor such as saying, “I will gather food and you can cook.” So actually our tendency to label each other uniquely arises out of a need for cooperation. Just a thought. For these reasons I have concluded that the self as a distinct entity is an illusion - that the one true self encompasses you, me, the birds and trees, the earth, the sun, and the stars.