Certainly most people feel separate from everything that surrounds them. On the one hand there is myself, and on the other hand the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything, and yet cut off and alone. I can feel what is going on inside my own body, but can only guess what is going on in others. My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of the being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.

Nevertheless, the physical reality is that my body exists only in relation to this universe, and in fact I am as a attached to it and dependent on it as a leaf on a tree. I feel cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more…