The Illusion of Separation

When you were first born, there were no thoughts in your head! Take a moment and let that in! But as you grew up, like all of us, thoughts began to take over, and most of the time you experience life exclusively through your thoughts.

There are many heartaches we experience when we are caught in thought. Thought is afraid of life. It believes you have to control it, or nothing will happen or something bad will happen. It also hides deep inside of ocean of grief from being cut off from the joy of being fully here for life. But by far the greatest heartache is the illusion that we are separate from life. Nothing could be further from the truth!

One of the easiest ways you can dismantle the illusion of separation is by looking at how you are dependent upon absolutely everything in the universe in order to survive. The beloved teacher Thich Nhat Hanh points this out in his exquisitely insightful piece on interbeing:

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.”

As you let in the truth of what he is pointing to include yourself in this reality of interbeing. If there were no sun, or rain, or soil, or people who plant and care for your food, or truck drivers that bring it to the store, or even your ancestors, you would not be alive! Everything in the whole universe is necessary for you to survive! When did you ever allow yourself to open into deep, deep gratitude for all that is necessary for you to be given the gift of life?