The Human Boundary:

Being a human is the sum of human problems; the moment we put up a human boundary between us and the universe, life becomes a universal struggle. There’s no universe out there; there are no beings living in the universe, for every cell, atom, bone, and flesh are forgotten elements of the universe.

There’s no distance between us and the universe. The air we breathe is the universe; the food we eat is the universe; the water we drink is the universe; the clothes we wear are the universe. We can live without being humans, but we can not live without being the universe. The human is not the man; the human is the boundary of the man. For man rather to live within the boundary of the universe than to be the universe.

Human awareness can not be greater than the human identity, for identity defines the boundary of the mind. Once we identify ourselves as humans, our awareness of the universe shifts to match the narrowness of our humanness. If we should shift our identity back to the universe, awareness will follow.

The universe can’t be reduced to less than itself; everything in the universe is a universe to something… someone else, from a rock to a tree to the body of a human. The man is a human to the man. But to the trillions of tiny beings that live on and within him, the man is a universe. Humanness is an island that is a misfit in a universe that is made up of universes.

Humans live on the lonely island of thought; the universe doesn’t know any such being. The universe has never met any being other than itself. We can misremember that we’re the universe and wed ourselves to the idea of being human, but no matter how hard we try, we can not divorce ourselves from the universe.