##### 🔑 Our inner and outer worlds are not separate Most of us experience ourselves as separate from other and world. We’re conditioned to sense that there is a “me” in this mind and an "everything else" outside of this mind, and that our [[⭐️ Body]] keeps the "everything else" out there and the “me” contained in here. This is an *extremely* common, innocent, cultural mistake. Our bodies don’t separate us from the cosmos; they *embed* us within it. Our bodies, our senses, are points of contact — bridges connecting our interiority to our apparent exterior lives. They may not merge, but it is a kind of non-separation — a porous membrane. %%We may sense that others and world are outside of us, but that’s as natural a mistake to make as when we believed the sun revolved around the earth — it kinda *looks* as if that’s the case.%% >*“Tell me," (Ludwig) Wittgenstein's asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”* It might seem as if we’re sensing our exteriors. But all of that sensing, every sight, smell, taste, feeling, and sound is an *interior* sensory experience, arising to our interior awareness. The boundaries between self and world are much more fuzzy than we’re normally aware of. Just for fun: notice how when you inhale and exhale there is no barrier separating the air in your body from the air outside of your body. --- We may need to make external changes before we can make internal progress; we may find ourselves more able to act in the world because of the internal work we’ve done. ###### See Also - [[⭐️ Life Curation]] - [[🔑 Our mind is directly influenced by our surroundings]] - [[🔑 Form is emptiness, emptiness is form]] - [[🔑 Everything is connected to everything else]] - [[🔑 Psyche and Soma are not separate]] - [[🔑 The sacred and the ordinary are not separate]] [^1]: