There are—in nature, in the actual physical universe—no such things as things, and no such happenings as events. They’re all invented by us in the same way as we invent lines of latitude and longitude, inches, meters, minutes and hours. They’re all measures: they don’t really exist out there. But we choose certain lines. For example, we choose the boundary of the human skin and we say this divides “me” from “everything else.” Inside this bag of skin is “me,” inside those bags of skin is “you.” And outside that is a foreign world that isn’t me, that isn’t you.
We have lost the fundamental physical elemental sense that every single one of us is the entire works, focused here and now. That is to say, every human being—every beetle, every mosquito, every living cell—is something that the entire cosmos, the whole universe, is doing in a particular way. Just as when you hold a magnifying glass to the sun, and you focus the sun as a vivid little point of light at that particular spot on that particular leaf, so every creature that exists is a focus, a special case of what the entire works of existence is doing. Only: we have been taught to forget that.
Here’s a tree—a barren tree; dead branches—and from nowhere at all a bunch of birds come and alight on it. There they are: birds from somewhere else alighting on a barren tree. That’s the way most people feel themselves in the world: human beings in a world largely composed of rocks, and fire, and electronic jazz which has no feelings, no sense of values, no intelligence. But we just live here by accident. The other image is the tree, again, that suddenly gives rise to leaves and fruit. What a different situation. But according to all our knowledge of the sciences—of biology, ecology, evolution, and so on—we are leaves on a tree. We live, we express—each one of us—a world which produces human beings in precisely the same way that an apple tree produces apples.
The word “tree” is different from the word “ground,” and therefore it seems that the tree is different from the ground. But it isn’t. The tree is the ground reaching up to grab at the sky and, you know… enjoy. It’s the ground, swinging. So, in the same way, each one of us is the whole cosmos waving and saying, “Yoo-hoo! I’m here!”