The Illusion of Separation

We are not separate.  Everything is a part of everything else, everything is one whole fabric where each thread is inseparable from every other thread.  Separating things out from each other is merely an illusion of the mind, the way that we look at things.

Have you ever eaten animal crackers?  No matter how the pieces are shaped, it's all cookie dough through and through, but cut into forms that resemble elephants and tigers and cars and people.  But it's all really cookie dough.  The universe is like that cookie dough - it's all of one form and one nature, and the mind is the cookie cutter that separates things out into different forms.

We can call that one form and one nature whatever we like - the cosmos, buddha-nature, the Word, or God.  I like "cookie-dough."  Zen Master Dogen called it "Total Existence," and said "Total Existence is not smashed into hundreds of bits and pieces" - things are not separate from one another - "and Total Existence is not undifferentiated like a slab of iron" - we can distinguish points within the mass, just like we can distinguish individual waves or ripples on the sea.  But just because we can distinguish one from the other doesn't mean that it all isn't still just one. 

That having been said, there is no difference between self and other, or one individual from another.  If one person attains enlightenment, all persons are enlightened ("How marvelous," the Buddha is said to have remarked upon his awakening, "I and all sentient beings have come into enlightenment together").  If one person receives the grace of God, all persons have the grace of God.  In fact, looking deeper, "God" and "man" are just two more forms the cookie-cutter mind carves from of the dough of Total Existence.

So much of human suffering occurs when the illusion of separateness collides with the reality of the unseparated, interconnected nature of the cookie dough of Total Existence.  The practical aspect of all this is that we can drop away so much unnecessary and useless suffering if we just give up the illusion of separateness.  Why worry about this sack of skin dying, when it's not and never has been anything other than part of the whole universe, and always has been and always will be?