Your body is borrowed, all of it. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood — star-ash, every atom, on temporary loan from exploded suns. The air in your lungs right now: is it you, or world? It was world a second ago; it is becoming you as you read; it will be world again before you finish the page, and some of it will be in another person’s blood by evening. Where is the border? The line keeps moving because there is no line. The skin is not a wall; it is a place of exchange, busier than any port, and what you call “my body” is a whirlpool in a river of food and air and light, holding its shape while the water races through. The whirlpool is real. But try to take it home in a bucket.

You are not a thing in the world. You and the world are one process, and the felt border between them was drawn by the same dreaming mind that drew the small someone — drawn the way constellations are drawn. The stars are real; the lion connecting them exists only in the eye. The universe is real; the warehouse of separate items is a connect-the-dots game played by a frightened mind.

The old texts put it without blinking: this is like a dream, a bubble, a shadow — not meaning the world is not here, but meaning it is not divided the way it appears. And when your own scientists finally built instruments fine enough to look for the ultimate separate stuff — the little solid balls everything was supposed to be made of — the balls dissolved as they approached. At the bottom of matter they found no bottom and no matter: only relations, vibrations, fields without edges — a universe that behaves less like a warehouse than a single unbroken movement. I do not say the physicists proved the mystics right; they were asking different questions. I only note that the deepest report from the laboratory and the deepest report from the monastery rhyme. And they rhyme on exactly this point: separateness is not found. It is assumed at the surface and absent at depth, wherever the digging is honest, whoever holds the shovel.