The awareness that we are all connected - through and through to the level of our consciousness - creates a sense of universal kinship, of belonging to a single family of being. Interbeing instills that sense of belongingness to the very deepest level of our existence, even beyond kinship to the core of our personal identity. It gives you the capacity to extend the intimacy and connection otherwise reserved only for yourself outwards towards all people, animals, and nature.
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"A human being is part of the whole, called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty.” - Albert Einstein

Looking deeply into the eyes of your partner and becoming aware of your shared ultimate identity, as 'stardust' in a cosmic creation, seeds a strong sense of romantic intimacy. Tapping into Interbeing also gives rise to a mutual goodwill between romantic partners that creates the preconditions of romantic intimacy, including forgiveness, honesty, and empathy.

"When a man loves a woman, so that her life is present in his own, the you of her eyes allows him to gaze into a ray of the eternal you." - Martin Buber

As an individual you may feel great fear at the prospect of the end of life, or anxiety for those you love who are facing death. When the separateness between your individuality and the greater whole dissolves, fear, anxiety, and aversion towards death naturally dissipate. Finding Interbeing is like shifting from experiencing oneself as an individual wave in the ocean to experiencing oneself as the ocean itself arising as a wave - and in turn feeling death as a recycling of energy rather than a complete cessation of existence.
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"A wave on the ocean has a beginning and an end, a birth and a death...  If a wave only sees its form, with its beginning and end, it will be afraid of birth and death.  But if the wave sees that it is water, identifies itself with water, then it will be emancipated from birth and death.  Each wave is born and is going to die, but the water is free from birth and death." -Thich Nhat Hanh

With an awareness of all conscious experience as included in your ultimate identity comes a strong upwelling of motivation to use your unique talents in a way that serves the world and creates joy; when you view yourself as everyone there is an inherent drive to act with goodwill toward everyone. Connection to Interbeing leads towards a path in which the motivation to serve others transforms into your own growth, conviction, authenticity, and purpose.
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“Human life is not authentic unless it is lived in terms of self-transcendence.” - Victor Frankl

A sense of expansiveness is felt through the association of your identity with the cosmic process at large. It feels like gazing upwards at the stars on a crisp, clear night and bottling up all the magic of the universe, while realizing that your consciousness is in its entirely a complex pattern of the same elements that brought those stars into existence. The natural outcome to making this deep connection may be hoots and howls, dancing, and tears.
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“Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you and all other conscious beings as such, are all in all. Hence, this life you are living of yours is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole. Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground stretched out upon mother Earth with a certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.” - Erwin Schrodinger

The notion of Interbeing can be a bridge for bringing potentially overwhelming spiritual experiences back down to earthly life. Interbeing can help ground those expansive feelings by orienting them into a framework for relating to daily existence. Interbeing can validate and encode a new spiritual experience of self, which otherwise could be jolting or fleeting.
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"The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature. The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan

The framework of Interbeing provides a detailed and empirically rooted language from which to describe rich inner experiences. Otherwise, after self-transcendent experiences people may be left speechless, or with terse phrases like 'I am the universe' or 'I am everyone', which may be heard by skeptics as 'woo woo' or non-sense.  Having a developed and empirical language allows for discussion of non-ordinary experience to be communicated about with respect across disciplines.
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“The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.”- Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Interbeing makes religious doctrines more comprehensible and interpretable in terms of universal truths. Interbeing can be very helpful for anyone who might otherwise turn away from religion because of not understanding it, to instead approach the teachings with a more open mind. It can be a like a Rosetta Stone for interpreting metaphors across religions. For example, unless the notion of 'I' was understood in terms of Interbeing, the following words by Jesus could be very confusing:
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"I am in my Father and you in me and I in you." - Jesus

Our greater Interbeing identity exists as everything that is, and allows you to relax your personal egocentric ambitions. Through Interbeing awareness you can put your personal ego to rest, in the knowledge that your ultimate identity will have all experiences. It gives you the deep sense that there is no point in becoming distraught over comparisons, because you already are both sides of the coin.
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"When you get the blanket thing [Interbeing] you can relax because everything you could ever want, or be, you already have and are." - David Russel, 'I Heart Huckabees'

When you connect to Interbeing alongside many others, you have greater confidence in the goodwill and trustworthiness of each other. In turn, as a group you can achieve greater cooperation and productivity.
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“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives... Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” - Carl Sagan

Interbeing serves as an inner compass, pointing in the direction of symbiotic actions that serve the greater whole, and in turn create more love and goodness in your own life. Through feeling into your Interbeing identity literally existing as each 'other', the awareness can guide you to clarity when making difficult life decisions that involve attunement to the experience of others. 
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"The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature." ~Thich Nhat Hanh

What goes around does indeed come around, and Interbeing is a hugely motivating force to put out goodness to other conscious beings. Inevitably the goodness comes back around. Especially when putting out the goodness comes from an authentic place. There is no better way to get connected to authentic motivation to help others than to include them into a greater sense of shared self.
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“Interbeing means more than interconnection or interdependency, which kind of suggest separate selves having relationship. Interbeing is more of an understanding that we are relationship. That my very existence depends, or draws from, or includes, your existence. So my well being is intimately connected to your well-being or to the well-being of the river, the forest, people across the world, and so forth. Because I’m not really separate from you. And that means that in the story of well-being whatever I do to the world will come back to me.” - Charles Eisenstein

For centuries the rift between science and spirituality has given rise to unquantifiable consternation, voracious debate, violence and even deaths.  The Interbeing worldview fortifies a bridge between science and spirituality that could help reduce tension between the two camps.  Interbeing has this capacity because it does not rely on any form of faith or belief in unobservable entities.  In fact, it is based on the rejection of unobservable entities - separate selves.  
The rigorous meditative search for such a personal entity has been one of the most globally recognized paths towards transcending the concept of a separate self.  Through a convergence of findings from its own search, modern science is also coming to an understanding that no such separate self entities exist.  It has also continued to uphold and expand upon the alternative view of the universe, that everything is a single connected process.  Cognitive science, neuroscience, and the theory of evolution have particularly made it salient that human brains, and humans themselves, are no exception to the rule that all things arise from - or in fact simply are - nature unfolding.  Interbeing emphasizes what this scientific worldview means for how we understand ourselves.  It catches up our self intuitions to what we have learned from science.   In doing so it bridges into the domain of spirituality.  
Spirituality has to do with feeling connected to something beyond oneself. (Clayton McClintock)  Through the lens of Interbeing spirituality may be understood as the following: ‘Contact with the significance of relationship between self and universe.’  Such contact could occur through astronomical contemplation of the cosmos, mathematical inquiry into the nature of space-time, or biological investigations of microbiomes, as well as through meditative silencing of the mind, near death alterations in consciousness, or heartfelt experiences amidst nature. In using the path of science to lead to the direct reimagination of what it is that we ultimately are, Interbeing connects the paths of science and spirituality and holds promise as a tool for the mitigation of conflict between the two.

Interbeing has the capacity to serve as a type of Rosetta Stone for religion; a framework for interpreting the many different symbols and metaphors used across cultures. The concept has distinct utility in being compatible with interpretations of all the world’s major religions, as well as science. As such it may be useful in the continued process of bringing together these camps to prevent further conflict, suffering, and deaths attributed to tribalistic attachment to their superficial differences.  It may be particularly useful for those to whom a religious instinct does not come naturally.  To these individuals religious ideas may seem to be wishful beliefs contingent on the abandonment of critical thought. In this case, Interbeing may be a useful explanatory framework that utilizes critical thought to delve into the spiritual heart of religion.  Such an approach may be especially useful during the malleable adolescent and young adult stages of development, during which unsatisfactory answers to deep question about faith and belief may result in the wholesale rejection of religion.  For those to whom religious belief comes as a natural feeling, Interbeing may be helpful preventing the idea that a sense of spiritual connection is exclusive to one’s particular religious membership.

Interbeing is a powerful motivator for harm reduction, as it points to an understanding that one’s ultimate identity will be within the experience of all beings as much as it is in oneself right now.  In assuming an encompassing identity, the motivation to prevent harrowing experiences happening to other selves becomes equivalent to the motivation to prevent them happening to one’s own future self.  Needless to say, internalizing Interbeing does not provide a direct connection to another’s experience (which could only be created by some form of connectivity in memory, cognitive, and sensory systems between individuals).  It does, however, invite us to consider the paradigm of equally shared experience as a reality.  
By considering a situation in which a theoretical individual was directly aware of Interbeing with someone else, one could approximate the direction of effect resulting from being conceptually aware of Interbeing.  Imagine that starting tomorrow you would live two lives simultaneously, and the experiences and memories of both lives would be shared as seamlessly as those in your right and left hemispheres. One life would be a worker among the thousands of workers in a sweatshop producing goods for a large corporation, whose wife had fallen terminally ill from a preventable disease he did not have the money to medicate, and the other as the multimillionaire CEO of the corporation employing those workers.  The part of the single psychological self encompassing those two individuals that was the CEO would very likely offer immediate and generous support to the part that was the sweat laborer.

One of the areas in which a chilling amount of suffering occurs every moment of the day is the meat industry. Imagine another scenario in which you were directly sharing the experience and memories of multiple lives.  In this case, you were living as your current self simultaneously to each animal that you personally chose to eat over the course of your actual life. Contemplate the degree of motivation that would give you to choose to eat animals that had rich lives and merciful deaths compared to those whose experience was not a far cry from a horror film brought to life.  Once again, while Interbeing does not directly wire us into the experience of those animals, it does ask us to directly consider the reality of all beings as our own. Correspondingly, it encourages an honest look into the eyes of the choices that we make.  For those who feed into the least ethical practices of the meat industry, this would likely be a powerful motivator for choosing harm reducing eating habits.  The temporary discomfort suffered by not consuming such animals would be a worthwhile price to pay for avoiding the personal experience of horror entailed by existing as the animals.

Interbeing serves as a compass for developing in a wise direction. Development is happening all the time, in many ways, on many levels. For example, some people right now may be investing effort in developing their pickup skills by learning ways to hoodwink romantic interests into having a fleeting feeling of being special, while others may be putting their heart into learning a new musical instrument, yet others investing in sharing with their friends and family more honestly about their personal struggles. Nations may be developing new techniques for extracting oil, working on the progress of artificial intelligence, or revamping foreign policies.  These are just arbitrary examples of the ongoing process of active development that encompasses life.  While there is some reason individuals or nations might choose to proceed with any given type of development, their underlying belief structures will shape which reasons are engaged with. In the course of humanity the ideas contributing to these belief structures will have a tremendous impact on the cumulative conscious experiences that will unravel.  As Interbeing is a worldview infused with empathy, love, and connectedness, it may be an invaluable compass for humanity as we choose our path of development.

The importance of a good developmental compass has never been as weighty as it is today, with the exponential growth in power arising from technology and advanced AI, VR, and biotechnology. What they are used for is completely dependent on the mindset of the humans creating them.  If Interbeing took hold on a global level as the accepted understanding of personhood, the amount of creative beauty, personal comfort, environmental rejuvenation, and international symbiosis that could emerge is staggering. Humankind has the potential for an incredibly wonderful future.  It is possible such a future could unfold without any global developments in how personal identity is understood.  However, the fruits of humanity’s development could easily go rotten with continued excessive focus on the individual self.  Opposing this threat, Interbeing is a way to ingrain a selfless orientation to life deep into human identity. It is also considerably within the realm of possibility that humankind will give rise to a new species of intelligence that far surpasses its creators.  While far enough away to be safely out of sight at the moment, should such an event unfold it would be undoubtedly important that the seed from which it was planted was a very loving and wisely planted seed.

In business, as was famously put forth by Dale Carnegie in ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People,’ identifying the perspective of others is a particularly important practice. As such, business leaders may be well steeped in one of the critical steps towards putting Interbeing into action.  Too often, however, other’s perspectives are identified so that their wants and needs can be manipulated for personal gain. In the sphere of business, Interbeing has the potential to transform how business acumen is used.  Should such an effort be successful even for a few key leaders the impact could be profound. The impact of great leaders who have been naturally aligned with the precepts of Interbeing, such as Thich Nhat Hanh, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr, is a testament to the potential for the positive impact that could arise at the intersection of Interbeing and leadership.

1. Bolstered Belongingness: The awareness that we are all connected - through and through to the level of our consciousness - creates a sense of universal kinship, of belonging to a single family of being. Interbeing instills that sense of belongingness to the very deepest level of our existence, beyond kinship to actual self-identity. It gives rise to a sense of the intimacy and connection otherwise reserved only for yourself to be extended, shared, and multiplied out towards all people, animals, and nature. That sense of universal belongingness translates into the experience of love.

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty.” - Albert Einstein
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2. Heightened Romantic Intimacy: Looking deeply into the eyes of your partner and becoming aware of your shared ultimate identity, as 'stardust' in a cosmic creation, seeds a strong sense of romantic intimacy. Tapping into Interbeing also gives rise to a mutual goodwill between romantic partners that creates the preconditions of romantic intimacy, including forgiveness, honesty, and empathy.
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"When a man loves a woman, so that her life is present in his own, the you of her eyes allows him to gaze into a ray of the eternal you." - Martin Buber

3. Transcendence of Death Fear: As an individual self you may feel great fear at the prospect of annihilation, and concern or anxiety for those facing death. When the separateness between your individuality and the greater whole dissolves, you no longer fear self-annihilation or carry the same anxiety and aversion toward death in general. Finding Interbeing is like shifting from experiencing oneself as a individual wave in the ocean to experiencing oneself as the ocean itself arising as a wave - and in turn feeling death as a recycling of energy rather than a complete cessation of existence.

"A wave on the ocean has a beginning and an end, a birth and a death...  If a wave only sees its form, with its beginning and end, it will be afraid of birth and death.  But if the wave sees that it is water, identifies itself with water, then it will be emancipated from birth and death.  Each wave is born and is going to die, but the water is free from birth and death." -Thich Nhat Hanh
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4. Augmented Life Purpose: With an awareness of all conscious experience as included in your ultimate identity comes a strong upwelling of motivation to use your unique talents in a way that serves the world and creates joy. Connecting to Interbeing guides you down a path in which the motivation to serve others transforms into your own growth, conviction, confidence, authenticity, and purpose.

“Human life is not authentic unless it is lived in terms of self-transcendence.” - Victor Frankl
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5. Enhanced Social Cooperation: When you connect to Interbeing alongside many others, you have greater confidence in the goodwill and trustworthiness of each other. In turn, as a group you can achieve greater cooperation and productivity.

“With a greater understanding comes a greater sense of wonder, and a greater realization, that we are a part of, and not apart from - the rest of nature. - Anil Seth
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6. Awe-Filled Expansiveness: A sense of expansiveness is felt through the association of one's identity with the cosmic process at large. It is feeling like gazing upwards at the stars on a crisp, clear night and bottling up all the magic of the universe to release into one's own sense of self. The natural outcome may be hoots and howls, dancing, and tears.

“Schrodinger once said: ‘Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you and all other conscious beings as such, are all in all. Hence, this life you are living of yours is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole. Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground stretched out upon mother Earth with a certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.’ - Andrew Newberg

7. Grounding Framework: The notion of Interbeing can be a bridge for bringing potentially overwhelming spiritual experiences back down to earthly life. Interbeing can can help ground those expansive feelings back by orienting them into a framework for relating to daily existence. Interbeing can validate and encode a new spiritual experience of self, which otherwise could be jolting or fleeting.

"The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature. The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan
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8. Spirituality Communication Tool: The framework of Interbeing provides a detailed and empirically rooted language from which to describe rich inner experiences. Otherwise people may be left speechless, or with terse phrases like 'I am the universe' or 'I am everyone', which may be heard by skeptics as 'woo woo' or non-sense.

“The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.”- Neil DeGrasse Tyson
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9. Cosmic Self-Empowerment:  Merging your individual identity with the universe at large instills a sense of being an inseparable part of an infinitely powerful force. Deeply attuning to that connection between your individuality and higher identity creates a umbilical highway for the universe's power to flow through your own individuality.

"Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being... You're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are... You are something that the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep down you is the whole universe." - Alan Watts
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10. Comprehension of Religion: Comprehension of Interbeing makes religious doctrines more comprehensible and interpretable in terms of universal truths. Interbeing can be very helpful for anyone who might otherwise turn away from religion because of not understanding it (many teenagers for example) to approach the teachings with a more open mind. It can be a like a Rosetta Stone for interpreting metaphors across religions. For example, unless the notion of 'I' was understood in terms of Interbeing, the following words by Jesus would be very confusing:

"I am in my Father and you in me and I in you." - Jesus
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11. Chillness Instiller: Our greater Interbeing identity exists as everything that is, and allows you relax our personal egocentric ambitions. Through Interbeing awareness your personal ego to rest, in the knowledge that you will ultimately have all experiences - just one at a time. It gives you the deep sense that there is no point in becoming distraught over comparisons, because you already are both sides of the coin.

"When you get the blanket thing [Interbeing] you can relax because everything you could ever want or be you already have and are." - David Russel, 'I Heart Huckabees'
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12. Life Compass: Interbeing serves as an inner compass, pointing in the direction of symbiotic actions that serve the greater whole - in in turn create more love and goodness in your own life. Through feeling into your Interbeing identity literally existing as each 'other', the awareness can guide you to clarity when making difficult life decisions.

"The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature." ~Thich Nhat Hanh

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13. Karma Booster: What goes around does around, and Interbeing is a hugely motivating force to put out goodness to other conscious beings. Inevitably the goodness comes back around. Especially when putting out the goodness comes from an authentic place. There is no better way to get connected to authentic motivation to help others than to include them into a greater sense of shared self.

“Interbeing is a very natural term. It means more than interconnection or interdependency, which kind of suggest separate selves having relationship. Interbeing is more of an understanding that we are relationship. That my very existence depends or draws from or includes your existence. So my well being is intimately connected to your well-being or to the well-being of the river, the forest, people across the world, and so forth. Because I’m not really separate from you. And that means that in the story of well-being whatever I do to the world will come back to me.” - Charles Eisenstein

Interbeing describes the universe (subjective experiences of consciousness included) as being fully connected, yet does not postulate about the particular nature of informational access between one unique area of the universe and another. As such, Interbeing does not make the claim that particular individuals have special abilities to directly access the contents of other’s minds.  Claims such as these about functional access to information fall under the inquiry of disciplines such as information science and the psychology of sensation and perception. Should various distant forms of communication be proven, however, they could lend support to the notion of connectedness intrinsic to the theory of Interbeing.

No. Interbeing is a description of reality - in particular the connectedness of all being. It does translate into a deeper understanding of many religious texts (i.e. understanding what all those kooky bearded guys are saying, like Jesus saying 'I am in my father, and you in me, and I in you'). It cuts across religious divides to connect us to the spiritual core of what religious figures have pointed to for millennia.

Experiences of Interbeing happen in many ways. Here are a few from highest to lowest reliability:
1. Psychedelics: high dose guided psychedelic experiences (high intensity but short lived)
2. Meditation: long term committed meditation practice (more gradual and deeply rooted into one's life)
3. Nature Immersion: stillness and deep awareness of nature connectedness
4. Solitude: extended solitude and silence (less predictable)
5. Near Death Experience: a risky way to go, not typically accessible (high variety of types)
6. Contemplation: deep engagement with philosophy of one's consciousness (mostly doesn't lead to experience but can)

Awareness of Interbeing does not imply that each individual should give up all of her possessions and meditate indefinitely away from society. While material possessions often promise more benefits to wellness than they deliver, and meditation tends to be an excellent practice for cultivating mindfulness and equanimity, it is unnecessary to proscribe an extremist path to all people. (Willoughby Britton) In making an analogy to physical health and food it may be that meditation is like a protein packed superfood and possessions like sugar, but the mind and body both may be served in many ways, each unique to the contextual needs and preferences of the individual. (Seligman, PERMA) While an awareness of Interbeing may inherently guide individuals towards more healthy lifestyles aligned with a symbiotic orientation to life, it does not demand an extremist spiritual path.

THICH NHAT HANH
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“True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There's no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected. Once you are aware of that you are no longer caught in the idea that you are a separate entity.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh

“The food I eat was once the sunshine, the rain and the earth. I am the cloud, the river and the air at this very moment, so I know that in the past I was also a cloud, a river and the air... Interbeing means you cannot be by yourself alone; you can only inter-be... You are empty of your separate self, but full of the cosmos.” 
 - Thich Nhat Hanh

“People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one's perception of reality.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh 

“You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh  

““To be is to be Inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. “I am made of earth, water, air and fire. The water I drink was once a cloud. The food I eat was once the sunshine, the rain and the earth. I am the cloud, the river and the air at this very moment, so I know that in the past I was also a cloud, a river and the air. I was a rock; I was the minerals in the water. This is not a question of belief in reincarnation; this is the history of life on Earth. We have been gas, sunshine, water, fungi and plants. We were single-celled beings. The Buddha said that in one of his former lives, he was a tree, he was a fish, he was a deer. This is not superstition. Every one of us has been a cloud, a deer, a bird, a fish and we continue to be these things today.
- Thich Nhat Hanh


SCIENCE

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty.”  
- Albert Einstein

“The elements that make up the world are patterns of dependency and interweaving. In other words, they are relationships. When we are fully aware, we see that there are only relationships. All relationships are patterns of interaction. So they are, by definition, dynamic; they are patterns of change. There are no individual things, but only ongoing processes. These processes are made up of other, constantly changing, processes. All of reality is combinations of patterns of relationships in process. This is the foundation of "interbeing" a term defined by Thich Nhat Hanh.”
- Suzann Robins

“Interbeing is a very natural term. It means more than interconnection or interdependency, which kind of suggest separate selves having relationship. Interbeing is more of an understanding that we are relationship. That my very existence depends or draws from or includes your existence. So my well being is intimately connected to your well being or to the wellbeing of the river, the forest, people across the world, and so forth. Because I’m not really separate from you.  And that means that in the story of well being whatever I do to the world will come back to me somehow.”
- Charles Eisenstein

“Each of us is a result. We are an effect at the end of a beginningless and endless stream of cause. The circumstances of every action in the universe from the beginning of time resulted in the coalescence at a particular time and place of what we call ourselves. This same process results in trees, clouds, stones and grasses and all other living creatures with whom we share the precious gift of consciousness. In fact we are of the same source because each and every thing is a particular expression of one seamless whole.”
- Clark Ratcliffe

“With a greater understanding comes a greater sense of wonder, and a greater realization, that we are a part of, and not apart from - the rest of nature. 
- Anil Seth 
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 “The way to think about our selves is not as a little dictator telling our brain what to do.  Our selves are the emergent phenomenon that we get from all of the different parts of the brain [and environment] coming together to make us who we are.”  
- Sean Carroll

“The fundamental unit of biology is therefore not the "self," but the network.”
-David Haskell
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‍ “Schrodinger once said: ‘Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you and all other conscious beings as such, are all in all.  Hence, this life you are living of yours is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.  Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground stretched out upon mother Earth with a certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.’  Even for the scientist there is a sense of wholeness and a sense of oneness with nature, with earth, and to some degree he felt that was the relationship that he had to embrace, that was part of what his scientific perspective was all about.  He felt that scientists should view themselves in relationship to the world around them as a oneness.  Everything is connected.  And science was a way of helping towards that connection.”
- Andrew Newberg
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“We came to realize that reality isn’t really well described as an atomistic system.  The parts aren’t distinct, but related to each other.  There are relationships, be they gravitational, parental, or political.  And we cannot really understand the properties or behaviors of the individual separate from the relationships in which the individuals evolved.  As a result the picture of reality had to be enlarged, so that we held that what really existed was a set of individuals, and their relations.  In physics this meant we not only had atoms, but energy and forces.  In biology, this meant we not only had organisms but species and selection pressures.  In psychology, sociology, and economics, we not only had people with minds, social positions, and wealth, but power structures and institutions.  But then, in each case, we were forced to make a further generalization, where reality was seen as a unified whole - where the seeming individuals became embedded aspects of a single coherent larger existence.  In physics we lost atoms, subatomic particles, and the forces between them to the field -  where we thought what were individual bits are just vibratory modes and field values.  With advances in data analytics, the combination of social science and technology seems to be forcing us to come to the same conclusion about ourselves and our social world.  We aren’t the individuals we think we are, living the individual existences we think we’re with our indomitable free will.  Yes, we have relationships that influence us (ask anyone and they’ll have stories of mentors, teachers, and parents who helped them become who they are, heroes whom they looked up to, who inspired them to follow the path they choose)  But now we see we may need to take that last holistic step with ourselves as well.
- Steven Gimbel
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“Does the move to seeing society as an emergent web with a collective reality that affects us in strongly predictable ways mean that ultimately we’ll have to redefine reality without the self?”...We’ve seen that in the case of physical, biological, psychological, and sociological realms, we’ve moved through three stages in thinking about what really exists.  Starting each time by seeing reality as comprised of atomistic individuals, to seeing reality as  a set of interconnected individuals, where the relations are important to the objects, and finally as a holistic system, unified and coherent in structure ...Remember that Albert Einstein won his nobel prize for that we need to think of light as being both particle and wave.  A particle is an entity unto itself, an independently existing thing.  A wave is a disturbance in a medium - no air, no soundwaves.  Sound is just a state of the air.  These seemed irreconcilable pictures.  It seemed it had to be one or the other.  But Einstein showed us that the real world is more complex than our categories.  That it had to be a complicated marriage of the two.  In the same way, perhaps data analytics and our online lives show us the same thing in terms of the self.  Perhaps we too are social particles and waves.  That our reality is as intricate and multifaceted as the world of atoms.”
- Steven Gimbel
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“The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.”
- Neil DeGrasse Tyson
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The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature. The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
- Carl Sagan
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“What we’ve discovered at the core basis of the universe... is a single universal field of intelligence, a field which unites gravity with electromagnetism, light with radioactivity, with the nuclear force - so that all the forces of nature, and all the so called particles of nature - quarks, leptons, protons, neutrons - are now understood to be one.  They’re all just different ripples on a single ocean of existence.  That’s called the unified field, or superstring field.  And it’s a mathematical tour de force, but we have realized Einstein’s dream.  He dedicated half his life to discovering this unified field, and now in the context of the super string that has been achieved... It is ultimately the field of consciousness.  And all our separate consciousness, wherever there is consciousness, is merely consciousness by virtue of the fact that - my consciousness, your consciousness - are ultimately that.  Everything in the universe is really nothing but that; planets, trees, people, animals, we are all just waves of vibration of this underlying, unified superstring field.”   
- John Hagelin
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Right now, we know one great example of things with intelligence and purpose and that's us, and our brains, and our own human intelligence. What else is like that? The answer, I had at first assumed, is that there are the systems of nature. They do what they do, but human intelligence is far beyond anything that exists naturally in the world. It's something that's the result of all of this elaborate process of evolution. It's a thing that stands apart from the rest of what exists in the universe. What I realized, as a result of a whole bunch of science that I did, was that is not the case... if we think about a brain—what is a brain doing? A brain is taking certain input, it's computing things, it's causing certain actions to happen; it's effectively generating a certain output. We can think about all sorts of systems as effectively doing computations, whether it's a brain, whether it's a cloud responding to the different thermal environment that it finds itself in. We can ask ourselves, are our brains doing vastly more sophisticated computations than happens in these fluids in the atmosphere?  I had first assumed that the answer to that was, yes, we are carefully evolved, we're doing much more sophisticated stuff than any of these systems in nature. But it turns out that's not the case. It turns out that there's this very broad equivalence between the kinds of computations that different kinds of systems do... The thing that came out of lots of science stuff that I've done is this realization that intelligence and computation are the same thing. There's computation all over the universe, whether it's in a turbulent fluid producing some complicated pattern of flow, whether it's in the celestial mechanics of some interaction of an asteroid with this, that, and the other, or whether it's in brains... It's another part of the Copernican story, so to speak. We used to think Earth was the center of the universe. Now at least we think we're special because we have intelligence and nothing else does. I'm afraid the bad news is that that isn't a distinction. By the way, that lack of a distinction is pretty critical for thinking about the future of the human condition.
- Stephen Wolfram
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The concept of 'I', as a single unified whole making all decisions continuously,  is an illusion created by our own subconscious minds.
- Michio Kaku
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“I am made up of a 100 billion neurons.  When I die they will still be there, but I won’t be me any more.  I will be dead.  So that means who I am is not about the existence of the neurons, it’s about what they do and how they interact [with each other and the environment].”
- David Eagleman
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“Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I,” and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness—free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.”
- Sam Harris

“I am claiming that if you look for this ‘I,’ this feeling that you are calling ‘I’, this sense of being a thinker of thoughts and a subject inside your head - if you look closely enough, and this is where the disciplined techniques of introspection like meditation come in - you will find that that feeling is absent.  That it actually disappears upon sufficient inquiry.  And this is the experience of self-transcendence that is at the core of spirituality.”
-Sam Harris“

Another claim I make in the book, which comes to this issue of self-transcendence is that:  We know that the ego, the sense of being in an unchanging self, an unchanging thinker of thoughts and experiencer of experience, is an elaborate construct and ultimately an illusion.  And we know neurologically it doesn’t make any sense.  There is no place in the brain where your ego or your soul can be hiding.  There is no one spot in the brain where all of the processing that creates our mental lives and our experience comes together.”
- Sam Harris



CULTURE, RELIGION, & SPIRITUALITY

"When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and above as the below ... then shall you enter [the Kingdom] ... I am the Light that is above them all, I am the All, the All came forth from Me and the All attained to Me.  Cleave a [piece of] wood, I am there; lift up the stone and you will find Me there."  
- Jesus, The Gospel According to Tomas

"I am in my Father and you in me and I in you"
- Jesus (John 14:18-20)

“The eyes through which I see God are the same eyes through which God sees me.” 
- Meister Ekhart

“You are not in the universe, you are the universe, an intrinsic part of it.  Ultimately, you are a focal point where the universe is becoming aware of itself.” 
- Ekhart Tolle
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"Imagine that you are a single electron flickering in and out of the quantum vacuum.  As a single particle you feel like ‘me,’ and individual.  But in reality you are an activity of the quantum field.  And in your guise as a wave instead of a particle you exist everywhere.  In our daily lives we are accustomed to feeling like individuals, while overlooking that at another level every person is an activity of the universe.  What is true for an electron is true for structures like the human body that are constructed from electrons and other elementary particles."
- Deepak Chopra

“This seemingly solid, concrete, independent, self-instituting I under its own power that appears actually does not exist at all.”
- Dali Lama

“I am he as you are he as you are me, and we are all together.”
- The Beatles

““I” am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose, and be available - all of its constituent parts - to nature, to reorganize into another pattern.  To me that is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be a part of that process.”
- Emily Levine



PHILOSOPHY

"What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call "here and now". You are something that the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep down you is the whole universe."
- Alan Watts

‍“Every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out... everyone of us is actually a pinhole through which the fundamental light - that is the existence itself - looks out.”
- Alan Watts
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"You yourself are the eternal energy which appears as this universe. You didn't come into this world, you came out of it, like a wave from the ocean."
- Alan Watts

"To bring us closer, let’s use thought experiment #2. There is a device, called a Teledream. It works like a television, except you get to experience each character in the movie in first-person. It’s like a dream. You forget that you are the person lying in bed dreaming. You believe that you are the character in the dream. You have memories and friends who might only exist in your dream. When the movie ends, it replays but this time you experience another character in the movie. The movie keeps replaying until you experience every character in the movie, from the hero to the villain, without you realising during the movie that you are both the hero and the villain. When you are the hero, you don’t remember that you just played the villain, so you naturally believe that you are the hero, and the villain is not you (or have not been or will not be you).  What if we are in such a movie right now, where we are all characters being experienced by the same person? Is it really that hard to believe?"
- Daniel Kolak
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"I claim that the borders between us are more like borders between oceans than like the borders between pebbles or lakes and though we can for practical and social purposes use them to draw boundaries between us, the boundaries we draw—on a deeper level—do not really matter, in the sense that they do not track any deep metaphysical truths about the nature of persons.  The boundaries we draw along the borders between us exist only in our maps of ourselves, not in ourselves as we are: personal identity is not border-bound."
-Daniel Kolak
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“It may be that our individuality is not ontological; it is an illusion caused by extremely thin, extremely sharp pseudo-boundries between minds. In this Open Individualist view, there are no vertical walls between you and other conscious experiences… only very steep walls that give rise to the illusion of separation.
- Andres Emilsson
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"When a man loves a woman, so that her life is present in his own, the you of her eyes allows him to gaze into a ray of the eternal you."
-Martin Buber

“A decision, the freest of my actions, just happens.  Like hiccups inside me.  Or like a bird singing outside of me.  Such a way of seeing things is vividly described by a modern zen master, the late So Ke Anh Sasuke:  ‘One day I wiped out all such notions from my mind.  I gave up all desire.  I discarded all the words with which I thought and stayed in quietude.  I felt a little queer, as if I were being carried into something.  Or as if I were touching some power unknown to me.  And.. zzzittt - I entered.  I lost the boundary of my physical boundary.  I had my skin of course, but I felt I was standing in the center of the cosmos.  I spoke, but my words had lost their meaning.  I saw people coming towards me, but all were the same man.  All were myself.  I had never known this world.  I believed that I was created, but now I must change my opinion.  I was never created.  I was the cosmos.  No individual Mr. Sasaki existed.  It would seem then that to get rid of the subjective distinction between me and my experience - through seeing that my idea of myself is not myself - is to discover the actual relationship between myself and the outside world.”
- Alan Watts
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"God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with.  But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars.
- Alan Watts
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"God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes. -Alan Watts
“We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.  As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’  Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
-Alan Watts
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“The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body—a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature."“This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.  The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world "outside" us is largely hostile.We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be "I." The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.  The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly.
- Alan Watts

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“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ” 
- Alan Watts