Eric Oliver

And I would often find myself having a hard time falling asleep because I was just convinced that there was some bear or cougar or axe-wielding maniac who was about to come and get me.

And one night I said, okay, I'm going to flip the script on this.

And I started thinking instead of hearing every rustle in the bushes as an imminent threat,

I would think of them as friendly hellos because all of these other creatures are my cousins in the life force.

We are all part of the same fire of life that has been going on this planet for at least 3.7 billion years.

We're all different expressions of this.

To use another metaphor, it's like we're all, there's one big tree of life and we're all just very, very different leaves.

And once I was able to sort of tap into that, this really deep feeling of kind of continuity and connection really just enveloped me.

That kind of lonely vulnerability that I oftentimes feel and carry around really went away.

Now, that was also a bit of an illusion because, yeah, sure, a lot of those animals probably would have happily made a meal out of me given the opportunity.

And it's both kind of a wonderful thing and a mixed blessing for us because on the one hand, it means we're never truly alone.

Like I said earlier, we are an amalgamation of different beings coming together that are underneath this experience of an eye, a singular eye.

And part of, I think, knowing ourselves and opening up our minds to ourselves is getting more in touch with a more collective sense of being, that I am just not an I, I am both this multicellular creature, but I'm also connected with everyone else around me.

My self processes do not exist in isolation.

They are the byproduct of my social interactions.

So we are deeply interconnected.

On the other hand, it also means that each of us doesn't really matter all that much.

And that's a bit of a gut punch, at least for me, because I like to believe that I'm special and, you know, that I'm distinctive, but really I'm not.

And so part of appreciating that is also letting go of this kind of egoistic conceit that somehow another, you know, I am distinct in the universe.

And I think the more that we can actually let go of that, the more peaceful our experience of being becomes.