As soon as we translate the unseen world into shared symbols, we have reduced the infinite to the finite, the authentic to the artificial, the natural to the manmade. We have separated observer from observed and created a barrier that isolates us from our environment like the walls of a cage. Integration is the defining quality of the awakened state, meaning self and environment are not two but one. As if it’s not enough that life is but a dream, most of us are stuck behind closed eyes – a dream within a dream – so even knowing where we are in the dream sense is withheld from us.

Manmade systems wall us off from our undivided nature, splitting authentic unity into artificial duality and creating the illusion of segregation where only integration exists. By inserting that artificial barrier, we are set apart from our natural environment and thus self-consigned to a divided state of self/other instead of the unified state of otherlessness. By removing that artificial barrier, by opening our eyes and seeing for ourselves, beholder and beheld are re-integrated and unity is restored.