**\#️⃣ Tags:** #Wisdom > **🌱 Planted:** Wed 13 November 2024 --- > [!quote] > Look, here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples. And we call it an apple tree because the tree apples. That's what it does. > > Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that at least on the planet Earth the thing peoples, in just the same way that an apple tree apples. > > Because you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree. If evolution means anything, it means that. > > — [[Publish/Elements/People/人 Alan Watts|人 Alan Watts]] The universe is a conscious, living, breathing organism. We couldn't be separate from it even if we wanted to be.   Yet we often think (and act like) we are separate. But, how could it be any other way? Everything that there is and everything that there ever will be, is made from the same substance. Call it what you like: energy, spirit, awareness, consciousness. Whatever it is, the substrate we've evolved and appeared from is the same. The world, the universe, is one giant interaction of an infinite amount of complex and interrelated self-organising systems, each interacting and having influence on one another. It is not reductive, it is emergent. So rather than being something that is separate to this world, you are instead something that is deeply connected to this world and everything in it. --- **➡️ Next:** - [[Parts come together to reveal new wholes beyond what they are alone]] - [[Language causes the inseparable to become separable]]