We live in a world on fire. Everywhere we turn, there's discord, strife, violence. It feels like everything is falling apart, and the global suffering never seems to end. What can we do? Some say, we must eradicate separation and experience Unity, in order to step back from the brink of destruction. We must come together As One, and embrace a sense of universal connection. The only problem is, separation is central to our human experience. We are separate beings, distinct from each other. And we constantly seek to distinguish ourselves from others, as part of our community-building work. This book explores how we can embrace separation and distance as a vital part of our human lives. It asks us to look within - to the very structure of our cells - to find answers... and ultimately meaning... in the way we're built, and the way we are built to connect. Separation is what we are. Connection is what we do. Join this journey into the innermost workings of the amazing human body, and let it change your ideas about the outermost workings of the human species. IN DEPTH In this work, I explore an alternative view: namely, that rather than being our enemy, Separation - or Distance - from a perceived Other is at once endemic to our human nature and an invaluable bridge to the connection we hungrily seek. And only by accepting the fact of our separation can we truly learn to creatively navigate the spaces that divide us. Separation and Distance is, in fact, a fundamental component of our participation in this thought-form theater we term "reality", beginning at the most basic of our sensory functions and extending throughout our entire human infrastructure. Experience of Distance from Others is not due to inferior design or devolved consciousness. Quite the contrary - it's part and parcel of who we are, how we're built. In this work, I propose that our acceptance of and successful integration of Separation, combined with our ongoing impulse to close the Distance between Ourselves and the Other, is the very thing which provides the essential influx, aggregation, and processing of "data points" which inform and evolve our human experience, raising it from mere existence to engaged, expanding evolution. Starting from the following basic fact about our physical condition, that at our most minuscule neural level, we are separated from direct contact with the world around us, I will explore how: due to this separation, we never have direct contact with anything, and our experience of reality depends on a complex yet well-integrated process of data detection, decoding, and interpretation, which "fills in the blanks" in ways that are both enriching and problematic, rather than suffering from separation, our experience of ourselves and our world is continuously enriched and evolved as an end product of this process, and we can learn from our physical systems' in-born capabilities to address the issues of "Otherness", separation, and alienation in our outer world and actively, intentionally find commonality that makes us more than the simple sum of our connections. We need not vilify and excise all Separation and Distance and sense of Other from our roster of acceptable life experiences. Indeed, we can holistically embrace the contradictions of Separation and the tensions of Distance in our experienced reality, in much the same way that our physical systems do. Rather than banishing the experience of Distance as "unreality", I propose that we embrace it more fully as a building block of an expanded Reality and recognize the opportunities inherent in its gaps to take ourselves beyond the limits of our imagined constraints. For indeed, ultimately richness and meaning is added exponentially to our lives precisely because of the essential separateness of our natures.
