You were taught that you’re in here and the world is out there.
Subject on one side. Object on the other. A pane of glass between you and everything else.
This is the founding assumption of Western thought since Descartes, built so deep into how we see that it feels like reality rather than a choice.
It isn’t reality, it’s a habit of attention.
Watch what happens when you give something your full attention.
Not a glance, not a categorisation, but genuine, unhurried presence.
The boundary softens.
Not because you’ve dissolved into the thing, but because the strict division between observer and observed turns out to be something you were doing, not something that was there.
The plant already knows this. It doesn’t defend itself from the sun. It opens.
That same quality of attention is available to us.
Not ecstasy in the dramatic sense. Ecstasy in its original Greek meaning: a standing away from the self.
Becoming genuinely open to what’s in front of you, rather than processing it from behind the glass.
You don’t disappear, you just stop being a fortress.
The world was never separate from you.
You were just paying the wrong kind of attention.