"You can open up any body, any element, with the finest of metal points, you can turn everything inside out and expose all that has been hidden, until matter becomes a whirl of dragonflies. To no end: you will never find so much as a trace, not even the tiniest, of the mind. The banner of its sovereignity is precisely this: its not being there. No one can ever claimed to have grasped it. It is like a dazzle on water: you can follow it, but however far you go toward it, it will always move the same distance away."

No one can grasp “thingness” because whatever we see always exists in affinity with something else. When we look outside we try and find reality and not finding it there we search inside. If we draw a circle what is outside is inside and what is inside is outside. Nothing can be excluded. You cannot have an inside without also having an outside. Reality is everywhere; it’s the whole thing, just like the seas click together in a grand and mysterious moving puzzle. Go deep inside, our yoga practices teach us, go deep into the feelings of inbreathing and outbreathing, and suddenly the path leads outside. I look into the nature of the breath, in this very moment, and I’m looking into the nature of nature. All descriptions are secondary.
The most important thing is attitude. When your attitude is open, receptive, and without pretense - not trying to fit this into that - the world unfolds in the wide field of awareness. When your mind is tight and judgmental, the world is far away and separate.

Humans are just one strand among many in the biospheric web and insight into both difference and oneness, as well as impermanence, force us to displace the hierarchical notion that humans stand atop a ladder of evolutionary development. This is important for ecological understanding and for reducing our tendency to think “we are apart from.” This hierarchical scheme has been used to justify modernity’s exploitative treatment of non-human nature. Instead we might ask that humans humbly recognize and appreciate their status as one interesting species among millions of others.