A human being is a part, limited in time and space, of the whole that we call the universe. He experiences himself and his feelings as cut off from the rest – an optical illusion of his consciousness.
Albert Einstein
What we consciously experience as individual is selected by our brains from a much larger field of consciousness.
William James
We aren’t separate, even if it seems that way. We never leave the environment into which we have been born. We are the continuation of the flows of reality which preceded us, which surge through us, and stretch forwards into a future where we become the memories held by others.
Einstein and James are making this point in these two quotations and it’s something I’ve been very aware of for a long time. We are much more deeply entangled in all that is than we realise. The reductionist mechanistic and atomistic models of the universe present us with a very distorted view of reality.
But there’s something else important in these quotes – we select out, or we “abstract” a limited portion of the whole to give ourselves the illusion of separateness.
This is a fascinating insight – it suggests our brains create our everyday experience by filtering, by sifting, and by selecting from the whole, and, in association with this, focused on that selection in a particular way.
In other words consciousness exists everywhere and our own unique experience of it is partial and temporary.
We are never disconnected from the Whole. We are never alone. We are never cut off or separated. It just appears that way in certain circumstances and at certain times. I think that’s why we should practice being connected, we should call to mind the reality that we belong.
What can you do today to experience some connectedness?
Heroes Not Zombies 
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