What if?

What if there is no outside? What if all that appears out there, out side our body that we call the world, is actually already inside us and has entered us unseen for as long as we can remember. Not like the connecting, long, spherical portal in the science fiction film Donnie Darko that connects one body to another but a vortex of energy that pervades the very flesh and bones of us, so that there is no liminal zone between self and the things that we see as apparently separate from self, but all the time part of the environment like us. The breathing in and out one action. What if this claimed outside is porous, continuously entering and leaving the body without a trace because the process is indistinguishable, Our brain must know that it is enclosed within our skull. It perceives its parameters - skull, bone as a wall, a dividing line, all fenced off, pertaining to the physical body. That’s how it knows me from not me. It deceives us by imaging that the other space that it does not occupy is actually an outside. But what if it’s incorrect? What if that space filled with the products of the world is an extension of self as non-physical body? If we close our eyes the established other space of the world disappears into darkness that envelopes and conjoins self. No longer a body discreetly different from the world but a body of and in the world. Reality dissolved. A lingering fog that devours all shapes and things and people until they and we are no longer distinguishable. The outside inside as it has always been. So, what if there is no outside, nowhere to escape to from self an inherent part of the reality we understand to be true. What if we are just part of the landscape? Seen from space we humans are lost among so much sea and land. What if?