In our culture we’ve been trained for individual differences to stand out. So you look at each person and immediately you think brighter, dumber, older, younger, richer, poorer. We make all these dimensional distinctions, put them into categories and treat them that way. And we get so that we only see others as separate from ourselves in the ways in which they’re separate. One of the dramatic characteristics of experience is being with another person and suddenly seeing the ways in which they are like you, not different from you, and experiencing the fact of that which is essence in you, and which is essence in me, is indeed one; the understanding that there is no other. It is all one. I wasn’t born Richard Alpert, I was just born a human being and then I learned this whole business of who I am, and whether I’m good or bad, achieving or not. All that’s learned along the way.
