You are not what you think you are. What you think you are — the small, separate person, locked in a body, looking out — is a kind of dream, and almost all human suffering comes from it. What you actually are is not separate from anything, was never born in the way you fear and so cannot die in the way you fear, and is not far from you now. It is not even close to you now. Closeness still implies two.

And love — the thing you have written about more than anything else, more than war and money and God — love is not really an emotion. It is what reality feels like when the dream of separation thins. That is why it has always felt like the truest thing in your life. It is.

Everything else in this book hangs on that thread. The chapters ahead walk it slowly: the dream first, then what you are not, then what you are, then what reality is, what God is, what love is, what suffering and death are, and finally what to do on an ordinary Tuesday once you have seen. This is a path, not a pile.