You're Not a Thing—You're a Wave
Understanding No Separation: You as an Expression of Your Environment
I’ve got a deceptively simple insight for you this week—one that might totally rearrange your understanding of yourself in the universe.
It landed for me after listening to one of my favorite spiritual teachers discuss birth and death in a way that has my brain reorganizing its understanding of life’s basics.1
Let’s see if I can pass that understanding on to you without devolving into woo-woo drivel.
The Lie of Separation
The insight is this: Language tricks us into seeing separation where none actually exists. We carve up reality with words in ways that give us power but don't reflect the true nature of things.
To start, consider your hand. You can point to it, name it, even paint its nails.
But where exactly does your "hand" end and your "arm" begin? The boundary is conceptual—useful for getting stuff done, but ultimately arbitrary. Your hand isn't separate from the rest of you any more than a wave is separate from the ocean.
This same principle applies to everything we think of as distinct "things" in the world.
Consider a tree…
You never see a tree separate from soil, sunlight, and the surrounding air unless you’ve yanked it out of the ground and shoved it into a glass box.
And if you did these things, it would quickly die.
The elements we think of as "sustaining" the tree aren't really separate from the tree. They are the tree.
The soil doesn't feed the tree—the soil is part of the tree system. The sun doesn't shine on the tree—the sun is part of what makes the tree possible. Remove any element, and the "tree" ceases to exist.
What we call a tree is actually a temporary organization of earth, water, air, and sunlight. A flowing process that we've frozen in language and called a "thing."
This principle extends to creatures in nature. A garden makes snails. A reef makes fish. A jungle makes monkeys.
These environments express themselves through the beings they produce, like vines popping grapes into existence. Grapes aren’t separate from the vine; animals aren’t separate from the habitats that shape them.
And humans? Alan Watts put it beautifully: "The Earth 'peoples' the way an apple tree 'apples.'"2
Where Did You Grow From?
Apparently, in some Asian languages, young children don't ask their nervous parents "Where did I come from?" but rather, "Where did I grow from?"
This gets at something essential.
Everything that keeps you alive is liquid, gases, and matter from your surroundings. You're still just more environment, temporarily organized in a walking, talking pattern.
We are, quite literally, animated compost.
When I really sat with that, I stopped seeing myself as a separate object and instead started seeing myself as an unfolding process.
But here’s where I ran into a problem…
The Illusion of Hard Starts and Stops
I initially struggled with thinking of life as this fluid, continuous process I’m describing because it’s bookended by a dramatic entrance and exit. Birth and death seem like such definitive markers of a beginning and an end.
But then I realized that even these apparently hard boundaries are conceptual illusions.
The moment we typically think of as the "start" of life—emerging from the womb—isn't really a beginning. We've been growing for nine months, sprouting like a bud on a plant. And before that, the genetic story stretches endlessly backward.
Similarly, what we call "death"—when the heart stops beating—isn't really an ending. Electrical impulses continue in the brain. Cellular processes continue in the body. The atoms that composed us return to the environment to be reorganized into new patterns.
What’s more, when I remembered that conscious awareness doesn't even align with these supposed start and end points, I got the tingles and things really started clicking.
Most of us don’t remember being born. Our sense of self takes a few years to boot up. You look at photos of baby-you and go, “Who is that potato?” Because it doesn’t feel like you.
Same is true on the way out. For many, death isn’t a sharp stop but a slow fade. Dementia, illness, sedation—we begin drifting before we’re technically gone.
So if consciousness—the thing that makes us feel like separate "selves"—doesn't even span our full biological existence, what exactly are we identifying with when we think of ourselves as distinct things?
The Continuous Wave of Becoming
Once I grasped that conscious awareness doesn't align with biological birth and death, I could more easily see that what we call life is one continuous flow—an endless process of becoming.
We don't have lives; we are life, temporarily localized.
The "hard starts" and "hard stops" we perceive aren't really that definitive. What we call life is actually a continuous process of birthing and dying, emerging and dissolving. You could arbitrarily say that you “switch” from growing to declining at the midpoint of your unknown lifespan, but that’s just more conceptual noise.
The point is that the environment is doing its thing—sprouting, blooming, peopling—through you.
We only feel separate because, somewhere along the way, consciousness flickered into awareness. We "thingified" ourselves, but you’re not a thing. You’re an event.
At some point, awareness landed in that event—you became aware of being—and because you could see yourself, you assumed you were separate. You drew a mental line around your body and said, "me."
We haven't even touched the cosmic scale, but it’s easy to extrapolate. If apple trees ‘apple’ and the Earth ‘peoples,’ then clearly, the universe ‘planets.’
Our solar system is a temporary organization of cosmic dust and energy. Our galaxy is a swirling pattern in space-time. The universe itself might be just one wave in an ocean of multiverses we can't even imagine.
At every level, what appears to be separate things are revealed to be processes, patterns, and waves in larger systems.
This is what spiritual traditions mean when they talk about "no separation" or "oneness." Not that everything is mushy and identical, but that the boundaries we perceive are conceptual conveniences rather than ultimate realities.
The truth? You never stopped being the vine, the tree, the soil, the Earth.
You just got self-conscious about it.
What This All Means
Realizing you’re a wave doesn’t diminish your significance—it deepens it.
Your anxieties about separation and death? That's the wave temporarily forgetting it's part of the ocean. The isolation you feel? That's the environment briefly losing track of its own creativity.
But waves don't actually separate from oceans, and you don't actually separate from the universe that's expressing itself as you.
So what does this mean for living your life?
To be honest, I don’t really know—I only just figured this out. But at first blush, I’d say it has an ethical implication that goes something like this:
We should aim to live out our day-to-day with more cooperation rather than competition and an appreciation for how profoundly our actions ripple outward, shaping the world just as the world shapes us.
Keep waving, friend. I'll catch you next week.
If this blew your mind a little bit, consider sticking around for more existential nudges, psycho-spiritual deep dives, and gentle reminders of who—and what—you really are. Subscribe to The Aussie Mystic to keep riding the wave.
Adyashanti. (2019). The most important thing, Volume 2: Discovering truth at the heart of life [Audiobook]. Sounds True.
Watts, A. (2011). The book: On the taboo against knowing who you are. Vintage.