Very interesting talk. I don’t imagine this comment will be seen, but I feel it’s important to clarify some Buddhist concepts. I would argue, as a Buddhist, that the description is probably a bit of a stretch, but I know where it is coming from. <br><br>In Buddhism, a core concept is non-self which can also be described as emptiness. This isn’t a negative emptiness as westerners might conceive it. What it means is that all things have elements of other things, and there is no existing separate from everything else. A flower is made of sunlight, carbon that we exhale, and water from the rain. We can’t separate the flower from the non-flower elements.<br><br>Because nothing can exist by itself, it means that the sense of self that we all have is an illusion. When we meditate on non-self, we are tapping into this reality, and it makes us aware of how we are not actually a separate entity. This can be immensely freeing.<br><br>Another way to conceptualize this is Indra’s net. Indra’s net is a hypothetical geometrical structure where a round pearl exists at every intersection. This is a reflective pearl, and in this way all the pearls exist within all of the other pearls. <br><br>I think of this when I hear a bird. Because the bird song is entering my consciousness, I begin to mirror the bird and my mind starts to reflect the world outside of my own experience. When we are most awake, we are reflecting all of the non-self elements that make up our experience. So to feel integrated with the universe is to mediate on non-self until you can feel the universe reflected in your mind, which is probably not the same thing as saying everything has consciousness. <br><br>In fact, a common refrain is that the wave rises and the wave falls, but the wave is just water. We try to be like the water.,(reply>), I guess I don’t think  that consciousness has anything to do with emptiness. Things are empty in spite of consciousness. Our consciousness is what has difficulty understanding emptiness. It’s not as if me understanding that I am made of water that comes from a glacier means that the glacier and I share a mind. I guess the brain has glacier elements in it, but I don’t think that makes them a shared consciousness. I think it kind of makes the concept of consciousness null. It’s a temporary state that we experience.