We suffer because we erroneously believe we are separate. It’s why humans suffer as individuals, and it’s why humanity creates so much suffering as a collective.

As individuals we suffer because we create a psychological self-construct at a young age comprised of memories and mental stories, and we imbue that psychological self with the power of belief by identifying with it. There is nothing in the raw data of our immediate sensory experience which tells us that we’re a separate “me” character standing apart from the rest of the world who must secure its own interests against those of others, but because we identify with the psychological self-construct, we believe its stories telling us that this is the case.

The believed experience of being a tiny “me” character moving through linear time in an ever-changing world is one of constant fear, insecurity, lack, deficiency, and discontentment. It’s a completely false dilemma because we’ve never actually experienced separateness except in our own imaginations, but it feels real because we believe our mental stories about it.

We generate suffering in much the same way as a collective. We imagine ourselves to be separate from other humans, so we compete against them, and can even be convinced to fight wars against other groups of them. We imagine ourselves to be separate from nature, so we work to dominate and enslave it even when doing so destroys the biosphere we ourselves depend on for survival.

All our systems for driving human behavior at mass scale are built around the premise of competition. Competing against each other for jobs and wealth. Competing against rival businesses and corporations for money. Competing against other nations for planetary dominance. Competing against the non-human organisms of this planet for profit and security.

These systems of competition give rise to inequality, exploitation, poverty, injustice, oligarchy, violence, war, tyranny, and ecocide. And it’s all based on fictional stories with no real existence outside our own skulls.

Humanity has the ability to awaken from the dream of separation. Humans have been writing about this for thousands of years — that’s all Buddha was ever talking about. This potential has been sleeping within us this entire time, just waiting for the right moment to become activated.

The fact that enlightenment is a real thing that humans are very capable of attaining has massive implications for our species and the existential hurdles it faces at this point in history. It’s like a Chekhov’s gun that’s been sitting there since the opening scene of this play we’ve been acting out for millennia, and it is not unreasonable to suspect that the mounting pressures of our time may cause it to go off before the final curtain.

If humanity can unlock this latent potential, every single one of the problems we now face can be very easily resolved. As soon as we are no longer transfixed by hallucinations of separation, we’ll have the ability to move from a competition-driven species to a collaboration-driven one, because we’ll no longer be ruled by fear and insecurity. The propaganda which tells us to compete and hate and toil and hoard will no longer find any egoic purchase within us, and we can shrug off the old systems of control like a heavy coat on a warm day.

I see a great many reasons to have hope for the future, but one of the biggest is the fact that there’s this potential sitting right there within each of us just waiting to be unlocked. As our very survival on this planet is becoming increasingly threatened by the illusion of separation, we may find ourselves at the point where, to quote Anais Nin, “the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”