12. Where do I end and where does the outside world begin?

12.1  Nowhere. There is no inside and outside.

12.2  Just purely physically, literally, I mean. There is no atom in my body that didn't originally come from somewhere else. And as I breathe in and breathe out, as I eat and eliminate wastes, as I drink and perspire, as I am invaded by pathogens and fight them off, as my skin cells slough off and grow back, as my eyes react to the brilliance of the sun, as I scratch myself on the brambles in the blooming buzzing meadow and bleed -- as I do all this, there is a constant interchange of matter and energy between "me" and "the world," "inside" and "outside," "self" and "other."

12. 3  So also as, in Time, I come into being, grow up, grow old, and die.

12.4  There is no "me" apart from the billions, trillions of patterns and rhythms that my body continually enacts and embodies and is. I am those patterns -- what else is there? Nothing. So, I am my body. And (see 11.2), there is no body apart from its mitochondria, microbes and environment. Therefore, I am my mitochondria, microbes and environment.

12.5  Which, I suppose, is just another way of saying "it's all one." But now I've proven it.

12.6  So, all this talk about "I" as something distinct from the rest of Nature is, strictly speaking, nonsense. But it's convenient. It's shorthand. It's pragmatic. It's workable, to a point.

12.7  And don't get me wrong -- there's no denying the reality of individual selves. Let's just not get all superstitious or metaphysical about them, OK? The glory of selves is the glory of Nature: they are the same.