Last night while on the pot thumbing through Chodron I thought;

The Four Noble Truths are a spiritual equivalent to general relativity. If everything is transient, a lot is perception or preconception, and there’s no real barrier between us, then what IS real? There’s got to be a constant and that’s the constant.

@Leucrotta I mean, I'm myself, and I'm not you, and you're not me. So I'd say there's definitely dividing lines between people.

(unless that's not what "barrier" means but nobody ever explains it.)

@frost how big a difference is there really between all of us? We all need food and shelter, have hopes, fears and dreams. We’re all going to get old and die (me sooner than you, though). Gets into lack of duality, we simultaneously are the same while being very different in ways worth honoring.

@Leucrotta yeah but "similar" does not mean "the same", even /identical/ does not mean "the same person" (I'm /really/ similar to my headmates but they are not me either – heck, if you copied me the clone would not be me).

@Leucrotta but like, if you mean "barriers" as in "fundamental differences in ways of being", then yeah. Everyone's fundamentally pretty similar.

But if you mean "no barriers" as in "I am you and you are me", then nope.

@Leucrotta (...I'm probably assuming something different than what you're talking about because wheeee I've got triggers. 🙃 And we've run into some WEIRD scary shit before.)