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We all live on the same planet, but each of us lives in their own world.  We are (each and all), nevertheless, only temporary guests.
- Tan Laoshi
 
In India, the Vedas and the Upanishads painted a cyclical picture of the universe.  Right and wrong actions increase the positive and negative potential energy ('apurva') associated with each person.  Apurva is eventually released (in this or the next life) and causes good or evil to the person.  Basically, misfortune is caused by prior wrongful deeds.  It is not only deserved but even required.  Life is a loop from the individual back to the individual.  This was cosmic justice totally independent of the gods.  Wisdom is the realization that everything is suffering, but the realization of suffering does not lead to pessimism: it leads to salvation. Salvation does not require any change in the world. It requires a realization that everything is part of an absolute, or Brahman.  Salvation comes from the union of the individual soul ('atman') with the universal soul ('Brahman').  'Maya', the plurality of the world is an illusion of the senses.  Salvation comes from 'moksha': liberation from maya and experience of Brahman.  By experiencing the divine within the self, one reaches pure knowledge and becomes one with the eternal, infinite, and conscious being.  Nothing has changed in the world: it is the individual's state of mind that has changed. Self-knowledge is knowledge of the absolute.

Buddha focused on the suffering, a ubiquitous state of living beings, but ended up denying the existence of the self: only events exist, the enduring self is an illusion (the 'atman' is an illusion).  Each moment is an entirely new existence, influenced by all other moments.  To quote a Buddhist scripture, 'only suffering exists, but no sufferer is to be found'.  Suffering can be ended by overcoming ignorance and attachment to Earthly things.
- Piero Scaruffi
 
Our habitual self-perception as a hermetically isolated consciousness imprisoned within the boundaries of our individual body is an illusion we can learn to see through, and the more we exercise this faculty of extending our self-identification to the rest of life the more we may be able to grasp the deeper meaning of the insight that we are 'cells in the body of Gaia'. Our ability to navigate the perilous waters that lie ahead may depend significantly on the extent to which we avail ourselves of this possibility.
- David Midgley
 
The move from seeing ourselves as separate beings placed on Earth ("the world was made for us”) to seeing ourselves as a self-reflective expression of Earth ("we were made for the world”) is an immense transformation in human identity.
- Michael Dowd