There is an apple on the tree. It is external. If you eat it, it becomes internal: it will be your blood, your bones, your marrow. When does it become internal? How does the external become internal? And one day you will die, and all that was inside you will be again outside, back into the earth. It will nourish some apple tree, more apples will grow.

You breathe in and it becomes internal. Then you have to breathe out. Where does the breath become internal? Watch. That’s what Buddha says: Watch your breathing – and see where it becomes internal and where it becomes external again. Just watching your breath, all distinctions will disappear. You will see it is the same circle. The internal is the external, and the external is the internal.

The moment you see this in your breath circle, you have solved a great problem, a great dichotomy is dissolved. Then you are no more a body or a soul. Then you don’t talk about these words. Then all these words are just childish – maybe useful, but they have no reality, no truth. Just useful, utilitarian.

You ask me: “How does the internal world of experience relate to the external reality?”

It does not relate! Because they are not two. They are one. It often becomes a great question. But the question is basically false, so all the answers that have been given. are false. Once you start by a wrong question, you will arrive again and again at wrong conclusions.

For at least five thousand years, man has been puzzled by one thing: the body/mind problem. How do they relate? First you divide…division is false. There is no body and no mind separate. It is body mind. It is one entity. The mind is only a way of looking at the body, and the body is also a way of looking at the mind. It is the same reality looked at from different angles. It is not two. But once you have thought that body and mind are two, then the problem arises: How do they relate?

Just watch a small action: you think to raise your hand – how do you do it? Such a simple phenomenon, raising your hand up – how do you do it? Philosophers have been puzzled and have not been able to answer it, how it happens, because of this internal and external: they are the mind and the body is being raised – how can the body follow the order from the mind?

Mind is invisible, immaterial; body is visible, material – how can matter follow mind? What is the link? How is it translated into body language? How does it correspond? But to me, basically the problem is wrong: there are not two entities in you – it is all one. Then the problem disappears.

You ask me how the internal relates with the external reality. There are not two realities. There is no question of internal and external. They don’t relate. They are one. How do two lovers relate with one another? If they are lovers, they don’t relate – they are simply one. In love they know the unity. If they are not lovers, then they relate. Then relationship is not much. It is more conflict and less relating. It is more fight than being together.