Consider a black and white, half-tone picture of a person and his surroundings. A half-tone picture is essentially a piece of white paper covered with black dots. The black dots vary in density to create contours and soft demarcations, like the demarcation between the image of the person and his surrounding environment. But if we magnify the picture to examine the dots more closely, we realize that it becomes difficult to tell where the image of the person ends and where his surroundings begin; demarcations then seem artificial and arbitrary. Hence, there is a hint that the universe is actually one and undivided.

Maybe appearances of individual objects in the physical world represent the "snake in the rope" according to the familiar analogy. Maybe there is actually nothing more than "a bunch of black dots on white paper." We rely on our memory -- our mental library of templates -- to conduct pattern recognition and say "Aha! I've found a match. I've identified an individual object." Attaining liberation (moksha) means to free ourselves from bondage in the prison cells of our mind, the labyrinth that houses our memories.

Perhaps the universe is just an enormous Rorschach test. In the inkspot, we can see a butterfly which appeals to us or we can see an ugly bat that causes aversion. Or we can simply see a black inkspot on white paper -- no butterfly...no bat...no snake in the rope.

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