"For the philosopher and neuroscientist Francisco Varela, this pluralism and otherness at the center of the self was a lifelong puzzle—one that a good scientist did not simply push off the table, but rather one in which the principle of biological existence reveals itself. For him, a being is fathomless, a sort of spiral whose firm edges are delineated on different levels by various agents: The cells, the organs, the body. But in the middle of the vortex engendered by a life form in the material world, there is a void. At our center, which comprises nothing, like the hollowness in the middle of a whirlwind, we fall back into the world. Every being is so deeply rooted in others that it is never identical with itself in the final analysis—its essence comprises far more what it is not.
This same nothingness delights us when the meadows lie quiet and full below the night sky, when the small glowing insects fall into their shadows and fade like dying stars. The meadow is a part of our body, folded outward, ready to be strolled through. It is one of our sensory organs in which we feel something that we would not otherwise understand properly."
