Where Am I? 
There I was tapping on the closed shutters of the Nepali border crossing office at Mahendrenagar. It was fifteen minutes past the official opening time, and though I was in Nepal, I had a train to catch in neighbouring India.
As I had my passport stamped by the Nepali border control ‘officer’ who was wiping sleep from his eyes and wearing just a vest and a cloth around his legs, the whole idea of the ‘border’ seemed to me ridiculous.
Having spent six months in India, I now had to spend one night in neighbouring Nepal before I could re-enter India. An invisible line between two states had to be crossed.
Who carved the lines between territories around the world? Who drew the lines on the map separating humanity? Who built the walls between countries? How is it that you can change countries just by passing through one village?
“Borders are scratched across the hearts of men,” says author Marya Mannes. “By strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red.”
Native Wisdom
When the European settlers first arrived in the Americas, the Native Americans didn’t understand the idea of fences and ownership of land. They likened it to building fences in the sky, as who can own the sky?
Alas, their innocence and ignorance about ownership of land did not fare them well, as now, many are fenced into reservations.
Jump across the globe and in Australia, you see aborigines fighting for their land rights, the land of their ancestors, the land of their dreamtime, as again they did not see land as something that you can own.
At the moment, China is thinking of damning a river that flows between its borders to create hydroelectric energy. However, this river does not stop at the border with the next country, it goes on flowing beyond the border. Damning this river will have a direct environmental impact on the neighbouring countries. So who owns the river? Who owns its power?
And we don’t stop at ‘owning’ earth. We can buy a star and rename it Sarah. NASA searches for water on the moon by blowing holes in it… will we need a passport to visit the moon? In fact, who owns the moon?
Borders As Limits
As we build fences, walls and border crossings, we deepen the idea of separation. We become ‘us’ and ‘them’. We might even fight to preserve our ‘us-ness’ and certainly to keep ‘them’ out.
Whether its borders created by religion or resources, we pigeon-hole ourselves by feeling we belong, for example, to a certain race, political body, even football teams.
Perhaps it gives us some comfort to associate only with smaller and smaller communities that are just like us. It gives us definition.
Divide and conquer was the way armies managed to take over great swathes of land and the minds of its inhabitants, and now we seem quite happy to be defined by our borders.
We don’t always wear our hearts on our sleeves, but we wear the name of our country, our football team, our brand, our personality on our T-shirts. Even if it’s a T-shirt advertising our brand of yoga, we like to define ourselves.
“I am the kind of person who doesn't recognize borders,” says Angelina Jolie. “I don't understand why we think it is okay to keep someone within one border when they are unable to feed their family and when they could be getting help somewhere else. I don't see people as different so I don't understand the idea of borders in this world.”
Moving Forwards
I believe that if we start to recognize and celebrate our similarities rather than fight about our differences, we can start to drop our borders, our boundaries, our limitations.
Despite physical borders and the need for passports, maybe we can start to go beyond the definition or the personality that our countries give us.
If we look and don’t see ourselves in the faces of others, if we don’t see the similarities despite the difference in language, skin tone or culture, we are fooling ourselves.
It is my feeling that we need to share resources, share our plans, to create a ‘shared’ future; beyond separation, without exploitation, and remembering Yogi Bhajan’s mantra ‘If you can’t see God in all, you can’t see God at all.’