The way I see it, Buddhism attempts the impossible, and somehow succeeds on occasions. When we were all infants/toddlers, we didn't think in words. We really didn't even see ourselves as separate from anything else. A two-year-old is just drinking it all in, (let's say on a walk in the park with her parents). The smells, the warmth of the sun, a dog walks by (all animals are Buddhists), your mom hugs you, you're thirsty and they get you a drink... does "God" matter to such a child? Of course not- they are God! A tree isn't a "t-r-e-e"- it's this tall thing that's just as much alive as you are, and you know it, without understanding it.

     The koans of Zen Buddhism try to get us back there. Words fail- once you've named something, you've quantified it, defined it; made it separate when it both is and is-not so. So you get the prompt: "what did your face look like before you were born?" from a Zen master. There's no answer. That is the answer. (It's also not the answer). and so on...

     Here's a good experiment: choose any word- your name, or whatever else, and speak it over and over, about once a second. In a minute or less, you'll notice something...

     Nirvana or enlightenment is being able to get back to those wordless, thoughtless days. We're all separate entities, yes. We have names, we're here in a specific time and place. But simultaneously, we are also just individual cells in the "mind-ground", like ants in a colony, and our function there is timeless. The individual ant doesn't matter- and yet it does.

     Often, in the Zen stories, when a student asked a master some pretentious or ego-based question- the answer would be the master swatting them with a stick! That moment of wordless anger or humiliation the student experiences is the window back to the source.