Firstly, for the sake of this post I’d like you to leave all your values and beliefs, all you’ve ever learned behind for the moment. Hopefully in doing this you achieve maximum shift in perspective, as I did when I learned what I’m about to tell you. It’s also important to explain in full so you can perceive what there has been so far to the fullest.
You are stardust.
The Universe started 13.7 billion years ago with a single event, an explosion of unfathomable magnitude – the big bang. The primordial soup of superheated, supercharged particles cooled down eventually to form atoms. These atoms over millions of years smashed together to eventually form hot, vast dense clouds of gas. This gas eventually became so dense that particles started to smash into each other again, forming clusters of stars – galaxies.
Eventually stars finished their cycles and explode – a supernova, this supernova ejects massive amounts of the heavy elements that make you and I, forged at the stars core, into the surrounding vicinity. Enough time passes and these elements clump together due to the forces of gravity, creating planets – and the Earth we live on.
Roughly 3.8 billion years ago, after the Earth cooled enough for the oceans to form, life emerged. This life started with simple single-celled processes that replicated themselves. Eventually they started to turn energy from the sun and geothermal vents into energy to sustain themselves.
These organisms evolved over billions of years, out onto land and into us – in our infinite complexity. Now obviously there is a lot of information I’ve left out but this is the general outline of what’s happened so far. You are composed of the elements made from our sun exploding a long time ago; you are stardust. To learn more about the beginnings life click here.
You think you are a human experiencing the universe, but really you are the universe experiencing a human.
Now for a moment pretend that you’re God, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. You decide to go back and watch what happened at the start – the big bang. From your vantage point, back then, the event is happening now. It’s also safe to say that you reading this is also happening now, correct? It is always now; the Universe is merely one event that has continued for billions of years.
If the universe started with a single event, you are the continuation of that one event; it is still ‘now’, still the one happening. It’s just that things are a little more complex now, because you, the universe, can now perceive yourself, for the first time ever the universe has found a way to perceive itself, through you.
Its important to note that life is merely a process between experience and non-experience. You are a set of patterns that all work simultaneously and symbiotically to produce the outcome that is you. You are a continuation of the same pattern that brought the stars and planets, galaxies and Earth, our home.
You are not in it, but you are it.
You did not come in to the universe from somewhere else; you came out of the universe. In the same way a lavender orchid ‘lavenders’ the universe ‘peoples’. The same way that a lavender flower is the complex fruition that manifests from the processes of the tree, a human is a complex manifestation that comes from the process of the universe.
Or to think of it another way, your environment is just an extension of your perceptual input. This is all you; only you create a boundary between yourself and others to set yourself limitations so you’re able to create meaning.
Now this may sound like quite a daunting realisation, but subsequent realisations also happen which can help you out. You simultaneously realise that if the universe is you, you are responsible for your own life, and you have the power to change it.
You see the world as a reflection of your consciousness, and that intrinsically corresponds to you putting more effort into yourself, because if your subjective reality is all there is, make it as nice as possible.
Work hard on your reality, because that is all there is.
From the ashes, you will rise.
Liam
