Perception

I've often wondered how people can be conscious and still be disenchanted or bored with the world. Sometimes, I'll see someone crush a beetle scuttling around their feet and it ties my stomach in knots. They didn't hate it. They had no anti-beetle agenda. The bug was just annoying to them. Pointless, maybe. I'd bet that most of these people have never thought about how that beetle breathes in the same oxygen as them, moves it through a maze of tubes and into increasingly fine fibers, replacing the nitrogen in that air with oxygen through diffusion, allowing the creature to last on a single bubble for longer than we could last on several chest fulls. How they use an intricate system of chemical signaling to avoid conflict between each other. Hell, some species even care for their young. As a species, they have spent 299 million years producing the most fit specimens and the only thing that bothers this guy is that he has to scrape the rest of this fantastic bit of life off the bottom of his new kicks.

About a month ago, I had an experience that helped me understand why we can't always be aware of how fantastic the existence of this universe really is. It wasn't brought on by any life-changing event. It wasn't even arrived at by a particular thought process. It was pure realization, the kind that Zen Buddhism gets so uppity about. Now here's where the writing of this entry gets difficult. The realization was more of a feeling than a thought. Perhaps I can compare it to a more common feeling. You know that feeling you get when you wake up in a strange place? You expect to open your eyes to your bedroom, but instead, you're assaulted with the vision of a hotel room or the living room of a friends house. Think about the feeling between when you realize you're not at home and when you come to terms with where you actually are. There's surprise. Anxiety, certainly. Excitement. That's what it feels like to see your existence from the outside. It's a paradigm shift, and an especially surprising one.

The human brain has evolved to deal with a very limited range of numbers. 25,000 miles around the earth. 70 years from birth to death. Think of a dozen pizzas. Now think of 14 billion pizzas. You can't visualize that. Our brains have simply never needed to know how long 14 billion years is in order to survive (it's as long as the universe has existed, by the way.) That night last month, I began to comprehend just how long that is. It was a beautiful moment, but it was frightening and disorientating. Coupled with a brief realization of just how far it is from me to the Alpha Centauri, it left me reeling. I was shaking, I was crying, I was physically ill. This lasted for about twenty minutes and by the end of it, I was exhausted. I was also enlightened.

I can't expect anybody to live a normal life with this sort of perception. Not if that's how you always see the universe, at least. It would be too easy to see human existence as pointless. And maybe it is. Maybe there is no resolution between our existence and the enormity of the universe. Maybe that's the cost of a paradigm shift. But maybe it's worth it. The way I see it, the universe is a beautiful thing as are we, as a part of it.  There's no reason we have to compare ourselves to the rest of the universe. We are not separate from it. Once you understand that, the rest should follow.