THE UNIVERSE

Everybody is pretty curious about it ah! Okay, let me define it in my own way...........

It’s you. It’s all you. You’re a feature of the universe in the same way that your individual cells are features of your human organism. You’re not a person made of cells, as if there were something in you distinct from the entire biological structure that’s more real you. You are the aggregate functioning of all the cells in your body. Well, in the same way, the universe is the aggregate functioning of all its component, interdependent features. You don’t live ‘in’ it, you are it.

However, human beings play a game in which we pretend that we’re all isolated individuals who confront a universe that has nothing to do with us. I say this is a game only in the sense that it’s technically speaking a pretense, but it has very deep roots in psychology and biology. Human beings have minds that allow us to think about the universe by dividing it into innumerable point instances, much like the process of calculus. In discovering that this massively aids our survival, we have over the course of our psychological evolution forgotten that the universe isn’t actually divided up into discreet objects at all. It’s actually one seamless unfolding that can’t be truthfully described by virtue of its own basic unity.

Waking up from the social hallucination of a divided reality happens to people all the time all over the world, and these people actually come to experience themselves not as an isolated creature who confronts an alien universe, but as the universe itself expressing itself as their particular form. This, in a nutshell, is what this whole ‘enlightenment’ malarkey is really all about. A ‘buddha’ is simply somebody who woke up from the delusion of individual agency. However, if you’ve got sense and this happens to you you’ll know intuitively to shut the hell up about it because, truthfully, there is literally nothing more heretical to human society than this realization. Indeed, the (poor) folks who undergo this often get wiped out by it entirely and have to spend the rest of their days in the loony bin because it’s simply too much for a human being to bear to learn that your whole conception of the universe was basically a hallucination and that you’re actually, for want of a word with less baggage, God. (I have a hypothesis that many schizophrenics are just accidental buddhas who have no way of contextualizing their experience because there is no framework for it in the West).

What this realization of the universe as an undivided unity really means is that the whole epistemology of science and even the very ancient Judeo-Christian ideal of the morally virtuous individual are essentially false. All this stuff about trying to work out a theory of the universe, or where ‘it’ came from, or who’s behind it, simply falls apart in the realization of non-duality because these questions rest upon the misperception that there is a ‘you’ that exists apart from the entire universal process. In reality, there is just the universe doing its creative unfolding, and that includes all of us. We’re all part of that. There’s nothing at all to be worked out or discovered here. It was all already just an essential unity expressing itself. To ask ‘why?’ assumes there’s something distinct from that unity compelled by essentially exterior forces.

This whole game of science and the quest for a more complete knowledge of the cosmos could come to an end right now if we were all somehow to shake ourselves awake from the social hallucination of a fundamentally divisible universe. But since this hallucination is probably one of the only things keeping most of us from lapsing into chimp-like savagery, it’s probably best that this doesn’t happen (although chimps don’t suffer anything like we do because of our mixed-up sense of reality). We’ve built our psychological house of cards too high now to dismantle it without inconceivable chaos and pain. The charade must go on…

The main thing that Buddhism and meditation have shown me is that the human condition is so much more absurd than any of us could possibly imagine. Our lives are exactly absurd. We imagine a psychological identity that never existed in the first place and then go around trying to negotiate each other into preserving and augmenting our identities, not realizing that it is the identity itself that creates the basic sense of struggle and conflict that we try so hard to overcome. It’s fighting fire with fire.

Puvvukonvict...