A UNIVERSE WITHIN - THE BEGINNING

It’s amazing how all the planets, the stars and all other bits of rock and metal, move so fast, as the universe expands, all hurling away from each other at such enormous speeds. Its truly unfathomable. At the same time, here we are on earth as if it were all perfectly still. Life happens; days go by; we move forward constantly albeit obliviously. Species evolving, become extinct and in the middle of all that, we humans, who have lived for over 250,000 years at the least, have founded and dug to the ground civilisations that have tried to solve the mysteries of existence and consciousness. It’s truly amazing. 

Ofcourse, we know why we don’t feel the movement of the universe; it’s because the speed is pretty much constant. Like when you’re in an airplane. You know you’re going fast but inside the airplane, you don’t feel it. If you look outside though, you see the clouds and can perceive your speed in relation to them. So we don’t feel the universe moving. As a result, we forget that our lives are already in constant movement, happening along with the clouds, the stars, the planets and the whole universe. We all move together, as one. Like a well choreographed dance of a musical. We’re all knowingly or unknowingly a part of this performance. We may have mistakenly assumed to be at the centre of it all; so we don’t register most movement apart from our own. What we do perceive is that which we can see; the type of movement we believe we are in control of. At times we may even have patience to perceive the movement of the people we love and admire, but the bus pretty much stops there and thats where most of our confusion begins. Truth is, we forget that the performance is much larger than us. It existed before we even entered and will most likely remain after we are long gone. We go on living, creating and perceiving; all for a better understanding of our place in the universe; because, deep down, no matter how much we deny it to ourselves, we are aware that life really is about being part of the biggest production ever seen - reality. 

Now this is quite contrary to the way we have been raised to think about the universe and our place in it. We have inherited a very individualistic sense of personality. Our societies, institutions, and even our language has been designed to validate our experience of the self as separate from the universe and everything in it. We fool ourselves into believing that the ‘self’ is merely a definition of our conscious waking mind or our superficial ego; navigating and interacting with an external world with the help of our 5 primary senses.  By accepting this illusion of the self as a separate ego, we begin to form an unhealthy relationship with it.  We forget that we are part of a larger production and instead convince ourselves that, we, are in fact the production. My hopes, my dreams, my curiosity, my opinions, my happiness, my effort, my achievements, my failures, my anxieties, my fears, my loneliness, all these repeated patterns of thought that loop around in our minds during our waking state become our understanding of the self. We create our own narratives fuelled by our thoughts and memories. We are so deep in to this act, we fail to observe the extent to which we have divided ourselves both both internally and externally.  Instead of co-existing, we dominate.  We become obsessed with consumption and control. Instead of balance, we seek gratification. And so, it’s a race for survival from the get go and you have to get to the top. The top of what, no one really knows. it feels like theres a goal we’re headed towards. Some sort of dream or purpose that we have convinced ourselves of. We hold on to this idea, self serving or selfless as it may be, and march towards a finish line we can’t quite define; so we’re never really sure where we need to go, how long it’s going to take or even why we want to get there. Yet we keep going; doing less of what we want to do today and more of what we need to do to keep doing the things we would want to do one day. 

Truth is, no matter how much we try to fool ourselves, deep down, theres a part within that has suspected from the very beginning that we are not at the centre of it all. For as long as we continue to  trick ourselves into believing we are separate from everything else around us, we will feel incomplete. The self can only be truly understood in relation to the other. Where there is no other, there is no self. You are not merely a consciousness caged within a body of skin and bones fighting to survive in this universe. You are an intelligent being who is capable of comprehending the fact that your internal & external reality come together to create this experience of life you are leading; your skin just a layer between the two.  In reality, it’s all one big happening. A harmonious & balanced relationship between the self and the other is an absolute must to experience this larger happening that we are all an expression of. 

The idea is to rise above trying to carve out a place for ourselves in the universe, but to realise that in an abstract sense, we are already an expression of the universe

ALICE (alice.in.blunderland) sits on her desk, somewhere in the middle of the rabbit hole, going up and down to bring back little bits of perspectives as and when the situation demands. Why Blunderland? Because Alice is aware that one person’s wonder may very well be another person’s blunder! So don’t take her adventures seriously if it’s not your cup of tea.