Every day you go about your routine. Work. Home. Family. Friends.
But… who are You?
You think you know. But do you… really?
Of course you do! You’re Jenny, or Fred, or Suzie, or William jr… the third. And you’re polite, honest, loyal, punctual, and fair… super fair.
Those are human tricks.
My dog sits, and shakes hands, and I’ve almost trained him to get me a beer. We’re currently a little stuck on the opening the fridge part.
Beyond the tricks you can perform… why do you feel the way you do about Blondes… and liver? Why are you afraid of snakes? How do you make your heartbeat, and see, and maintain your blood chemistry, and fight disease?
You don’t really know.
And if there is doubt about how well you know yourself… well, considering that everything you know, you know through yourself, how well can you claim to know anything else?
You have been conditioned to think of the world as a hierarchical assembly of parts. Disciplines that can be individually mastered:
Algebra. Geometry. Physics. Chemistry. Biology. History. People. Animals.
But this is not the way things are. The world has been attenuated for you. Broken into manageable parts for ease of use.
Take a look around. The world is never really algebra-ing, or biology-ing, or peopling, or animaling.
It is doing every one of those things, and so much more… simultaneously.
The periodic table of elements does not exist anywhere outside of our mind. It is a lens we created so we could pretend at understanding our world.
My physics professor who assured me that the world was structured and orderly… and not a random and chaotic place, died in a tsunami in Thailand.
Imagine that.
His lifetime dream of a southeast Asian family vacation coincided with one of the greatest earthquakes the world has known.
Coincidence, or chaos?
And… who had coronavirus in the office pool?
Layers…
Peel back a few.
Trees communicate and share resources with each other. They recognize and care for their offspring.
It’s true!
Peel away a few more layers.
You were born to die on a spinning rock that is flying through an unimaginably vast and violent universe at thousands of miles per hour.
This is also true.
Keep peeling.
The calcium in your bones came from exploded stars.
And peeling…
Quantum mechanics… a domain so wild that even the great minds of our time refuse to study it for fear that it will lead them to a place so far out, that it will ruin their reputation. Yet so reliable that it is the foundation of the electronics you cannot do without.
More peeling will reveal another dimension.
And beyond that another…
And another…
And on it goes.
A colossal game of hide and seek?
You know the fun of playing hide and seek isn’t remaining undiscovered. It’s watching the others try to find you. Whenever the seeker appears to be giving up… the hider makes a ‘peep’, to keep the game going.
And if you ever get to the end of this game. If you get you hands on the hider…
Don’t be surprised if you discover yourself.