Your mind IS the universe

Warning: Long post, sharing personal subjective experience, no TL;DR

I guarantee you this will sound like new-agey bs at first but stick with me here a little bit.

Also, I am sad to say I did not gain any supernatural powers or even an altered state of mind from this understanding.

First, the quotes.

Yunmen said The real Emptiness does not differ from materiality. - ewk (because it's hard to look for original quotes on mobile)

A monk asked: What is Joshu? The master said: East gate, West gate, South gate, North gate

Now let me ask you something. We receive portions of energy from our father and mother through their sperm and egg; clinging to what we receive, we call it our body. From the time of birth, as it gradually grows and matures, this body always belongs to the self. But tell me, does it belong to you or not? If you say it belongs to you, when first conceived you had nothing with you; when did the sperm and egg of your father and mother ever belong to you? Life can last a hundred years at most, furthermore, before the corpse is abandoned; when did it ever belong to you? And yet, if you say it doesn’t belong to you, right now there is no possibility of taking anything away. When it is reviled you anger, when it is pained you suffer; how could it not belong to you? Try to determine whether you have anything there or not, and you will find you cannot determine, because your root of doubt is not cut through. - Foyan

In physics and chemistry, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant; it is said to be conserved over time.[1] This law, first proposed and tested by Émilie du Châtelet, means that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another.

Classically, conservation of energy was distinct from conservation of mass; however, special relativity showed that mass is related to energy and vice versa by E = mc2, and science now takes the view that mass–energy as a whole is conserved.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy

Well, I don’t care about being dead! Because I won’t know about it. That is the best thing about being dead. You don’t know about it. It’s like being stupid; it’s only painful for others. - Ricky Gervais

I think people on Twitter, they know I’m an atheist, and they say things like, “Oh, what’s it like after you die?” And I go, “What was it like for 13.5 billion years before you were born?” It’s probably like that. I think we’re like tourists, right? - Ricky Gervais

Let's crack on then.

The setup may be important, so allow me to start with that:

I was laying in the bathtub this morning contemplating death as I often do these days when I read an article about somebody getting murdered.

Something about the fact that a person can be born to their parents, grow up with dreams and aspirations, all depths of personality and a meaningful emotional life, only for all of that to stop by being violently stabbed to death at 28 is not cool at all. It's downright creepy.

Each day I wake up, one of my first thoughts is always how fragile life is, that there is a chance I have a terminal illness I don't know of or that I can be killed or die in an accident the very next week.

Arrogant people would label this as some form of mental illness and conveniently sweep it under the rug but in truth, this is being realistic.

In fact, humans live their life like they're immortal and there is no better example of delusional thinking than that. The fact that we don't even like to think about death and impermanence is the clearest example of denial. I would call this mental illness, although I understand how from an evolutionary point of view it is preferable.

No wonder humanity needs religion. Without that, existence is unfair. It's pure chaos and the mind doesn't do well with that.

Contemplation and understanding of death and impermanence will naturally lead one to asking the BIG existential questions and/or praying.

I am pretty materialistic and atheistic in my current understanding, so I do think that existence is unfair and chaotic.

So I started begrudgingly contemplating, as we all do sometimes, how I didn't ask to be born.

This is when the penny dropped.

Saying, as we all do sometimes, "I wish I was born a 100 years later", "I wish I was born into a rich family", "I wish I wasn't born" do not make sense.

These questions are dualistic thinking that posit a separate existing ego/I that had the potential to not be born and stay nonexistent.

---

In truth, you never had a choice not to be born. Precisely because you do not exist.

Religious and conventionally spiritual people believe in the existence of a soul but let's stick to science here. In fact, I'm going to use materialistic science to demonstrate why you do not exist as a separate entity in the universe.

It really is simple. If you agree with modern science, you accept that your consciousness is an emergent quality of your nature, this blob of matter and energy that happened to form in such a way via millions of years of evolution, all the way back from non-living matter to an advanced brain.

The universe is made up of matter and energy, in different forms and distribution. The patch of matter and energy that is you happened to be advanced sufficiently enough that a subjective, dualistic perspective emerged (the source of all our suffering). Your mind is not IN the universe. Your mind IS the universe. At least a part of it, like a drop of water is part of the ocean.

The patch of matter and energy that makes up a deer has quite a different subjective perspective of the universe.

The patch of matter and energy that makes up a rock has none.

Yet they are all the same, despite the different attributes and abilities.

Our subjective perspective is both a gift and a curse. It is the source of all possible suffering, but it is also the source of all possible joy. From the universe's grand perspective, if there would be such a thing, there is not much going on even on the bloodiest of battlefields. Energy is being transferred, matter is changing qualities.

In this sense, our minds are special. Without the existence of subjective perspectives, there would be no perception of the universe. No wonder Zen Masters called the mind a precious mirror jewel, reflecting existence.

That doesn't mean that we are separate beings, that we exist and that emptiness doesn't reign forever.

It's turtles, turtles all the way down.

Submitted June 06, 2020 at 02:12PM by SpringRainPeace https://ift.tt/30dpsZC