Here. Now

[This is the beginning of my writing project You Are Here. A Big History. Took the photo in the bush near here. It’s a Common Fringe Lily (Thysanotus tuberosus), and the flower only lasts one day…]

Here. Now

Here, now.

Just sitting.

             Within the wordless, stillness, awareness.

There is: breathing, rising, falling…There is change/no change, no inside/outside, no thought, no time. Spaciousness. Emptiness.

            ‘The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return’.[i]

There is, quietly, a shift. A ‘startle’, a distraction: thoughts, change, memory, sequence.  Perhaps a birdcall, then named, catalogued, a bird imagined, a memory. There is still, intermittently, awareness of sensations, thoughts, forming and passing like clouds in the boundless sky, waves on the boundless ocean. Clouds and sky, waves and ocean, thoughts and awareness, birdcall and sitting, forms and emptiness, both and neither.

Then, watching, awareness ends. No more watching. Spaciousness gone. Time, thoughts resume.

Is there a ‘cause’, a ‘reason’ for this ending? Is that even the right question? One does not know, unaware of why awareness has ended. Perhaps conditions have changed. There seems to have been a disturbance, a leap, a wave, a startle or movement arising, a movement away from watching and awareness, a severing or dis-traction, a pulling into and away, a grasping (‘greed’) or rejecting (‘fear’), an identification with a sensation, memory, thought, a thing. A leap, a ‘fall’ into word and world. An ‘othering’ into things, into I and Other.

There is thinking. I am thinking. I am my thinking.

So now, with this thinking, there is an ‘I-feeling’, and this ‘I’ seems to be what has been identified with, has apparently become, these fleeting sensations, memories, thoughts, things. I have become distracted, ‘clouded’, become a fuzzy plasma of rapidly expanding and interconnecting networks-of-networks of associations-and-responses, a network of apparently discrete ‘things’ that are unconsciously selected and perceived, a temporal self of before-and-after, past and future, with thoughts, memories, feelings, words, internal speaking, and ‘over there’ at a distance the ‘ten thousand things’ crowding in. All these form into surging repetitive patterns. A sense of a what, a where, a when, a how, a because, a past, a future.

A world, a universe seems to have arisen, space and time, an ‘I’ in here, an ‘it’ out there, a teeming world of ‘ten thousand things’ and their relationships.

So, with this startle, this identification, there has been a mysterious, subtle ‘singularity’, a splitting, or ‘big bang’. Together with everything else, am I now this vast seeming reality continually birthing and dying itself out of itself, the beginning of branching and exfoliating, changing, matter-body-mind and space-time self-organizing and self-evolving from, and back to, or as, some still, silent, spacious, aware Emptiness, some ‘void-and-energy’, beyond time-and-space, beyond thought? [ii]

And at this desk, as this reality here-and-now, feeling, thinking, I am, now seen from the outside in the third person, an apparently individual form of space-time-matter stepping back from and bending back on itself, self-reflecting, thinking, writing. And I remember I have read the science that my living body-mind apparently doing all this is formed of stardust born in the first stars a mere cosmic breath of 550 million years after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago or in later exploding supernovas.

If so, I, we, seem to be the aperture, the localised, particular mind, the personal eye of flesh-and-consciousness through which the universe is seeing and reflecting itself.

I now remember having read that the calcium in the bone of my finger typing the keyboard was forged in the furnace of early stars ten, a hundred, even a thousand times bigger than our sun. The water in my cells may have originally come from inside comets and asteroids that rained on the earth four billion years ago and produced the oceans, the source of life, or it may have arisen from deep within the bowels of the earth.

My body and brain began many millions of years ago in that ocean in some cellular or amoebic sensation that evolved further up into an invertebrate nervous system or a new vertebrate’s spinal column, moved all this up in the dance of evolution through the reptilian territorial brain, formed a lovingly hierarchical mammalian limbic system, blossomed out the abstracting bud of a primate cortex and self-reflective neocortex perhaps already in the first hominins just three or four million years ago or else the first homo species just two million years ago.

And as external complexity has grown and differentiated, so its inside, its flipside interiority has grown deeper, differentiating, integrating, encompassing more and more of the previous differentiations and developments.

Now I remember my body-brain, my ego identity, my mind – including its thinking here written into electrons on this screen ‒ is in truth not ‘mine’ but a collective artefact, embodiment and expression of the universe, one, even literally, still in-formed by all the millions of beautiful, diverse, material and immaterial forms and patterns of previous planetary evolution and human history. One still nourished and influenced by the very first forms of sentient life, the archaic bacteria, viruses and fungi living in my gut (the ‘microbiome’, the ‘enteric nervous system’).

I am a human being, a mammal species somewhat prematurely self-describing itself as ‘wise’ (sapiens). I am a human individual born in the middle of what we call the twentieth century, right at the beginning of what we now call the Human Age, the Anthropocene, about 13.8 billion years after what many scientists currently like to call the beginning of the universe in the Big Bang or Big Bounce, about five billion years after the formation of our solar system and four and half billion years after the origin of planet Earth and, soon afterwards, our unknown first sentient life form, LUCA, our Last Universal Common Ancestor.

Now this evolutionary embodiment, this apparent individual is sitting at a computer writing this text. Stepping back again, I see there are at least four concepts in that last sentence, ‘evolutionary embodiment’, ‘individual’, ‘computer’, ‘writing text’, four concepts that each contain a complex configuration of overlapping, over-determining, interdependent deep-time evolutions and histories: cosmic, planetary, socio-historical, linguistic, four concepts themselves produced by and embodying the majestic, awe-inspiring cosmic evolution of simple inorganic matter-energy or space-time into complex life and mind/spirit.

All this, however infinitely mediated, is also right ‘now’. Based on such premises, in the transient form of this individual, or through the aperture or mirror of this seemingly individual mind, what we call the universe would seem to be stepping back a little and writing a text about itself on a sunny winter’s day in a house in a village in the southern highlands of New South Wales on the continent of Australia on planet Earth within our sun’s solar system on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy within the Local group of fifty galaxies on the outskirts of the Virgo thousand-galaxy cluster that is a small part of the Local Supercluster (a collection of hundreds of galaxy groups across more than 100 million light-years) and which is but one section of a much larger supercluster named Laniakea, a collection of 100,000 large galaxies  400 million light-years  across ‒ in what we call, seeking orientation in the immense vistas of universal evolution, winter 2022.

Yet, supreme paradox, we know we are both objectively a part of, and yet, in direct first-person experience, we are ourselves the only ‘universe’ we can ever know, stand outside and also contain all this as ourselves.

To be able to write this, or for those sister bees to be still busy on the rosemary bush outside my study window, and for this particular individual to see, appreciate and express them, and for another individual to read this, has taken the universe’s whole fourteen-billion-year evolution of itself.  There is wonder, gratitude and joy in all this, in this tat tvam asi (You Are It), in the re-membering that is as normal as its forgetting, its dis-membering:

‘And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born’.[iii]

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[i] Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 16 (1975 translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English).

[ii] Physicist F. David Peat draws out the analogies: ‘Speaking […] seems to be created out of an active silence. In quantum physics there is also a kind of vibrant silence; it is called the vacuum state, the state of total and absolute emptiness. The theories of modern physics indicate that this state of nothingness is in fact an infinite ocean of energy in potential. All the energy within our universe – the energy of suns and galaxies – is as a mere flicker on this vast ocean of nothingness. Likewise, the big bang origin of the universe – the creation of all that is – began as a tiny fluctuation within an ocean of absolute silence. All over the world ancient peoples have said that the cosmos was created in a song, a word, or a name. Now modern physics speaks of creation out of a fluctuation or vibration. Yet not one of these primordial acts could have taken place had it not been for a pre-existing attentive silence.’(Blackfoot Physics, 1994, pp. 74-75, own italics PL-N). Perhaps the resonance between contemplative/mystical experience of sound-silence, form-emptiness, and the postmodern physical theory of cosmic beginnings could not be made much clearer than in this beautiful passage.

[iii] A. Watts, The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), pp. 140-141

~ by Peter Lach-Newinsky on July 9, 2022.