The Symphony Playing Itself
From crispyneurons
"Duration is fleeting extension."
John Locke
Every once in a while, maybe once every two or three years, I have an experience that's like a mind orgasm, and my heart explodes. I was fortunate to have one of these experiences one ordinary afternoon.
I was walking home. I stood at the corner, waiting for the light to change. There I saw a blur of cars speeding down the road, one after the other. The intersection passes hundreds, possibly thousands of different cars each day. Each car burns a resource that will not last. Each car, built by people, won't last. Entropy grows and so the machines break. You can continue to repair it, spending more energy, and this act creates yet more entropy. Against the 2nd law of thermodynamics, there is no appeal. I imagined the intersection in 10 million years, and knew that there would likely be no evidence it ever even existed at all. Would San Diego exist? How could it? Would North America exist?
Each of these cars contains a person or two. Each one is a profoundly complex being, shaped through billions of years of material dancing its way out from primordial beginnings so very long ago, now sitting behind a steering wheel. Each of these beings has a mind, and each one does something unbelievably amazing: turning the chemical energy from its food into semiotic abstractions: thought, belief, and meaning, sometimes leading to astounding actions. Each one may be a tyrant, rebel or slave, ascetic or hedonist, a great artist or a couch potato. Most of them will drive poorly. Each one alone as ephemeral as a bubble, beginning and ending in a matter of decades.
But they aren't alone. Some of them yak into cell phones or tap on their Blackberrys, creating and participating in a vast invisible fabric enveloping the planet: a Net of Indra in which each mind is a jewel, each attached to others by relations mediated through technology that is both futuristic and ancient. This construct is profoundly self-transformative and few if any of its participants can even comprehend it. Each participant is a blur of its own, just as the intercommunication and the traffic are each a blur.
And I saw the sun above me, while I stood at the intersection, around which our planet swings so unbelievably fast, its thermonuclear furnace so impossibly powerful that here, 93 million miles away, I can't bear to look at it directly. And even it is slated for destruction. It won't last forever; one day it will blossom into a nebula. It powers all the plants here, fragile yet extremely successful patterns arising by themselves, many having great Carboniferous ancestors that ultimately became the gasoline now powering the cars. The planet spins so amazing fast around the gigantic solar fire. It in turn moves through a fluid of 100 billion other solar fires, and this spiral itself moves. Motion compounded on motion. All while I stand still, or so it might seem. Unbelievable, the amount of change!
As I stand there, I am burning chemical fire within that keeps me warm and alive. I breathe in the air. Cells are created, others are cast off. Profoundly complex biological processes manage it all. I look at the cars flying by, and my eyes catch the reflected sunlight, and it is converted to electrical signals. Sense perception is the grist of the mental mill. And it is my experience, as fleeting as it is. For one day I will encounter the end of experience, and the biological pattern ends. That which claims to be me will be gone, apparently, and that which maintained it then becomes something else, part of some other pattern.
It may not seem like this. I could walk down this street each morning and it seems substantially the same each day. But this is illusion. We are each crafted by nature with a powerful pattern-detecting machine. In all the turbulence and tangles of chaotic flux, we find certain regularities and fix on them. They are something we can relate to, something we can work with, something we can hang our existence on. Who doubts the sun will rise tomorrow? No one, because we figure the sun always rose before. It's an obvious pattern.
These illusions, as incredibly useful as they are, are false. The sun did not always exist. Neither did the earth. There was once no sunrise. And nothing natural can prevent their eventual destruction. Sunrise will come to an end. The patterns we hold on to are temporary fictions, little stories we tell ourselves to get through the scary night. At some level, everyone knows this. Nothing lasts. There is absolutely nothing certain and lasting to hold on to.
Initially, this perception is terrifying. You want some kind of foundation, one that truly endures, but there is none. At first, it seems like being born in a bottomless pit, falling your whole life, and then dying, still falling, and all your ancestors and descendants doing the same, and even the world itself--all of the amazing diversity and complexity of reality--everything in it. There is nothing firm to stand on--not just for you, but for anything whatsoever.
But looking deeper into this situation, this is a great comfort. Any true standing ground necessarily means that certain important possibilities are eliminated. You'd have a guarantee that something will or won't happen. With that, our reality would be a toy reality, one created with training wheels that can't be removed. In such a reality we would always be children.
And it's not that way. I'm grateful for that, and I'm willing to live in a foundationless state of being as long as I exist, knowing that any possible foundation is simply a restriction of pure possibility. In truth, it would be a straight jacket.
Fortunately, all possibility is available; as much as you want, as much as you can handle. It isn't falling... it's freedom. You really are free in all possible ways--and so is everything else. This is the great natural symphony of all reality, unwritten by any musician and playing itself for no external audience. We are part of it, and more than that, we are even graced with the power to perceive it, to unravel its story, to make our stories part of it, and to express what it means to each other and to anything else out there that can understand the tiny sliver we can articulate and comprehend. You--a natural being--can appreciate the symphony that you are a part of. You are reality beginning to understand itself.
The lights changed, and I crossed the street. Amazing.
