Our reality as we know it rests upon the foundation of the ability of things to be separate. Reality as we know it rests upon the foundation of the existence of space and time.
If there were no separateness—if everything existed at the same point in space and time—then you could not be there, and I could not be here, and you and I could not be you and I.
Yet because of the separateness of multidimensional existence, I can never completely know what it is to be you, and you can never completely know what it is to be me. For we can never truly experience what it is to be something other than who we are, where we are—with different past experiences, and with different present experiences from some other vantage point in space and time and through some other lens of thought and feeling. Thus, due to the existence of space and time, we require communication—we require some form of language—in order to bridge the gap of separateness.
Every part of the world is interacting with every other part of it. Even though things are separate, they are interdependent upon one another to exist. The fulfillment of physical, emotional, and intellectual sustenance comes via the other things—the other beings—in this world. We would cease to exist in this physical world if we could not continue to gain existence through other existing things. And so we require other existing things.
It is through our ability to interact with, to communicate with, other existing beings that we can come to attain ever greater awareness of ourselves and of our place in relation to all of the rest of existence. It is through our ability to experience an other separate from ourselves that we can come to discern purposeful coincidence in the world as events in the external physical world come to reflect our internal thoughts and feelings, and as physical events come to reflect other physical events, and as thoughts and feelings come to reflect other thoughts and feelings.
Through all of this interaction, we can come to realize that even thoughts and feelings are separate from us. Even though they are not separated from us by physical space, they are separate from us nonetheless, even at a single moment in time. And so there must be other spatial dimensions beyond the physical ones—space to separate thoughts and feelings from us.
But then who are we? If we are not our thoughts or feelings—if these things are things with which we interact and through which we might gain fulfillment but they are not us—then what are we?
It is space and time that allow us to ask these questions, and it is the other things that are separate from us in space and time that allow us to come upon the answers. The process of discovery and learning and ever increasing awareness is allowed by time—within which this process can occur—and the contents of that process are allowed by space—within which these contents can exist.
As we come to discern the separateness of ourselves from our world—beginning with only the recognition of I, but without real awareness of the “I”, and progressing to the recognition of others, but without any awareness of those others as other “I”’s, and progressing to the recognition of other “I”’s, where we can begin to become aware of ourselves as true “I”’s—we begin to discern the distinctness of ourselves from our world. And it is actually through this awareness of distinctness that we begin to become aware of the unity that underlies all things.
For all that we discern is separate from everything else. But that which is doing the discerning—the true underlying essence that is us, that is “I”—is single and unitary. In essence, there is only one “I”, for this “I” is not bound by space or by time. This “I” is not divided or differentiated by these things.
Beneath all the layers of physical reality and instinct and feeling and thought, there is “I”. And this “I” is that which chooses all of these things, beginning at thought, progressing to feeling, progressing to instinct and speech and action, and manifesting in the world of physicality. The “I” is that which gives shape and form to the world as it divides and differentiates on its path toward existence in the world of physicality.
And all of this differentiation occurs through the use of language. The “I” is ever shaping the world, separating it, dividing it, through its use of language. And we are all projections of that “I”—that single, unitary “I” that is at the heart and root of all that is.
No comments:
Post a Comment