Resting as the Universe: A Thought Experiment

Reach your arm up before you to the empty space as though it were a cloth, — as though it were an invisible cloth, a pocket square you could grab the centre of. A pocket square imprinted with the universe.

You grab it, pucker it, twist and gesticulate it into the trumpet of a flower, an invisible, airy flower containing the intention of a universe. And as you grab into the deep nothingness before you, aware of the hand moving but not of the action of its movement, you notice this hand pulling the universe, this universe that is also a pocket square, is itself also the universe; you pause, wondering.

‘If this hand is also the universe then aren’t ‘I’ also the universe?’ Thoughts flow out of you.

‘But if I am the universe then how am I me, how am I an I? Where is my moat? My isthmus of space sequestering me from everything else? Surely part of me can’t be the universe before me and the other me, the inside-me, something else?’

With eyes fixed on outstretched hand, you pause, letting an easeful silence grow in the fecundity of your wonderment.

The whole of creation seeming to have condensed itself into the viewless breadth of your mind.

‘Surely my hand isn’t before me if I’m also the universe, it is just as much me as my thoughts. And if so, my thoughts, the me-inside-my-head is not inside. It feels inside, it feels inside, deeply inside. But it is the universe. Maybe I am only the universe forgetting it is the universe. I am the corner of the universe with amnesia.’

‘I always feel separate though, like when I’m talking to you. If you accost me it’s an outside intruder, isn’t it? I try to hide the way it grates on me, me internal monologue vexed, hexes you with obscenities. You don’t know this, you aren’t me. But you exist in the same space as my hand and therefore my thoughts; so, aren’t you me?’

‘Also, if I am the universe, which I appear to be, what does it mean to think? Am I thinking? Or do thoughts merely happen and as consciousness, ‘I’,experience them? This seems better. So your thoughts are not part of me, which is my consciousness, but your image is, and your voice — those, and other outward bits of you are as much me as thoughts are: two expressions of the universe in this consciousness.’

‘So if you are conscious — assuming you are, you are only separated from me insofar as it ever is like something to be you which I also don’t experience. This is what makes you you and me me. But you and me, friends as we are, are no agents in space, we are space for the universe: we couldn’t be anything else.’

I hope you found this useful. You can find me at www.joshuacronkhite.com.