The Story of Your Life
Your eyes are the Universe’s eyes. Your retinas, optic nerves, and visual cortex form a kind of mirror for the Universe to gaze upon itself.
By all observational measures humans have designed so far, the Universe appears to be a self-contained closed system –everything there is, already inside it, matter and energy moving through various layers of chaos or states of excitement. Impossible to add anything new. What would it be? Where would it come from?
Of course, in the bounds of “everything” some unlikely things will show up. Matter and energy get creative, spark in a cell, a series, a web, a matrix of electrochemical intersections managing and reacting to observational input from environmental cues. A hundred billion or so neurons, a thousand trillion or so synapses firing & wiring in fragile fractal patterns generates an emergent holistic field. No single cell can see it, but somehow a teensy sliver of the Universe crackles into conscious awareness, the mirror begins to see itself, awakens to the idea of “you” and “me,” starts having opinions and intentions. Things get interesting.
Another way to define consciousness could be ‘the ability to tell stories.’
An often overlooked truth about stories is that they are a strange kind of energy. That might sound a bit mystical at first, but the effects that stories have had on our local bit of the Universe are quite apparent and observable. The story of the Foot & the Horizon, the Hoof & the Rider, the Hero’s Journey, the Wheel, the Axle, the Wagon, the Undiscovered Country, the Trade Route, the Transcontinental Railroad, Steam Ship, Prop Plane, Jumbo Jet, Saturn V Rocket, Satellite Telescope, Moonshot, Mars Rover, and Voyager 1 Probe breaching the Oort Cloud –a consciously designed synthetic object entering interstellar space on August 25, 2012. The story of Bigger Rocks & Better Gods, Burning Bushes & Brighter Stars, Royal Blue Blood & Beggars Bootstraps, Might Makes Right, Manifest Destiny, & American Exceptionalism, City-Burning Bombs & Mutually Assured Destruction, Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, and Anthropogenic Climate Change.
The evidence is literally all around us.
There is an undeniable energy, connected to our consciousness, conveyed in our communications and connections with one another, flowing like a river through our stories. It shapes the landscape of our lives, our collective future, the Earth herself.
What is this energy? Where does it come from? These are questions worth asking.
In this moment, consider that your consciousness might be a magical pinhole poked through the shell around the closed system, a personal wormhole bubbling in oxygen from elsewhere. Perhaps you are here specifically to supply this singular energy, to smuggle the Universe some essential nutrient that it cannot get inside the egg.
Upon reflection, the mirror called “you” might have thoughts, concerns, and judgments about how your story is going so far –dreams, doubts, preferences, and plans about where it goes from here. That’s okay.
Your matrix. Your wormhole. Your ticket. Your ride. Hold on when you must, let go whenever you can. And remember, nothing actually means what you think it does.
Remember, the Universe will never have another mirror that reflects it in quite the way that you do. This energy that comes through you is stunningly distinct, radically rare, and infinitely precious.
Your stories are the Universe’s stories. However you think they’re going, they are doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. They are perfect. You are nurturing the Universe -right now.
