“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” — Carl Sagan
There are tiny answers floating in my head, little stars or just motes in a sunbeam, fluttering up my senses and clouding my mind. I’m flustered and have been for a while. I’m flustered by a game that I once woke up to find myself in, that indeed, I had been born into. In its current guise it runs like one massive advertisement for a life somebody else really wants you to live. A life that keeps you flustered to give you something to do and that is so insecure it feels it must fill every awkward silence so that we can all walk around distracted by a world we have created. It’s a type of submission — looking down at our phones, our laptops, our TVs, our lives. Wrapped in a fiction to fix the emptiness that we know lies at the heart of our ideology. Millions of images and sounds are constantly swirled up all around us to swarm the hives into fascination, to catch the lowest common denominator and keep our attention fixed.
What makes me sad is that this is all a distraction and a delusion that we have tried our hardest to create with our best intentions at heart and that it hides something far greater from view. What also makes me sad is that even though it is a delusion, pulling away from it leaves you lonely, no longer a player of the game, with very few other options out there at present and far fewer players to play with. Making the break demands you be bold. One moment of doubt and all the world is there ready to pull and push you. It is lined up all around for you to fall back into. Comfortable, familiar, numb.
I sometimes feel, in my darker moments, that our society (I can share this statement with a lot of the world now, who either live through the West vicariously on their TVs or inhabit some ersatz version of it themselves) is like a conveyor belt and we are all plastic molds of human beings plodding along to a final tumble. Inevitable, nonchalant, and unnerving. Yet we pride ourselves on our ability to stand on the shoulders of giants who themselves stood on the shoulders of giants and we proudly bask in the vertiginous glory of Western development. However, although our books may be filled with tremendous insights, this cannot so easily be said of our societies. If we listened to all history, all people, all philosophy, discovery, religion, science, psychology, sociology, economics, law, ecology and literature and applied all that there is to be learned from human endeavour to today, how would we measure up? How much of our potential have we achieved? My guess is nowhere near as much as we could. It is as if on the path to learning and furthering mankind we have become distracted. We have seen a shiny penny on the ground and lost track of where we were going.
Distraction. Today that distraction is purposefully formulated and structured, fed and projected to people all over the world, every moment of the day for the sole purpose of feeding, gorging and growing the distraction even more. It’s fit to burst and when it pops, our offspring will be picking up the pieces for generations.
We live in a time of such importance. Every moment in history has led up to this point right now and the beauty of it is that you can say that about every moment. But right now stood with World War and Nuclear stalemate behind us, religious fundamentalism and ecological disaster before us we are on the edge of a new world, sat right on the liminal. I’ve woken up at the end of one game but before the next one begins. My lifetime will be one of transition. All I can hope is that enough of us can create a space away from the distractions to discuss our new home and I think I am finally finding it. Here in the quiet, sat beneath the stars in the foothills of the mountain I find a lull in the cacophony and take the time to remind myself of a few things that keep me from falling back to the busy, flustering sleep of the life I woke up in.
Stop looking down and start looking up. Put everything else aside. Breathe. It’s alright. See the lights up in the sky — they are burning answers of what we are. Some are so far away they are both elsewhere and elsewhen. We know them through the thoughts and mathematics, ideas and reason that we have thrown on them from an infinity away. And as we have done so, a long time hidden secret has begun to reveal itself. An empty world is falling to dust and in the absence of the distractions it becomes lit with the brilliance of mind displaying itself to itself. A reflection in which all life sees that it is of one origin, and indeed of one vast, interconnected cosmos. A universe of which we are all a part, no matter how small.
On Earth we have looked around for shiny pennies for so long now that we have submitted to the distractions. We have created stimulation to distract from the darkness, to never look up, to hide when it gets dark, and to live in ignorance of what we are and who we could be. To ignore the space that old Gods lost and to merely fill it with consumption. To know awe and reverence for celebrities and products when every atom in our bodies wants us to know that they came from a star and that you are a moment of explosion, a thought and a dream. An instant and an eternity in the hovering sound of all-time.
Our old Gods may be dead but the universe is not. It just got lost in all the names. We see it in the mountain, the oceans, the trees and the animals around us, of which we are very much a part. We can see it in each other when we watch each other live. We reveal ourselves to each other throughout our lives as does the living world around us. In some we see the blue sparks of their selves light the spaces between the thoughts that make the stories of their lives. We see the dynamo turn and the blue sparks fly, the gestalt magic from the spaces in between from where the inanimate became animate and the formless takes form. This forgotten space is the reason why we care, why we love and protect. It’s screaming to us from every star forged atom in us, from every leaf on every tree. Peel back the plastic from your life, it says. Regain the spaces that your parents lost, the ones they sold to bring you up. Remember us and live as us, look to the stars and wake up.