Everything Is Happening On All Possible Levels At All Possible Times

I realise now that the type of Reality I have been trying to describe is nothing more than a collection of fluffy, amorphous blobs - clouds of vagueness which trap us and make us forget their form, like the field of poppies in the Wizard of Oz. 


I have spent a lot of time blithering on about the grandiose things - the very fashionable cosmological discoveries which lend themselves well to those romantically, philosophically and magniloquently predisposed - in order to reveal some Big Important Headlines about who we are and what we are doing here.  (Have a look at my Everything Really Is Waves blog for a link to the beautiful chromoscope, which shows most elegantly how many levels of Reality are manifest in the skies.)

Yet we can get equally lost in the clouds of the very small.  The kindest British doctor on television without a moustache, Michael Mosley's new series Inside the Human Body is an incredible and intrepid Innerspace-type journey through the human body.  Using cutting-edge (ha! funny because there is also a lot of graphic imagery of surgical procedures!) CGI imaging based on what we have actually observed happening inside us, the programme paints us as planets - enormous colonies for autonomous, exquisitely alien cells.  It becomes very quickly apparent in watching this show that we have little to no control over the vast majority of what we do.  Our breathing, our immune system, our digestion, our emotions, our blood supply - in fact, everything which keeps us alive - is nothing to do with at all, much as we have colonised our city, our country, our planet, without it having any say at all.  

And it is miraculous.  

There seems to be a current trend at the moment in the media- every generation has had an apocalypse to face, but ours is shown in high definition, backed up by data, and all the more terrifying as a result - to find the unity between humankind, to try to remind us of all we have in common and therefore how much we all have to lose.  Humility based on facts - how I wish that this could be what defines us as an era, rather than the looming tsunami of disaster which seems ever-present (although it may well be that the distinctly apocalyptic tip the weather seems to be on at the moment may not strictly be climate change just yet - much of the most recent catastrophes - in Pakistan, in Australia, in the US, in South Asia - have been attributed to La Niña).


But sharing a common genetic heritage and corpus operandi is not nearly all.  


Beyond the cellular level, we are atomic.  Each cell is made up of incredible strings of proteins, made from amino acids, each made from tiny ornamentations of elements, bound inextricably together.  Each atom is a combination of protons and electrons, separated by comparatively enormous distances of nothingness.  Beyond that, we are at the quantum level, which (as I most recently blogged about) is tantamount to a different reality altogether.  In fact, each layer of existence is in itself a different Reality, as separate as it is inter-connected, each organism both a universe unto itself and part of many other universes, like messing with the zoom on a camera, microscope and telescope all at once.

I argued last time that it is possible to argue anything, to believe anything, if you thought about it for long enough.  When you consider how ENORMOUS Reality is, everything really is everything.


As Einstein said: "A human being is part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)"

Of course, it isn't as easy as all that, Einstein.  We have evolved to perceive the world the way we do because it is the most useful for us to survive.  Contemplating Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't make running for the bus easier (may even render the whole thing futile and cause us all to lie down like in the video for Radiohead's Just).  It is perhaps just as difficult to understand that we are part of a human collective, part of a mutually upheld present, part of a generation, part of a planet, part of anything.  It is perhaps merely enough to contemplate, every now and again, perhaps while letting the entire planet of your bowels do its unbidden work, this fact.  


We are just as much sketches as paintings:

And it is little wonder that we find so much wonder in all of this, how a "God"-creature can be the only way our mind can cope with the the fluke of its birth - we have accidentally developed to be able to appreciate the vastness, we are fleetingly unbound from our most primal urges to be able to stare, blinking, at what is happening all around us.  It is perhaps redundant to name this feeling, to worship it - this is, however, an impulse which has existed exactly as long as we have had the brains to deal with the Looking Around - but it is important to be grateful for it.  Even the mighty Marcus Aurelius (121-180) was humbled thus:
"All things are woven together and the common bond is sacred, and scarcely one thing is foreign to another, for they have been arranged together in their places and together make the same ordered Universe. For there is one Universe out of all, one God through all, one substance and one law, one common Reason of all intelligent creatures and one Truth.
Frequently consider the connection of all things in the universe.
We should not say ‘I am an Athenian’ or ‘I am a Roman’ but ‘I am a citizen of the Universe'.
(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)"

We are, within and without, made of Universes.  

Close-up image of a tumorous pancreatic mass

Simulation of the current most accurate model for the structure of the entire Universe as we understand it