This post was originally published on October 31, 2013.
[Marconi] points out that the amount of the universe a human can experience is statistically, like, zero percent. You’ve got this huge universe, trillions of trillions of miles of empty space between galaxies, and all a human can perceive is a little tunnel a few feet wide and a few feet long in front of our eyes. So he says we don’t really live in the universe at all, we live inside our brains. All we can see is like a blurry little pinhole in a blindfold, and the rest is filled in by our imagination. So whatever we think of the world, whether you think the world is cruel or good or cold or hot or wet or dry or big or small, that comes entirely from inside your head and nowhere else.
David Wong, This Book is Full of Spiders
The universe is not fixed. There is no objective universe out there. As quantum physicist David Bohm explains it, reality does not exist in the absence of observation.
What we see is what we expect to see.
It is one thing to recognize that smiling at someone we pass on the street will raise the likelihood of that someone smiling at us. It is an entirely higher level of amazing to realize that, at the quantum level, the entire universe is to us as we expect it to be.
Recently I had a conversation with a friend. He was harried. Overwhelmed. Why, I asked.
My girlfriend wants me to go to a wedding with her this weekend, he said. And there’s so much for me to do at work, I might never catch up. It’s all too much.
This is what we call a problem of abundance, I said. Remember when you didn’t have a girlfriend who wanted to spend time with you? And you were just finding ways to look busy at work? Now your life is full. And you’re hoping it gets less full, so that you’ll be able to relax and enjoy yourself. But that’s not going to happen. The nature of evolution is such that life always will keep moving forward, and you are progressively going to be challenged to give more and more of yourself to life.
Things never are going to slow down enough to give you the feeling of peace you’re seeking. So the challenge then becomes, how do I find that feeling of peace with the way things are? How do I accept that this is my life—full, rich, varied—and that if I am to have peace within myself, my version of peace must take all of this into account.
This is our job. Notice the world as much as we can, take it in as fully as we can, be present in it with as much of our self as we can, and with an expectation of peace, of adventure, of joy, of abundance. Rather than expecting evidence of the difficulties of life, expect evidence of the presence of joy and the support of nature in all that we do.
Everything in my life today is exactly the way it must be in order for me to have the next lesson necessary for my spiritual evolution.
With this as a baseline truth, I can expect evidence of it in everything that happens today, in the faces of everyone I meet, in the results of every action I take, every interaction I am a part of.
Today I will expect the universe to show me again and again that it is benign, that it is here to support me, that it wants nothing for me but the fullest joy of living that I can handle.
Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Gordon (University of Arizona) [Public domain], via WikimediaCommons (resized and cropped)
Sponsored DISCLAIMER: This is a paid advertisement for California Behavioral Health, LLC, a CA licensed substance abuse treatment provider and not a service provided by The Fix. Calls to this number are answered by CBH, free and without obligation to the consumer. No one who answers the call receives a fee based upon the consumer’s choice to enter treatment. For additional info on other treatment providers and options visit www.samhsa.gov.
