God

How can we find nothing when we look at the center of ourselves?  You mean, at home, there’s… nothing?  Well then, what are we?  Just a nothingness looking out from—nothing? 

I think we are trapped inside of a sphere resting on the sand of a desert island.  When we stop observing the objects on the small circle of land—palm leaves, sand, birds or waves or shells, sticks and flotsam and jetsam and crabs washed up on shore—and retreat into ourselves, we feel… bored.  What?  Yes, I think that we do.  We’re so used to looking at the moving objects outside our windows; our whole attention is outward.  Even so, if we’re determined to get to the bottom of things, and we decide to start digging a hole right in the middle of where we’re standing, what will we find? 

If we decide to keep digging deeper and not stop, no matter what, until we find out what’s at the bottom of this place we’re standing on, will we get anywhere?  Where can we go?  This is what the Buddha is supposed to have done by sitting under his Bodhi fig tree, determined not to stand up again until he got THE ANSWER to his fundamental questions.

This place is exactly where I’m arguing that we should go, if we want to know something once and for all.  For me, the answer is not “out there” in the arms of a lover or in the words or books of another.  The answer has to be somewhere, somehow inside of me—even if I don’t exist—or accessible through me.  It has to be, because when I die, all the books I ever read will go away and I’ll be left with just what I am. 

So, all I can trust is what I have become:  The experience of truth directly.  Back to that impossibility.  That maddening necessity.  When you eat an orange you experience something… directly?  Well, close.  When you read about eating it, that’s even further—apart.  You have certain understandings and assumptions and speculations, but you have nothing.  You have only ideas about what it might be.  It’s the parallel of that brain feeling something directly.  A self-aware brain floating in a vacuum would be ‘experiencing’ its own reaction to exploding—never experiencing reality itself.  Unless…  Unless maybe in a sense it is experiencing reality itself.  It’s experiencing what it’s experiencing.  So, even though it doesn’t know what the world outside looks like, not being able to “taste” it—that doesn’t matter; it is experiencing itself: it’s own reactions to exploding.  But even that more honest, fundamental and closer-to-home experiencing is still a step away from reality-as-it-is.    How small do we need to go to get to reality?  How small do the pieces of us have to be?  The only way to experience reality itself is to become reality.  The freezing and exploding brain would have to become space and vacuum to understand space and vacuum.  It would have to lose itself to experience something else for the first time. 

True direct experiencing of reality must be the complete dilution of the minute particles making up that brain—the brain would have to be dissolved into space like sugar into water.  That would be a direct experience of space.  But then, there wouldn’t be any more of that brain, would there...  This is the apparent dilemma.  To fully comprehend life, we have to fully experience death.  Clearly impossible.  Throughout thousands of years of relatively recent history, however, people have been saying they’ve been there, done that.

Can we become God?