Daily Times

Dear reader, let me take you on a journey. A human being, living in a different part of the world than yours, sitting in a room with the AC turned on to avoid the sweltering heat of the afternoon sun, wrote these words on a computer.

These words were transmitted via e-mail to the platform you are now reading this article on, the bits and bytes of information travelling at the speed of light through fiber optic cables laid down in the oceans connecting our worlds together, making their way to the inbox of a person who read and vetted this article.

Through a sequence of back and forth transmission of bytes across digital highways, these words appearing on your screen have traveled more distance than you possibly would in the space of a month, yet all that travelling happened pretty much instantaneously.

Right now, you are reading this on a screen, it may be a phone or a laptop or a desktop computer connected to the world through your internet connection, your link to the outside world. A link that is constantly humming with millions upon millions of videos, articles, stories, lives, thoughts and emotions. A network that is brimming with the collective thoughts of the human consciousness, giving you instant access to knowledge of the present and the past in the form of books written by the old masters of knowledge that have come and gone.

How do you choose to use this vast power at your disposal? Do you seek to enrich your mind and soul? Do you seek to find inner peace? Do you watch cat videos?

Whatever you do, be at peace with it! For all I want is peace and contentment for you.

I am not content however, and I’ll tell you why. My mind does not sleep, every waking moment I contemplate myself and the world I am a part of, and on a greater level, the grand scheme of things.

I look down at my hands and I can see the muscles that walk between my skin, helping me flex my fingers and grasp things. I see the individual strands of muscle connected to the nerves and I see the signals moving from those nerves causing these strands to clench and loose. I follow their path to the brain, the individual spark merging with a firework show of a kind I’ll perhaps never see with my naked eye. How those individual flashes weave their way though pipelines of consciousness, how their dance results in me and how I share my thoughts and emotions with you through the useful tool of language.

I can’t help but feel the similarities between the network that resulted in this article being transmitted to you and the network that results in my consciousness. Imagine this vast network of cables that results in the internet we surf daily for a moment and simultaneously imagine the vast network on neurons in your brain that transmit signals, just like fiber optic cables, at the speed of light, resulting in your consciousness. Perhaps, you’ll feel that same similarity.

Being burdened with observation, my sight feels deepened, I can see that I am not alone, and that this invisible air around me is filled with colours. What colours you may ask, well, do you really think that air is empty?

Ever wondered what the world would be like if you could see wifi, radio and cellular signals or even the electromagnetic waves emitted by every electric appliance you own? It would be visual overload. A Cacophony of rainbow colours passing through windows bouncing off walls, intermixing and mingling together and reaching your devices. Try and imagine, the world isn’t as empty as it seems, we just fail to see.

Let’s take it a step further. Imagine you are sitting in a park, on the greenest of grass, sitting in the shade of the shadiest tree, watching the sunset. You reach down your hands and rub them in the grass, feeling the cold dew on your fingers, pinching a blade of grass and bringing it up to your eyes. Now let’s imagine for a moment your eyes are like a microscope, you focus and your vision zooms into the leaf before you, newer more intricate details pop into existence before you, crisscrossing highways of veins that help transport vital nutrients to every part of that blade of grass in your hand.

You zoom in further and you see the individual cells, all buzzing with life, creating vital nutrients to keep the blade of grass alive. You zoom in further and see within an individual cell, a factory of life with various components working in harmony, handing off and sharing resources, producing energy and utilising energy, you look deeper and you see all of these parts of the cell individually, how they are made of of complex chains of molecules, each molecule made up of complex set of atoms, you focus on one of the atoms and dive in and see brilliant flashes of light, a nebulous cloud of electrons buzzing around a bright core that looks very much like a star.

Do you see how the universe reflects itself within the fundamental building blocks of life?

Look deeper within dear reader, within that core of the atom, the nucleus, more streaks and flashes of light even smaller, buzzing so fast they appear to create this nucleus that you see. Deeper within each component of the nucleus, deeper and deeper still, energy bubbling into existence from the ether, creating the reality from literally nothingness. This is where everything and everyone you see comes from.

We and everything around us comes from this place, this place where things arise spontaneously from nothing, and go back to nothing. This constant buzzing of sub-atomic particles appearing and disappearing from the quantum foam gives rise to everything in the entire universe, yes, that includes you too.

Everything is alive, and we are a part of that everything.

How do you feel now? Do you feel smaller? Do you feel bigger? Do you feel more a part of the world you are in?

Congratulations, you have arrived at your destination. You have just had your first taste of the burden of observation.

When you are burdened with observation, the world looks different, feels different, day to day problems and life just feel mundane and less significant. Because you realise, there is more to life beyond the routines we tie ourselves up in. Perhaps, just perhaps, I was able to give you a taste of what it feels like to look at the world through a different set of eyes. The immense peace and connected-ness one feels when one can see at the heart of all things, and see that everything is one thing and nothing at the same time.

This world that I shared with you is yours to come back to any time you want. It was made for us thinking feeling beings, and I believe it is here we should all spend our solitary moments. Because it is a beautiful place, a place worth experiencing in quiet starry night.

Here I bid you farewell. Live long and prosper fellow human.

Peace to you and yours.

And if you ever have a quiet moment in the future, come join me, let’s contemplate life together.

Farewell.