On the edge (cosmologically)

 

Have you ever had one of those weird existential moments when you felt like you could step outside of yourself and see reality from the other side as if none of it was real? You feel like an actor in a play, and you have just forgotten your lines, the cues make no sense, your pants are missing, and you have no idea how this thing is supposed to turn out. Your soul is disquieted by an eerie sense of déjà vu, but the familiarity you feel is completely unfamiliar as you had done this before, but you don't know why because everything seems different as if someone substituted a different script at the last moment, but you haven't read it yet. You recognize the rest of the actors, but they are just as disoriented as you are. The props feel fake, the stage is empty, you've forgotten your blocking, and even your body doesn't feel like your body. You are starting to think that we drift from metaphor to metaphor, completely unaware of how we are constructing reality as we go to suit ourselves. The world may be a stage, but life should not embody its metaphor, but resemble it. You are on edge because you lack an explanation of the very space you occupy, time moves forward but only because you say it does, and lineal thinking is a convention, not a provable reality. Everything feels hinky, unreal, fake, false, a simulacrum ad infinitum. Is it real because we accept reality as a fact? Or is there some sort of independent reality in which we participate--a reality which produces space and time, independently of our modes of perception. It's as if you can see be the fake flats on stage. The flats are painted so well that they look like bookcases, televisions, furniture, and all the rest of the trappings of daily life with which we decorate our living simulacrum. We all agree to play by the same rules, but do any of us know why? On the edge of night when it's not really either day or night, we traverse a liminal space, a metaphor for the threshold between our waking self that can identify the simulacrum as a simulacrum and our dreaming self that suspends its disbelief and fully assumes its role in the play without asking questions or being upset by the illogical nature of our invented reality. If the universe is expanding, and we can see that it expands, I think we should all be asking into what it might be expanding, or is space a fluid structure that can expand infinitely? We have no reason to believe that there are answers to any of these questions or whether any of these questions or statements make the least bit of sense at all. So we putter along, play along, singing a song, without a care in the world, but then again, would it matter if we care or cared in the least about time, space, or infinity? When I'm on edge about these things I catch glimpses of eternity, I feel infinity spreading out before me, and I see the shadow of other dimensions, unbounded by space or time, as if ghosts or giants had been there before me, asking the same questions, and unable to answer or understand, created myths to answer questions about the origins of the universe, its age, or where it is. Mystics seem to have an edge in the sense that reality is just a minor objection which does not seem to trouble them. Philosophers are troubled by these details, but they go between questioning and participating, flip-flopping about what they want to resolve and what would be better left unresolved. Maybe we should not look at the man behind the curtain, perhaps some illusions are better left just that, as illusions. Eventually, the edgy feeling goes away, my soul stops asking questions as if it were a five-year-old, and I can accept my place in an expanding universe without getting too nervous.