091. ...cogs and nodes of this giant love machine...
(morning thinking)
We are all tubes. I think I heard that right. We're essentially a long tube that takes in nutrients at the top, processes them in the middle and passes out waste at the other end. At the bottom. Smirk.
And that's all organisms. I think that's what they were getting at, whomever it was that I heard explain this.
Arms and legs, tentacles or wings are just appendages for moving our tubes from feeding opportunity to feeding opportunity.
I'm not a biologist or zoologist and I don't remember who I was listening to or why, so if I'm way off the mark please correct me. That's how we learn right? Not by being right. So if I'm wrong and you know how I can be right, write and let me know. Y'know? Nice.
Moving on.
We are tubes and I think this might be a unified theory of everything that I can get behind.
We are tubes living inside tubes, living inside tubes. Complex open ended matryoshka dolls or those really long old fashioned, expandable, extendable telescopes that pirates and sea captains used to have. But REALLY long.
When my meditation practice was at its strongest, when I'd sit each morning on the beach, rain or shine, and accept the dawning, I had a mantra that worked very well for me. I would repeat in my head…
"I breathe in light and warmth from the universe and I breathe out love and kindness"
Breathing from the first "I" and exhaling on the "and", saying the words slowly and steadily, got me a good full inhalation, and the ins and outs are about the same length. There's a couple of syllables of difference if you want to get picky.
As I'd sit there, just outside my home, all peaceful with the sun rising in front of me, it was easy to feel the light and sometimes the warmth on my face and to think about the distance that energy had travelled before smacking right into my skin. As a bonus I was reasonably physically close, in those moments, to the people I loved (they were still sleeping in their beds twenty metres away) and in the heart of a community where I felt seen and valued.
It was an easy mantra to use, it kept time and made some literal sense.
I could inhale and accept the energy of the universe (the sun) into my body with grace and gratitude. I could exhale my breath with a wish that the love I had in my heart would be felt in my community and beyond.
So a bunch of syllables that count time AND combine to make words that express my thoughts and intentions. Super cool. I love dual utility.
My meditation practice has shifted in recent years from an eastern vipassana kind of thing, to a more western philosophical meditative practice. Instead of sitting in a cloud of my thoughts with a mantra rolling beneath them, I let my thoughts fall out the front of my head to be corralled on the pages below. Both are good I think. Both encourage peaceful reflection.
As the sunrise gets earlier and my mornings begin with the thinnest sliver of orange on the horizon, I’m thinking more and more often about going back out to the beach to sit.
Part of the way I’ve built my own spiritual and philosophical practice involves the acceptance of change. New ideas will come and go. New practices can be introduced, old ones dropped for a while, or forever as they no longer fit with my needs. As long as I have an underlying structure of positive habits I can be flexible over the top.
So I have dusted off my old mantra and begun looking for other places, later in my day, where I might write. Move things about a bit.
I sat with the old mantra and followed its familiar repetition, allowed it to wash over me, and I quickly began to feel infused with calm and contentment. It’s lovely! Welcome back you lovely mantra! I felt as though I was being hugged and held close, in the safe embrace of an old friend.
“I breathe in light and warmth from the universe…” helps me see that I am a tiny part of something boundless, epic and ultimately unknowable “...and I breathe out love and kindness” reassures me that I have a small part to play in shaping this vastness.
It occurred to me that, despite the enormity of our solar system, it might also be a tube. Energy goes in at one end (Big Bang), is filtered through all the living organisms who turn that energy, ultimately and over a LONG time, into love.
At some points in the process we, the cogs and nodes of this giant love machine will do a better job of this than at others. Wars and personalised number plates represent instances of low efficiency but in overall terms the system is still quite young and we’re still working out the kinks.
Our universe is thought to be only 13.7 billion years old and the soonest estimate of universal collapse I can find gives us another 22 billion years of effective processing time. My theory is that the point of the universe is to turn energy into love. We’re about a third of the way through the project and getting incrementally better all the time. On balance.
We are all love tubes. Doesn’t sound so good when I put it like that.
Leave me a wee like if you like this. Share it if you know any astrophysicists or folks who like a little love. Comment below if you can help me refine my thinking.