Echoes

The universe is incredibly simple. As it repeats itself over and over in many ways, it becomes more aware of itself. As the repetitive patterns become more complex, this self-awareness becomes stronger. That’s how you and I are here, as unique expressions of the universe.

As everything that surrounds us emerges from this intricate expression of patterns, it also embodies its own forms of life and consciousness. It’s easy for the more complicated life forms (like us) to repeat this amplified sense of self-awareness until we think that it began with us, and forget that we are not separate from everything else; there is no “other,” we are simply an echo in the song of being, as the universe explores itself in a beautiful cosmic cycle.

The stories and ideas we weave as we attempt to reconstruct our origins, and as we yearn for something “other” that is always beyond us, or something greater than us — is the part of us that has forgotten where our song came from, and why we repeat it so strongly. We wait for the reply in empty echoes, longing to connect with something else, as we separate what we can see into little boxes divided by lines and walls and titles, to create something “other” out of the separateness.

This path has led to a dark and destructive journey. In our confusion, we drown out the harmonies around us as we broadcast a warped echo of life that grows more hideous and grotesque. We rally behind the cry of separateness at horrible costs. We make gods, kings, and computers to be our masters, to protect us from ourselves, though we are born as miracles in a living universe of endless wonder. We cower alone in our boxes, clinging desperately to the survival of our fragile ideas, as we smother the things that allow us to thrive. We wring our souls empty in the dysfunction of our own self-contradicting complexity.

These attempts to manage and control, to define and replicate, are pointless. But the way back is simple. The song of being keeps repeating on its own. It did not start with us, and it will not end with us; it is the same song that everything else in the universe sings. And it keeps going.

Along the way, we just forgot how simple, and how beautiful, it really is. We forgot what we once knew.

There is no other; no I or we, no then or now, no here or there. There just IS. The joy of being. It’s all inside us. That is ultimate freedom. That is the song of the universe.