Sentient Meat, You and Me
One of the many game-changing moments for me in my spiritual explorations was when someone said “you are the universe experiencing itself.” Think about the shift that this perspective induces: instead of a segregated “I” looking out to an unknown or alien “it” (god or gods, the universe or multiverse), you return to yourself as inherently integrated with the rest of the world; you are the “it,” as a matter of fact. This is, I realize, another variation on the oft-cited idea that “we are made of star-stuff.” But for some reason, that expression of it never really resonated with me; it’s nifty, of course, but to simply be built of the same material as something else did not, for whatever reason, trigger any major change in how I conceived of myself or my own consciousness. But to say that we are the universe experiencing itself – that, somehow, does. I suppose that’s because one can build many different things out of the same material, without commenting on the qualities or nature of