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 the things in-themselves; but when you think “I am part of the universe,” the fundamental concept of what “I” is is redefined, blurring the lines between you and it, an individual versus a portion of a universe of conscious and unconscious matter. 

Yeah I know buddy, this is wild. 

And my delight only increased as I thought about it more; because from an empirical, objective viewpoint (which, you know, is important to atheopagans) it’s a pretty indisputable claim. As Rust puts it in True Detective,, we are sentient meat; or conscious star-stuff, if you prefer. We are chemicals, molecules, atoms. All forms of life are matter made animate and self-replicating, and then at some point (and here of course we can debate when), conscious. Is there any fundamental difference between the stuff in the galaxies and the stuff that whizzes about our brains, giving us feelings, beliefs, values? No, there isn’t. So yes, we are small portions of the universe experiencing itself. How else could we possibly understand ourselves?

 

When I meditate on this, I experience so many walls that Western culture has built breaking down. The Cartesian dualism between body and mind which constructs and aggravates so many problems in our cultures, its earlier roots in the Platonic and Christian concepts of a fallen or corrupt world, and the alienation between humans and animals and nature that we impose upon ourselves. My dogs, too, are slices of the universe experiencing themselves. My consciousness and their consciousness are two expressions of the same amazing phenomenon – matter made aware.  So we are bound together in this; we’re both waking up, on some level, and going “whoah, check me/this out.” And whatever we are, however disappointing or painful it can be (cruelty, selfishness, sadness, suffering) it is part of the entire whole of what there is. There are a lot of ways to find a way to love it and navigate the messiness of being alive, but to construct some other realm – heaven, gods, the sphere of perfect forms – that is fundamentally different or “superior” is not an option. There is a radical concept of love in there that, as far as I can tell, is ultimately rooted in truth; which is to say, in reality. 

 

Of course, nothing guarantees that you’ll be able to experience this love, or have a subjectively positive reaction to what is an objective fact. The matter of our brains are arranged differently, and for so many reasons we’ve just barely begun to understand, life can be a blissed out kaleidoscope of awesome for some of us, and a slog of depressing isolation for others. I’ve got nothing comforting to say about that; indeed one of my foundational beliefs is that there is no moral order to the universe, and that darkness and injustice has to recognized and acknowledged (rather than explained away in some painful contortion of intellectual gymnastics). But what can I say; as for the little slice of the universe that is my brain, it is pretty well blown, and in the best possible way. 

 

But it brings me a lot of comfort to think about how so much of life is about care – about parents and siblings and friends providing for and protecting one another. So many mommy mammals suckling their young; even so many odd animal friendships that defy the more usual route of being predator and prey or simply indifferent to each other. It suggests to me that there is something about the material that makes up the universe that, once it becomes self-aware, wants to take care of other manifestations of itself; that leans, in other words, towards love. 

 

I don’t believe that this means that the universe is benevolent; no more than humanity could be said to be benevolent, when we clearly are quite capable of being anything but. Yet it does suggest to me that the universe cannot possibly be described as malevolent, either; there is no moral order to the universe beyond what each little part of it decides to commit to. So now we come back to you, to me, to everything; even in the same instance that we recognize the limit of an egotistic conception of “I,” so too we realize that we each have the freedom to choose what we want to do with ourselves; what kind of additional slice of the universe we want to create and leave behind for all the matter-made-conscious to come.