Only Three Percent is Visible

At this rate, it could be a long rest of the year…..

One thing about living in a yurt is that you are always in the company of the sky.  We see clouds and constellations, flocks of birds and rainbows.  The moon is getting full now and passes over the dome in the ceiling at night, shining moonlight down on us in bed.  It is quite an astonishing feeling, even if it keeps one awake.   So, last night, of course it kept me awake and the hamster in my head was running running running on its’ wheel, pondering a Difficult Big Question.  Something that it would have been nice to have resolved a long time ago, but there it is.  For once, maybe it was the moon, I went into the unpleasant feeling, walking with it as though a part of me were a calm, developed being.  (HA) It became gradually clearer, which allowed me to not hold on to the resentment and pain of it, but still didn’t get me to any decision making ability.  But it did make me understand how sometimes you just have to walk completely away from things, even big things- really big things,  and that is all right.  We fear others’ judgements, want to be a “nice” person (what ever the hell THAT is), all the rest of it, but on some level miss the whole point.  We get stuck on the particulars, the events, our injuries and forget that the important thing is to be true to yourself and what you are here for.  Which is not to say that the selfishness of the vertical society is being true to oneself, either.  Pushing for something to happen outside of oneself and counting that as success and not paying attention to what needs to be done in life truthfully is not being true to oneself.

Being true to oneself means being able to decide what you are actually here for, and not allowing others’ opinions and attitudes and needs to swamp your ability to actually live.  It involves forgiveness to the extent that you come to understand that everything does in fact go around in whatever gyre it does, people do what they do, and your job is to not keep reproducing the suffering that happens when you abdicate responsibility for yourself and allow a situation to control your behavior.  Inasmuch as is reasonably possible in the situation.  Any thing that has happened, the wounds and pains and setbacks, along with the successes and joys, are all part of the big palimpsest of existence and are also all sort of the same:  They’re something you see from way underneath the water, perhaps, and from way up in the sky.  How to translate this into action may be revisited in tonight’s probably predictable moon induced insomnia.  I certainly hope so because seriously? I am sick of this particular gorilla.

Meanwhile this morning we heard an interview with the astrophysicist who just won the Nobel Prize for his work showing the following amazing thing:  There’s about three percent of what we see around us that’s actually “stuff”.  The rest of it is largely invisible.  Dark energy and dark matter.  So what we see is kind of the spangly covering on some huge moving thing that we cannot see, that’s expanding and contracting and moving and pulling us in all sorts of directions.  So the metaphor of our consciousness being a small pin prick of light is a good one.  I thought of the Hindu concept of Vishnu, sleeping essentially on a flower in water,  and opening and closing his eyes in vast time, creating and destroying, creating and destroying again, over and over.  Innumerable beings, immeasurable “time”.  I thought about how when we meet someone, how much do we perceive about them at the time, and over time?  Often it seems it’s about three percent.  Coincidence?  I THINK NOT.  Then I thought about how the matter and energy in this theory (we’ll call it that for simplicity’s sake)  are referred to as “dark”, and it brought me to the other thing I’ve been thrashing about with in my little mind, which is that the Spaniard’s galleons (black) were often not “seen” by the Caribs and the natives upon whom they descended.  They were, for the Native peoples,  essentially dark matter and dark energy.  It was beyond the ken of the inhabitants here, and thus invisible to them.  THEN I thought about how maybe sometimes we gradually learn to see into that darkness.  But at what price?  Is it better to stay residing among the spangled surfaces?  Looking at that three percent which seems so enormous and fantastic?  (Should we call it the three percent or the three dimensions?) Or are we meant to dip into the darkness and see what lies hurtling underneath our conscious thought?

In any event, that’s another story, and now we have to go to town, always an endeavor.  It’s an amusing shopping list, too:  Batteries, Bullets, and Milk. We’ll see how we do.

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