Astronomers say there was a primordial explosion, an enormous bang billions of years ago which flung all the galaxies into space. Well, let’s take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened.
It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see?
So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting.
But so we define ourselves as being only that.
If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time.
Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself.
You are actually — if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning — you’re not something that is a result of the big bang, on the end of the process. You are still the process! You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
(…)
But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.
We have been hypnotized, literally hypnotized by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins. That we are not the original bang, but just something out on the end of it.
(…)
And so what I would call a basic problem we’ve got to go through first, is to understand that there are no such things as things — that is to say separate things, or separate events.
So the world doesn’t come thinged; it doesn’t come evented. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. The ocean waves, and the universe peoples. And as the wave, I wave at you and say ‘Yoo-hoo!’ — the world is waving at me with you and saying ‘Hi! I’m here!’