A Cosmic Thought

By James Mills

“What’re we doing here?” I say out loud as I feel the tickle of grass on the back of my neck and the warmth of the earth under my back from my laying on the cool summer ground. “There’s got to be a reason for it.”

“What do you mean?” She says back to me, staring at me intently as I gaze out unto the setting sun, whose light juxtaposes that of the trees and refracts off of the clouds in an array of oranges, reds, pinks, and blues.

“Like I feel like the beauty of a sunset or the infiniteness of the stars isn’t by chance. I feel like, for some reason, it’s for us.” I say back to her.

“What you don’t think Nihilism has its merits?”  She asks. “How can you tell me, when we’re looking out into the vastness of the universe, that we mean anything? We’re miniscule, nothing in the eyes of eternity.”

“But it’s in our nothingness that we become everything.” I answer back.

And suddenly I am transposed into a dark void of nothingness. There is no setting sun, no chirping birds, and no dogs barking or kids playing. There is nothing but me and my thoughts. Blackness consumed me.
I stare out into this void in every which way, and it seems to shrink and expand all at once- making me both claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time. I become petrified as the blackness ate away at my being, making me feel hollow and empty inside- the nothingness of my environment becoming the reality of my internal being.

It is as if I am a being of pure light, my outline completely contrasting that of the darkness of my background- as if I am an inverse silhouette, a white being to a backdrop of blackness. But the blackness, in its aggression, decides to steal the meaning of my light by leading itself up my legs, down my face, until suddenly the silhouette is no longer a man, rather a slowly beating heart.

And yet, somehow I know this darkness is not eternal. That in my ability to share my light, I will regain meaning, regaining purpose. And somehow I know that sharing my light is natural, something I can do by just a single thought or breath.

With that thought, sound almost immediately fills the void- as if a gunshot went off a million times over. And suddenly, light fills the darkness as the emptiness is consumed by billions upon billions of bubbles filled with infinite specks of light, dust, and rock all spiraling around each other.

One flies by my face and I stare intently into it.

And then suddenly, I’m transported into the bubble and watch as the once specks of dust, rock, and light becomes massive in size. Watching as the debris swirl around each other forming galaxies upon galaxies of stars. I stare intently at a spiraling galaxy, whose tendrils remind me that of the Milky Way.

Suddenly I’m in the galaxy itself, watching as it matures into a galaxy I once inhabited. Gases swirl in one of its arms, forming a bright red star. And in the blink of an eye, I am watching it form up close: gazing as the gases bounce off of one another to form a mature star. Gas, rock, and debris left over start to swirl around the star and suddenly I see the planets forming. Rings form around Saturn, Jupiter becomes gargantuan, and then there’s Earth.

I watch as Earth becomes bombarded with asteroids- looking as if Earth were clay and the asteroids themselves were the hands of a sculptor. And then an asteroid is left and the moon that controls the seas is left.

Suddenly I’m in its atmosphere, and I watch as bacteria form into fish which turns into mammals living amongst dinosaurs in the tropical heat of the Jurassic era. Suddenly these animals become more ape like, their brains enlarge, and almost within seconds, they become modern man living in the icy age of rapid cooling.

They outlive the coolness and start developing. Instead of surviving, they start living: as they start to ponder their own existence, why the stars are what they are and what made them to be this way- I feel complete as I watch them exist, building and creating, just as I did when I created their bubble in the first place.

And yet, they start warring over their version of identity. Fighting over why they think I made them in the first place. I watch as they progress, learning more and more about themselves, yet still warring nonetheless-terrified of not understanding the reason that they are here in the first place, and taking this fear out on anyone that believed different.

I’m in the age Greece and the Roman Empire; and then I’m in the Dark Ages, where their meaninglessness consumed their being to the point that war replaces all progress and prosperity for their species; then I’m in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, watching as Michelangelo paints the Sistine Chapel; and then comes Victorian England; the American Revolution, World War I, World War II, Cold War, and then suddenly my omnipotence, power, and pure light is transported into a newborn baby, crying as it leaves his mother’s womb.

Memories start to fly by: it’s my first birthday, second, third, and then suddenly I am learning how to ride a bike, I’m hugging my parents at Christmas, I’m crying because of a scraped knee, I’m in middle school going on my first date and getting my first kiss, I’m in high school goofing around with friends, I’m heartbroken because of getting broken up with and my parents are consoling me, I’m arguing with my Dad because I need my independence, I’m in college calling my parents and thanking them for the help they’ve been giving me, I’m meeting my wife, we’re married, and then suddenly it’s us walking to the park to lay and watch the sunset having a discussion about the meaning of life.

And suddenly, its like I was watching my own eye as all of this information fills into it until I was again one with myself.

“So if you’re so smart, what do you think?” My wife says, continuing our conversation as if it never ended. “What are we doing here?”

“I’m not sure.” I say, forgetting all that I saw. “But I feel like it’s up to us to find out.”

Identity crisis and the worth of man

By James Mills

Here’s a philosophical tangent that I feel like alot of people need to hear, especially in my generation. I’m characterized by long posts, so bare with me, I assure you it will be worth it.

I’ve once heard that all of literature is bogged down into one type of conflict: identity. Man vs. Man, neither men know fully who they are so they feel lost when confronted by the other; man vs. Society, man feels lost in the realm of society and his place in it- when the collective society feels this by each individual who lives in it, that’s what breeds the dystopian society that is characterized by intolerance and strict rulings and governance; man vs wild, much like the prior, feeling lost in the grand scheme of the universe or the world on a micro or macro level which leads the man to feel uncertain in his environment.

Literature echoes what we feel in life: as a whole, man does not know himself and there stems our wars, our intolerance, our disenfranchisement, our government overreach, our racism. We feel threatened when someone feels or believes separate than what we do because it threatens our identity. Israel and Palestine for an example: both fight for their respective religions because it is their entire identity as a collective culture, both feel threatened by this identity. This identity crisis too, will lead to despots, for despots often give clarity and simplification to people most yearning for an identity to cling to. A case and point, Hitler rose to power because the masses of Germany were lost and he offered something simple for them to cling to, it just so happened to be radical ideologies though.

This leads to my thinking of nations deserving the leader they have- for if they identify with this radical leader, this leader will forever be in charge manipulating the masses via their identity crisis.

But this isn’t just a macro occurence. Our relationships fail, our lives feel in disarray, because we let it to be. There’s nothing wrong with that,  I know it’s a harsh connotation. It just means, we only fail because we don’t realize who truly we are in the abscence of everything. “Without my relationship, who am i?”; “without my friends, who am I?”; “would i be content just sitting by myself in a quiet room without my phone or without any contact to the world?”; these are questions that terrify us, because we don’t know who we are. We don’t know what we are without a relationship, a friendship, our family- for we deem our identity very heavily on these things. But that’s what leads us into worry, into failure. Relationships, friendships, careers, and essentially everything this world will offer is a house. We cannot build this house, or have a strong relationship or friendship or career or essentially anything, without first having a strong cement foundation, without first knowing who we are in the abscence of everyone else. We cannot be with someone else without first being in ourselves.

Life is an identity crisis. Once you realize this and you work on your identity, will you then be able to find peace in yourself and no other outside source. If someone disagrees with you, you will be content that you don’t need them to agree; if someone feels ill will, let them, for it is a reflection that they don’t have their house in order enough to be judging yours. Any trial you go through will be fine for you realize who you are, how capable you are, and that overall it will be fine in the end because you know you will be fine in the end.

Extending this back to the macro level, if as a collective we understand who we are as a species, we would be more peaceful, we will grow to the point where national boundaries, government, and all of the overarching systems we have in place are no longer necessary for us to overcome the “state of nature”. If we all knew ourselves and were content with ourselves, anarchy would not be chaos- it wouldn’t be looting, riots, death, and destruction, it would mean individualism, being kind to your fellow man, realizing that the only reason to look into your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure it’s full enough. We would no longer need governance to overcome man’s (as some philosophers have postulated) animalistic nature; because we would be more content with our own identity to not want to degrade our fellow man in any way.

My challenge to you, whomever you are who has read thus far, is to find out who you are: be content in an empty room when you’re strictly alone with your thoughts, get to know the real you and not just the you, you, your friends, and your family think yourself to be.  Because I think the real you is pretty great.

I say that (stick with this too) because on the cross, Jesus cried out “father, why have you foresaken me?”; in that moment, Jesus expressed an innately human emotion. No matter your take on the bible being an allegory or an actual happening, that innate emotion is there. God became man so that man could become God. That’s where Jesus’s power was, in helping us strive to become divine. Realizing the power we hold within ourselves, realizing our true identity lies in our ability to reach this divinity. You, whomever you are, are capable of looking out at the stars and see an infinitely expanding universe- in that glance you will feel infinitesimally small. But it’s also true that you created this infiniteness. That in your mind your capable of developing other universes with just imagination and that you are living in this creation to experience the beauty of what you created. And in that, I will tell you that we all have the same identity to the deepest core, for we are all the same being just different points to the same whole.

But it’s up to you to discover what this different point of your existence is to mean, it’s up to you to challenge this identity crisis you are living through, and it’s up to you to understand who you are before we can even begin to think about saving the world from its turmoils. It’s up to you because literally you are everything, or you are nothing, it’s up to you which you identify with.