I wonder if there is a cosmic me. I’m starting to think of the whole cosmos and me as being one. It is an outrageous reach, but it feels intuitively right.
Actually, it is a kind of contradiction because there really is no “me”, and I am beginning to appreciate this. There is a tenacious illusion of self that I struggle to see around and beyond. As I attempt to to see that there is no self, then all that remains is the all expansive, all including, all possibility cosmos. And I think that cosmos and I are the same.
The crusty, persistent notion of self stands between my paltry experience of living as a human being and the experience of a vastness I am not yet able to grasp. But I’m reaching.
From a strictly materialistic point of view held by contemporary science, there is nothing in me that has not been there since the very beginning. Everything in me existed at the moment there was space and time. Science says that the material me was there at the moment we now call the Big Bang.
What existed before that “first” moment is debated and subject to much speculation. But I feel certain that every part of my physical body has been in existence since just before that first nano second of time when all the cosmos was physically united. That signature of singular cosmic oneness is still carried in my body.
It is fanciful, maybe poetic to say that we are made of star dust, but it goes back before then, before there were stars. Every part of material me, every component has been in existence since the beginning and came from the same original something.
I am made up of many parts that all point back to a common point of origin when time and space as we now imagine it first appeared. As a material entity I am intimately linked to all the cosmos. If I am capable of imagining it, I am inseparable from all that is, from the whole cosmos. I am cosmic, cosmic me.
For my mind to grasp what it is like to be part of this cosmic whole, I have to rid myself of any traditional notions of separateness. I have to rid myself of all the distractions I have made to get through my conventional way of living. But once I can rid myself of all these imagined distinctions, I see that there is no-thing, only emptiness. The cosmic me is emptiness.
The cosmos is an emptiness that is not a “without” except that there is nothing I have imagined. It is an emptiness that is all-embracing. all-containing, all-possibility. It is the cosmos as it really is and not as I imagine and as my senses encourage to see.
It is in this realm of emptiness that I really meet the cosmic me. It is there that I realize my consciousness is not separate but is an aspect of all consciousness. If there is anything I can regard as a me, it is the cosmic all. The all is cosmic me.