Why Do You and Your Belief in You Exist?

“Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?” – Stephen Hawking

Am I living a life or am I a life being lived? Am I or am I not? And if I am not then why is there still this sense of being?

You don’t have to spend much time looking at these things for the truth – the Truth – to start burbling to the surface. It’s all territory that’s been covered before – the body doing its thing regardless of any ‘help’ from you; the thoughts popping in and out of consciousness without being ‘summoned’ by you. All of which suggests rather strongly that there is no you or me.

Look still closer and it becomes obvious that ‘you’ come and go with those thoughts. Anyone can sit and, say, watch the sun set and as our minds are briefly silenced so too does time – and the sense of self – go with it. There is no me, no sun, no nothing – just beingness or awareness or whatever you want to call it.

Then a noise is heard or perhaps a hunger pang emerges and that sense of a self whooshes back in and lay claim to all of it. Only, there is this great gap of time and self and even the I cannot find it or understand what happened during those intervening moments. Clearly, “I” am nothing more than a hitchhiker cadging a ride with those thoughts and incredibly we take this for granted.

The mystics are fairly consistent in pointing out just how obvious is the great cosmic Truth each of us so steadfastly avoids. It’s as if we walk down the street desperately avoiding eye-contact with the reality that lies just behind the scenes (and the senses).

Why do we avert our eyes? I suppose because there is the implicit recognition that when the Truth is at last seen there can be no going back, no return of this all-important me with all its endless dramas, its birth and death, its destiny and mission in life. The individual I is done for when the totality of existence is at last seen.

So we hang on to life and the little, frightened me that keeps the whole thing going.

Today I stumbled across a terrific passage from a book that briefly details a mystical experience by the late Alan Ginsberg, which speaks to this hidden cosmic conscious to which each of us belongs and from which we stubbornly, persistently hide:

Ginsberg was reading William Blake’s “Ah Sun-Flower” when he suddenly heard a deep voice – a voice of the Ancient Days, Blake or God (or both) – intoning words and unrolling their meaning. He saw the world’s apparent solidity seem to flicker and go transparent. Over the next few days the vision continued to evolve, as though a window were gradually gobbling the wall that held it.

Lying in bed he could look into the infinite sky and see the “living blue hand itself…. Existence itself was God.” He felt “a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe” where an immense cosmic consciousness was at work. He saw it everywhere: in the gargoyles on the Harlem cornices, the workmen who made them, the sky that framed them. He walked into the Columbia University bookstore and saw in everyone’s faces that they knew they all had the consciousness – “it was like a great unconsciousness that was running between all of us that everybody was completely conscious….”

Everyone was in the ridiculous position of denying it so they could sell books, wrap them in paper, and collect money. They were hiding this knowledge of the shining self from each other, Ginsberg felt, even though they “knew completely everything.” They were hiding it because of self-hatred and rejection – the twistedness born of the suffering self.

And again, this smacks strongly of what the Near Death Experiencer sees: that he or she knows everything, has returned ‘home,’ was never really born and as such cannot possibly die.

This sense of being alive, of being ‘John’ or ‘Susan’ and walking the earth and living a life is often called a misunderstanding, and our reluctance or refusal to acknowledge this illusion is precisely what keeps it going.

Why does the universe exist? Why is there something vs. nothing? Why do you exist when you do not have to?

I have no idea but believe, as the mystics have long stated, that we exist only to ‘awaken’ to the nature of our own being. All else is illusion, so why waste time on it?