Samsara

Lately I've been thinking a lot about black holes; imagine a thing with gravity so great, not even time can escape. They're made from stars billions of times bigger than the sun, which collapse in on themselves, sucking whole galaxies into their centres, pulling neighbouring galaxies into collision, and causing destruction we can't even begin to fathom the size of.

Black holes are at the centre of every big galaxy, and the Milky Way has one of the biggest known to science - four million times heavier than the sun, it holds our place in the infinite, and it probably has a lot to do with the anomaly of life on Earth. Maybe we're made from the dust it flung into space when it died?

Our black hole is colossal. Trillions of light years of space-time are constantly being sucked over its event horizon toward an inevitable, inconceivable unknown. It is lightless, emotionless, it feels, thinks & sees nothing, it is indiscriminate, and nothing escapes. We're not even space junk to it, we're so insignificant. I think about this a lot.

I think about it when something asinine is on TV. When people at my job make life hell for everyone around them. When I wonder how things are made, like petroleum-based plastics, and keyboards and then thoughts typed on keyboards. I think about it when people find more pleasure in making misery than making joy. When insecurities turn us into ferocious animals. When Samsara clouds the mind.

We waste so much time on such unimportant things. But then, I think 'why not waste time on unimportant things?' It's all indiscriminately meaningless - the profound and the shallow, the erudite and the ignorant. Nothing means anything, when you get right down to it. Samsara is just friction along the path that gives us the illusion that things actually matter. It gives us wars and love, righteousness and self-righteousness, humility, and the belief that our existence is more than a complicated accident. It puts weight behind every stance we take, it makes us bold, puts our clenched fist into our hand.

The non-stop chatter of the ego - where does it come from? It's like radio static from space storms constantly raging. The emotions that flare up and wreak havoc on our lives because we can't unhook them from our coats and let them go out the windows. Backed into corners with the desire to see attack coming from all fronts. And I say "desire" because we make a choice to see things the way we see them. Absolutely nothing is intrinsic, except maybe nothingness. Our interpretation of everything in the universe is just a chemical reaction in the brain - a constant white noise of left and right brain functioning.

I think about this a lot. Especially when I pull myself out of the white noise, and listen to it objectively. When I see people around me, even intelligent people, all knotted up in it. I wish they'd all turn off their radios.