Living Resilience (in a crazy world) excerpt 2: Life, The Universe… and porridge.

I am just over halfway through a two day fast and during my daily writing sessions my thoughts have turned to food. So today’s longer excerpt is a story of Life, The Universe… and Porridge.

Sometime, time began, and there was no time like the present and the universe was made of porridge.

And the porridge was one, so everything in the universe was one. Then as a result of natural movements within the porridge a bubble appeared.

Inside the bubble the porridge was reflected through the lens of the bubble walls (it’s a metaphor, I have no idea where the light came from either…) and in seeing the reflection was different the bubble had self awareness and began to consider its life as it understood it from what it saw of the reflection.

In time other bubbles appeared in the porridge and they began to communicate their understanding of life by sharing their internal reflections. Now in addition to the internal reflections there was a communal understanding of those reflections.

Of course now their understanding of reality was two steps removed from the unity of the porridge and increasingly got the bubbles into trouble.

It became a regular event that bubbles would disagree about their internal filtering of the porridge and attempt to coerce each other into agreement on their ideas which they mistook for the reality of the porridge.

Such coercion would often result in a bubble bursting and so death entered the bubble world and a whole mythology arose around what it might be that was completely independent of the reality of the porridge.

And from time to time, just now and again, something else would happen. A bubble would spontaneously open and then close again before this ‘death’ thing occurred. And just occasionally the bubble would remember its glimpse of the porridge and begin to teach others about the misunderstanding of self view that the bubbles all suffered from.

Sometimes they were worshiped, which wasn’t really what they wanted, sometimes they were ridiculed and sometimes other bubbles marketed what the ‘special’ bubble had understood and made a lot of money.

The funny thing was that the ‘bubble who had seen’ didn’t really mind and just helped anyone who wanted it, to open their own bubble for a moment so they too could see, and so whole schools and approaches arose amongst bubbles who hadn’t yet seen the Porridge for what it really was.

And that was OK too because really there wasn’t any mistake. The porridge was porridge, it moved in certain ways and stuff happened.

The Porridge was still one.

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