A Brief Exploration of Cosmic Cereal and the Many Worlds Your Body Contains
To inhabit a body means to inherit isolation — a lifetime’s sense of separateness.
Perhaps this is what was really meant by “original sin.” And by that I mean a “holy mistake,” if one could be made lovingly purposeful.
Because in reality, everything is energy. Everything is a part of one flowing, ever-changing, evolving cosmic cereal. According to my tastes: a bowl of Lucky Charms in oat milk. Yet, here I am in this body that perceives itself as its own marshmallow, floating alone, navigating separateness with the promise of connection guiding it like a north star.
Meditating on the ebbs and flows of that voyage always has me curious about the places where my individual experience begins and where the “me” laps upon the “we” in delicious, and sometimes, hard-to-stomach ways.
There’s no real place to draw definitive lines and there never will be. (Good luck trying to slice a bowl of Charms with a knife.) But there’s something nourishing —invigorating, even — about zooming in and out of the many layers and perceived boundaries of the collective. To drink up as much of the bowl, the whole, as I can, and witness the “I” in it— even the smallest elements that make up and move this body.
Patterns continue to reveal themselves, giving me more questions and a lot to chew on.
The Marshmallow Un-Alone in Its Multitudes
Let’s start with the concept of space. “Emptiness.”
Physicists know at this point that there’s very little that matters in this universe.
In fact, according physicist Nassim Haramein, the founder of the Resonance Science Foundation, 0.0000…1% of the universe is actually comprised of matter.
The rest is an immense amount of space that, on some level, we all struggle to deal with.
In these materially, externally focused societies centered on the Amazons, Instagrams, and Walmarts — the subjects, objects, and the objectified — space creates a lingering sense of lack. A insatiable hunger. The Haves and the Have-Nots.
Space creates The Other.
Today, we measure the distance between “self” and “other” based on race, class, status, sex, age, gender identity, culture, ability, etc.
We are each beautifully unique, and in some sense, alone in our own distinct experience, on our own islands, dealing with our own pain. And so, at times, we wrestle with what to do with all of that frickin’ space.
We each want to know that we are significant.
To feel that we matter.
(Black Lives Matter! Trans Lives Matter!)
That “my life has meaning.”
That sense of meaninglessness and isolation felt so palpable during the days shelter-in-place in 2020. No more sharing meals with our relatives, or attending concerts, sports events, church; no more dancing with our friends at festivals or hanging out at our favorite bar (Zoom happy hours for sure weren’t cutting it.) And many of us lost loved ones without warning and moved through grief without our usual modes of support.
I remember feeling trapped in my wife and I’s one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and how scared I felt of people when I went on brief trips to the local supermarket. Even eye contact with passerby’s on the sidewalk felt risky. I remember the judgement I felt against people wearing their masks as chin guards. I’m ashamed of the disgust I felt for “those” people.
For me, these various experiences of disconnection and dehumanization were utterly draining. So, in this shelter-in-place depression — call it “wound”— my salve came from appreciating the types of connections I’ve often taken for granted.
The warmth of a hug from the people I could hold.
Cat cuddles.
Warm tea on my tongue.
Connections even on a microscopic level.
Somewhere along my metaphysics and biology studies, I began to see and understand each and every one of my trillions of cells as their own individual beings.
I thought that if I’m only a small part of this large Earth, I must be like one of its cells living out its own purpose somehow. And since everything in the universe is fractal in nature, perhaps my cells have their own consciousness in a similar way that I do.
They each have their own lives with their own jobs, self-expressions, memories, as well as life and death cycles. Because many of them tend to reside in certain places, I have organs, which each have their own functions— their own cultures. And from there you could map out my (mostly) internal world: The Country of Pancreas, The Great Skin Plains, the Isles of Ovaries.
My anatomy.
Most of my physical existence relies on unconscious events that occur in these microscopic worlds: breathing, beating. Trade. Exports. Telegraphs. A hormone for this, an electrical pulse for that. In other words, my life depends on various modes of communication. Connection (and in some cases, the lack thereof).
I am — this individual is — an amalgamation of communities in constant flux and exchange. And so, it appears that being in a body is a collective experience in and of itself.
Of course, this realization did not, all of a sudden, make loneliness and grief disappear. Nor did I truly want to “make them go away”. I understood that globally, many of us were being called to process various manifestations of trauma, past and present.
Instead, thinking this way helped me to sit with the discomfort of solitude and gain a new perspective on the multitudes my body contained — especially the pain.
Because as we all know, there’s inherent risk in communication. It holds the potential for misunderstandings, breakdowns, and clashes of all sorts. I started to wonder if, at times, the pain my body expresses is a sign of internal conflict needing reconciliation. New connections.
I’m now remembering a particular time when I kept waking up with a stiff neck which, for weeks, wouldn’t alleviate with massage, exercise or a fancier pillow.
In some deep energy work, I became conscious of a soccer memory that I’d long forgotten: Me, a goalkeeper, diving to save a ball with such vigor I ended up with whiplash. Fifteen (or so) years later, the muscles of my neck were, for some reason, triggered and acting as if I was still that banged up teenager who often felt like she needed to overextend herself to feel valued. The past had become painfully alive in the present for me to bear witness and process — perhaps on a level that I never had before.
Within the sinews, I felt the angst, the desperation, the shock, and the tension trying to protect me from future harm— the pain that was (and still is) trying to care for me. I visualized that 15-year-old who often overdid it and told her it was over now. I thanked her for doing what she needed to do to survive. Told her that she’s loved. I gave her an imaginary hug.
On the following days, I witnessed my neck relax as it responded better to massage and rehab. I couldn’t help but feel as if those cells had released its grip on a moment of my past; that they reached some sort of resolution and now they could establish a more comfortable level of tension.
Thinking about the body and its collective nature also gave me a greater appreciation of my movement practice. Because in this world that often times feels rather discordant and chaotic, here in my body, I get the chance to explore the opposite.
When I’m feeling into a dance that emotes whatever is coming up for me or practice a skill that I’ve always wanted to nail … like when I’m really tuning into the pieces of me working together to express my vision (the coordination of breath, energy transfer, muscle activation, correct feedback response) …
… I get to experience global synchronicity.
Or at least the efforts towards it.
To push this concept even further, I draw inspiration from the work of one of my friends, Beck Beverage (Trans Embodiment Project), who is an artist and embodiment coach based in Portland, OR. In a recent Instagram post, they ask: “What is considered movement?”
Since, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred,” according to Albert Einstein, Beverage posits that the body “alive” or “dead” is never not in motion:
The body ‘alive’ is a constant conversation. There is no boundary between me and my environment. Only construction, interpretation, and response. The body ‘dead’ releases itself to the environment. A dead body disintegrates into movement itself: energy. Perceived boundaries dissolve. Movement is the fundamental state of being that impacts everything. Connecting and dividing. Weaving. All sedentary acts my body engages in are movement. A movement practice can be a sedentary practice.
This means that “moving” in the conventional sense, is not required for me to cultivate gratitude for (if not total awareness of) the many ways relationships form and reform on a cellular, molecular, atomic and even more minute levels beyond human conception. Because although separation, boundaries, and lines of division are very much palpable aspects of reality, they also are a matter of perception.
The Milky Ways of Space
So, let’s return to space.
Space which most of us experience as “emptiness.”
Space is not, in fact, empty at all.
“Since everything radiates [energy], that space is not empty,” physicist Haramein says. “[Space is] full and infinitely full.”
He suggests that our universe is so energetically dense that light cannot escape. That if we were to shoot a laser into the universe, it would be continued to be bent by the gravitational field of all of the stars, planets, and smaller masses that it could not escape the radius of the universe; it would just come back onto itself. So, our universe technically meets the definition of a black hole. Or a “Black Whole,” as Haramein likes to say.
I’m so grateful to plant medicine and its chosen wielders who’ve both held space for me to experience the density of the vacuum — to feel the fields of energy that envelop and move through everyone and everything.
It was like being submerged in water and feeling the waves rolling through your bones. Maybe it’s what people say is the “returning to the womb” feeling. Just feeling held, taken care of, and yet so sensitive to the emotions and sensations of the mother (in Latin, the mater, i.e. the matrix). I could feel the joy and grief of the people around me as viscerally as ripples within my skin.
Of course, you don’t need plant-medicine or ceremony to understand how interconnected we all are. Notice how your body reacts when you hear a person crying, when you watch a person dancing their heart out. Think about that strange thing that happens when you see someone else yawn and you can’t help yawn yourself.
I think about the ways in which I tend to pick up the mannerisms and speech patterns of the people I hang around most, and the energy of others— my parents, my ancestors — express through me all of the time. I bop to dancehall like my father.
There’s no true separation between “I” and “we.”
When the world grieves I grieve on some level. Especially because of the pandemic, many of us know collective pain really well by now.
I wonder if we are capable of global joy. Coherence. Even for a moment. Something like the rainbow realizing that the problem isn’t the prism but the fact that it forgot it was always one light.
I’m not sure if anything like that has happened in human history or what, realistically, that would even look like. Perhaps its happening on some astral plane somewhere as I type this. Maybe I’ll get lucky to feel it in this lifetime as I continue to explore this world—this bowl of charms.
