Reality as we know it does not really exist.

We humans think, talk and perceive in terms of separate identities, meaning, happiness, sadness, desire, justice, countries, governments, up, down, left, right, good, bad, easy, hard, normal, insane, and on and on and on.

These are all things that exist only in our minds, and therefore exist only on our teeny tiny little rock of a planet. They don’t exist anywhere else, at all. We don’t know why the universe is here, but there are billions of light years of stars and galaxies that are just there, burning, with no notion of any of the stories that we have invented. They’re neutral. Every human story, from identity to justice, is localized. It exists only where we are and only where we think it.

Here’s an analogy:

Imagine a huge field of trees. And I mean huge. Let’s say it’s 100 million square miles of densely packed trees.

Now imagine that one of the trees is blue. One of them. At one of the corners of the 100 million square mile field, there is one tree that is blue. Surely we recognize this as an anomaly, and we recognize that it is not a condition universal among the field, and in fact the vast, vast majority of the field is green and has no trace or hint of blue; it just doesn’t exist.

The same is true in the universe, involving all the things that humans take to be components of their reality. The entire paradigm in which we perceive reality is confined to our planet! Our entire way of thinking about life is not a constant throughout the universe. Our planet is like that blue tree. We have made up billions of stories, starting with the story of “me” as a separate identity (more on this in future posts), and we somehow feel like life “is” what is happening on this planet. That in life there is misery, in life there is happiness, in life there is good and bad. All these things don’t exist anywhere else. We made them up! Imagine reality from the perspective of our sun for a minute. Or from Mars. Or from the other stars and galaxies.

Can you see how tiny our planet is compared to what’s around it? And how nothing outside of this planet is telling the stories we tell? Reality as we know it, as we live it on this rock, does not exist. All the concepts and stories that make up our everyday lives are complete fiction. 

Our entire reality is confined to this rock. Outside of this rock there are no stories. No happiness, no sadness, no good or bad, no justice or injustice, no peace or war, nothing. These are the fictional building blocks of our projected realities. Everywhere else, there is just existence.