This one’s easy. This is the invitation of every so-called ‘moment.’ Shall I play the particle? Or shall I move as a wave? Or shall I know myself as the ocean? Three experiences. Three windows of perception. All perfection.

Based on a model of reality based in matter, a person feels a part; a separate individual connected by way of relationship to others and the world. Finite, bounded, relatively small. Bigger than an ant but ultimately miniscule, negligible in the Universe. To our constructed gods of space and time, we are essentially meaningless. By way of relationship and drama, emotions arise – fearing and longing. Beautiful and colourful. Characters in the human drama feel desperate underneath, that their life story amounts to nothing. All the struggle and toiling, all the gnashing of teeth; we look to spirituality or religion for meaning. Or we look to each other, to our children to carry on the story. Or our accomplishments, our material potency. Or we look to reality TV for our 15 minutes of fame – imagining ourselves made of matter, we long to matter. Existentially, however, we know we don’t. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We look to make friends with nihilism. Failing this, we turn to anaesthesia – we numb ourselves and our angst with substances and distraction.

A moment, truly entered, is actually more like a wave. Not so much a congregation of particles but a movement. Like music, a lifetime is the ecstatic dance of notes in the silence of being. And so any moment – sitting here with a snoring mutt, sipping a double IPA, breathing alongside a fire as the day dies outside a window onto the Universe – any moment is an exhalation of possibility. Ultimately uncapturable. A flow of water which can be felt but not grasped. Rather than limit myself to this middle-aging body I can breathe myself out into the totality – feel myself as intimately in the dark blue and white winter scene as in the dancing flames and the scent of damp dog. Fear begins to recede. Longing fades and fullness arrives into form. Gone is the personal. In its place is flow, the dance of life. Seamless. Effortless. Ineffable and ephemeral. Always present.

But what about the silence that gives way to song? What about the space that welcomes all appearances and the stillness that places no bounds on the dance of existence? How profoundly, as a human collective, we ignore the presence of the unnameable emptiness which makes the music of being possible. Feeling ourselves to be only a particle, we only give our attention to the other seeming parts.

Call it consciousness or awareness, when will we give our attention to the invisible from which, in which, and out of which all visions appear?

We are the ocean dying of thirst. We are the Only feeling what it’s like to be lonely. We play as temporal pieces in an infinite and eternal emptiness. Hilarious and beautiful. The tragic comedy of being. Choose your window onto the existence that is you – particle, wave, or ocean.

Here’s 8 minutes worth getting lost in: “Mocean” by Chris Bryan.