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From our self-created delusion of a privileged point of view, we cannot imagine how small a slice of all that is we inhabit with our minds.

Bubbling up from the quantum foam, weaving in the gossamer veil, the fabric of consciousness fluttering between body & world, our awareness floats through seas of spacetime. Dependently arisen, the complex wave-crests of consciousness sparkle; they effervesce among infinite possibilities: awareness, fear and self-focus riding like flotsam on the tsunami of coincidence.

Hardly begun, we think ourselves capable of, deserving of, immortality. We imagine forever, our toy concept dancing on the waves, perpetually moments from drowning in the tides of the eons.

Between the swell of chaos and the lull after cascades of random ripples, collapsing possibilities into the currents of experience, we float on meanings so fragile the merest cosmic breeze, a single uncharted comet or asteroid, could return them in a blink to the interstellar dust from which they arose in the blink before.

What hubris! What heart! What desperate bravado in the face of death!

Between the visions of something and nothing, every-thing and no-thing, we arrange our half-silvered mirrors, constructing the experiments we hope will prove our existence.

Could there be another way to imagine this? A more modest meaning, but one that we could, even in the shelter of a cold beaker, believe in?

What if it is just what it seems to be, illusions aside? Just a lucky throw of the cosmic dice, with no further meaning than double sixes or snake eyes?

If we can come to terms with that, then perhaps nothing else, no other cherished view, would matter. We could let go of humanist dreams, religious nightmares, the search for the quantum clockworks that we imagine would soothe us with an endless tick-tock.

Here in this moment, standing just now, looking east by north-east, what would we see? Looking through the crack between the doors of everything and nothing, could we let go of privilege? Riding the arising, the swell of imagined significance, could we continue to float calmly, knowing the trough of despond that will always follow? Could we let go our clinging to some matter, embrace that we exist only as the flotsam of inevitable complexity, the foaming crest of some strange attractor?

What if all that arises is the false essence made of imagination—what is fearful about that once it is truly admitted? Resigning ourselves to our ultimate ephemerality, what is left to fear? The soggy clump of meaning that we rest upon. The bubbles of seaweed logic. The jetsam of disproven experiments past. The liquor of some sweet darkness that still hangs over us like yesterday’s excesses. We cling to the worthless like a child’s remembered dream of a blanket.

You think perhaps this means that nothing really matters. But everything-and-nothing is not that simple. Through the crack between those doors vast possibilities await. Spacetime will continue to construct itself from probability. The tempting illusions of cause and effect will not cease, but we do not have to believe there is nothing else. Wholesome deeds will still make us feel good. Having a positive effect on the future does not change simply because that future is not “forever.” The rise and fall can bring either joy or fear; it is the knowing that makes the difference.

What if the selves whose sharp edges every moment seem so cruel are not really needed? Their intentions, their effects, roll on through space and time like the molecules of water in the waves, rising and falling, marching in the greater army of waves unimaginable, beyond the curve of the horizon we stare at in wonder.

Me and you, the latest bubbles in the froth. Everything we imagine to be ours comes from some passionate couplings of waves from what seems, from here, like the past, colliding in hope of some future bliss. Suppose we do find out how it all works; then what would we do? Take our boat apart in mid-ocean, and reconstruct it? Why?

Between our loci of awareness and the all that surrounds them, there is the suffering, the circle of ripples going out and coming back in all dimensions. Yesterday, today, tomorrow—rings in the water. All the thoughts, glances and words, welling up from the sources of energies and emerging proto-particles, photons and electrons, organic synchronies swimming out of darkness, molecules begetting organelles, then cells, and so on. Endless conversations among coincidences, until, at last, thought emerges, and immediately confuses itself, tangling up like filament floating in the tides. Such a charming trap; we believe it, because disbelieving simply doesn’t occur to us as an option.

But it is an option.

What there is between “existence” and “non-existence,” between clinging to the eternal & fearing the death of meaning, is a path, a way of disentangling, a way of patiently turning the knots over and over until we see how to loosen them. Pulling doesn’t work. Trying without knowing only pulls them tighter.

It’s like learning to float on your back in the salty swell. There is the essential nature of trust. There is the feeling of cool air across your face, the fear of the unknown deep below. You cannot look behind you where the waves feel as if they are pulling you. You can only just be there, neither drowning nor flying, both living and dying all at once, being no one in particular, being kind to all who float by, singing your song of trust, not wanting to be or wanting not to be, not admitting the question has importance even; this is the ultimate nobility of mind.

Your song will float across the waves, bringing joy to all who hear it, bringing courage.