There is an extensive blue sky stretching out above you. You have been taught to believe it is the atmosphere that wraps the earth protectively, cradling it in its arms. You look at the sky and see clouds drifting by, a few birds flit across. You see dust motes floating in the air before they drop away from that one beam of sunlight.
You peel away that layer of blue from above and stare into the black hole that is the universe. An endless, large black abyss. Would you will yourself to travel into it and get sucked into the unknown? And maybe spend the next 80 years of your life in that darkness, while it swirls past you, only to give way to more black? Only to find out one day that you have not even made it past your own solar system, the one you labelled in your Geography notebooks?
There have been people who have wondered if the universe has an edge, perhaps a glass wall that defines that the end is ‘here’ and you can go no further. Nobody lived long enough to find out. Nobody had the means to make that journey happen.
And so all you can do is stare at that great big blue and wonder where to go next.
You decide to try the vortex in you this time. You go within.
You single out your heart, for it is the only organ you can sense all day long as it beats, like a drum that is chasing the end of a song. A countdown. You single it out, and you feel the blood pulsing in and out of your arteries. You know blood colours your insides and you zero down on the walls of your heart, the expanding, the contracting. You travel further to see that it is made of tissues, membranes. You then see that each tissue is made up of tiny little molecules. But that is not the end. Not yet.
You see a very tiny atom and realise now that all things have these atoms, which are just little bits of matter revolving around a centre. And these bits of matter are themselves, tinier bits that are eventually, not even solid. Not liquid, not gaseous. Are they even matter? We are not sure. We do not yet have the equipment to identify the basic unit of life.
Everything around you and inside you is just that…bits of nothingness revolving around nothingness.
Even the people you love. And the people you hate.
If you had that insight in your vision, you probably would just see empty spaces, not people. People who are born and who die, who have souls, trapped balls of energy. As if they are not solid at all. Like memories. Bits floating in and out, living and dying, bits of nothing. What happens to those trapped balls of energy? Energy is always constant, is it not? No creation, no destruction, just reuse, recycle, replace.
Now that you know it is all nothingness with misplaced-trapped balls of energy, where did the big point to your life disappear? Where is mine? What about all the hatred, all the failures? All the successes even? If you could disintegrate failures and success to the level of atoms then…would you be able to make out the difference?
Would it really matter who you loved and who you hated, where you lived and what you ate? Maybe not.
Then again, maybe it would. We have yet not agreed on the absoluteness of reality. So we all have the benefit of doubt.
However…what about the absoluteness of truth?
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Reema Prasanna is a baking coach, cook, travel & food Writer, blogger, ex-Googler, bathroom singer and wife to the most amazing man. More about her here http://about.me/reema.prasanna
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Art by Reema Moudgil