The Cosmic Dance

I spent Saturday catching up with an old friend over some beers. It's been a while since I've had the chance to meet up with my old buddies. My only free time these days is Saturday, when I take a brief break from family duties. 

I'm still trying to adjust to my new 5am routine. My sleeping hours have been greatly reduced and I have not been able to adhere to my plan to go to bed earlier. But I'm getting there and I'm eager to keep this routine going. I love the early hours of dawn when I can get a head start to the day ahead.

Human lifespan is but a brief insignificant moment in the history of earth. We've come to believe that we are 'important' and we should leave a legacy behind. There are great names in history, people with deeds--good and bad--who are remembered and talked about for ages. We can only view life, most of the time from a very narrow perspective; so we think we should maximise the opportunity given to us in this life. 

And even that is not sufficient for some, so we try to prepare for our afterlife.  Even though there may be such a thing as life after death, we need to question ourselves about our conception of life.

Why do we think what we experience through our five senses, constitutes life? When we imagine life after death, we see it as a continuation of this life that we know, without the encumbrances. Perhaps a life of pure unbridled happiness, without pain. 

As I've written in another blog post before, this is a failure of imagination.  If we want to talk about life, the entire cosmos is alive. Why can't we live the life of the cosmos? The reason why we are not able to do so is because we are tied up with our small mortal concerns of this very limited life--feeding ourselves,  procreating and making ourselves look good in the eyes of others.  It is the only life we know but if we know better, we would want to see life beyond this limited perspective. Is this possible? 

If we could see beyond limited vision our lives, we would effectively be enlightened beings, with cosmic consciousness. Our deaths would like the deaths of skin cells, a natural process of life, which consists of lives within lives within lives ad infinitum.

It's probably too much for most of us, to have such a cosmic vision of life. But we don't need to. We just need to know that we are part of this larger architecture of things and then we continue doing what we normally do: feeding, procreating, laughing and crying. But once we've caught a glimpse of this cosmic vision, every ordinary activity of ours would be infused with joy, for the dance is only possible when there are dancers.  We dance this cosmic dance by living our ordinary lives--feeding, procreating, laughing and crying.