Life, The Universe, & Everything

TL;DR: Paradoxes, Spirals, & Distortions. That is what Life, the Universe, & Everything is.

Read On

I recently turned 42 and like any true DNA reader, suddenly Life, The Universe, & Everything became all crystal clear to me.

Here are some things I’ve learned & become increasingly convinced of:

Paradoxes: Paradoxes are self-contradicting statements or phenomena that make our minds uncomfortable.

They abound in nature as well as life.

For every infinitely large, there is an infinitesimal at the other end of the spectrum. At a large & long enough scale, our life is meaningless; and that makes it imperative for us to make sure that we find & create our own meaning of it. I simultaneously know that life being a single-person game, the cavalry isn’t coming, and it is up to me. But at the same time, it also endows me with enough love & power to call upon it when I need to.

These contradictions abound everywhere – Love goes hand in hand with hurt, freedom with discipline, every function contains within it its own failure mode, and every system at some level acts against itself.

A life well-lived is comfortable navigating paradoxes and holds contradictions with equipoise.

Circles, Spirals, Loops: For something to make progress it has to come full circle and keep repeating it.

Everything in the Universe moves in circles; from electrons to galaxies to life itself – everything comes full circle.

Every time something comes full circle, it journeys to the other end of the diameter & then comes back. There is a Thesis, the Antithesis, & coming back with a new understanding & appreciation of not only the 2 ends but the entire spectrum; arrival at a new Synthesis. This is what we call progress, or enlightenment.

In 2 dimensions it appears like coming back to the same point, in 3-dimensional space, it has moved forward.

This is true for everything that has a Yin & Yang (And everything has a Yin & Yang). Optimism – Pessimism, Penury – Wealth, Structured Rigidity – Creative Fluidity, Ignorance – Mastery, endless list.

One owes it to life, to live & understand it well, to make the effort to traverse & fathom the spectrum fully & continuously, come full circle, and once reached, start all over again.

Distortions: Everything is some form of distortion. Either a manipulation or an abstraction of a fundamental something. From light, gravity, all our senses (distortion of physical entities) to emotions, RDFs, attitudes (distortion of chemicals, mindsets).

And we experience Life, the Universe, & everything through those distortions. We cannot fathom anything without them. For each one of us, it (& everything in it) can only manifest itself, if we can grasp it innately through its many distortions. And we can grasp it fully & innately only when we realize & acknowledge that everything (News, Love, Achievement, Technology, Sand, Dogs, literally everything) is a distortion of its underlying reality.

So, In a way, the Universe, Life, & everything exists uniquely for each one of us, through the distortions. We cannot understand (& eventually master or fully appreciate) something fully until we ourselves experience it deeply; with the awareness & humility of acknowledging the ocean distortions that we float in.

(Till then everything we think we know or understand is just the map & not the territory itself).

In Summary

Becoming aware of, then acknowledging, then Internalizing, & then building an equanimity, a disinterested mastery, to Paradoxes, Spirals (both upward & downward), & Distortions, is what Life, the Universe, & Everything is about. A la Shu Ha Ri. This has been known for eons and passed on to us through our childhood parables, stoic wisdom, history, & technology among other things. But as I said above, it exists & is internalized & understood uniquely by each one of us in the form that calls out to us the most. So, to close the loop & pass the spiral forward, go figure out yours.