Infinite Possibilities

If I understand the physicists and philosophers correctly (and there is an even chance that I don't) then all of us are just perpetually becoming perspectives. What we perceive as the past and future, as our own bodies, as matter and mass, is an illusion created by the accident of our ability to perceive certain things and not others. What we experience as change or progress or the passage of time is a creation of our own minds. What we experience as other people is likewise a creation of this perspective that is forever emerging in the present moment.

It's enough to break your brain, of course, because we, including the physicists and philosophers, are simply incapable of actually comprehending the true nature of existence. It's a notion, however, that I keep coming back to as I rattle things about in my head: a world of perspectives, all fundamentally and irredeemably baffled by the true essence of things, no one more correct, nor more wrong than the other, making the most of the thing we imagine life to be.

Sometimes these ideas frighten me, but increasingly, I find myself taking a kind of comfort in knowing that I don't know, that I can't know, and that no one else knows any better than me. We are all in this together, equals in ignorance. Of course, that doesn't mean that I don't feel strongly about things, that I don't have my morals and values, that I don't insist that my own ignorance is, at least in this one specific instance, less than yours, but I find a kind of freedom in knowing that when all is said and done, we're all operating based on illusions about how the universe works. 

None of this can be practically applied because we are not equipped by either nature or god to perceive anything beyond what our senses tell us. Yet still, there is this truth, if the physicists and philosophers are to be believed, that the present is something we are always creating, there is no real connection between now and the past, and that every moment carries with it infinite possibilities.

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