Under a clear blue sky—an ‘Arizona’ sky—no vapour trails, no activity between me and ‘it’, the reality beyond, the structure that is beyond me. I see this world of structure, like a massive monolithic heavy plate, like a vast plate of steel, resting in nothing. It composes the universe—the entirety of things. I don’t know what it rests in or on, nothing as far as I can tell, but it is everything and it is somehow beyond me even though I must be a part of it. And I see what I am a part of, a puff of consciousness somewhere in to or on it, or beside it, somewhere. Me, my knowledge of it, if only in part, is something strange occurring within the structure that is inanimate, unmoving, and unconcerned about itself. I am just about aware of it—something of the structure, but mostly my awareness is wrong, and it is also wrong in that I have a belief that ‘being conscious’ and the ‘objects of consciousness’ are somehow serious. Yes, that is the most striking thing; I realise that this is not a ‘serious’ affair—this relationship between it and me. It is part of the joy of the novelty of another; the fantasy that surrounds newness, for it will always be new. No, it is not a serious affair, it is light, filled with humour, not so much happiness but a kind of disregard which sees it all as some sort of fun, even a joke. There is nothing to fear of it, in it, it is simply what it is and consciousness both makes us aware of it and immunises us temporarily from being a full part of it.
And another day, another hot day and a clear evening and a clear dark sky. And I see the transition from looking into the sun through a soup of insects and staring out at the slowly appearing stars and realise that reality is not beyond, it is definitely within, the beyond is definitely within. And on top of that I see that scale confuses us. We are not small looking out at the grandness of the universe, we are of course but that is not the reference point—us small the rest of it large. It is both smaller and larger and we are the reference point for both. No, the universe is not huge and mysterious in the way that we should cower before it in awe, it is large but we are larger than more which is smaller. Scale is important to our metaphysic.
