Contemplative meanderings
Existence encompasses more than the universe. What we think we know about existence is little indeed. Although what we do know is awesome. What is not known is almost unimaginable.
I know that I do not know. But what I believe I know is comforting. To take comfort in belief is grand, but to declare it for everyone is harmful. Learn to accept beliefs that are not yours and live in harmony with all.
Within the bounds of perception, the me of the body constructs its world. Given what we are born with, we interact with the environment we experience and construct beliefs about ourselves and the world in which we live. We do this from birth, but at any point we can be born again to construct a new world of beliefs.
At the fundamental level of our basic existence, we cannot share the same space and so we never share the same world. Our individual worlds are unique, but our senses are too gross to notice. We appear to share the same world with others when we do not. As the me of the body, we are each separate worlds of perception interacting in spacetime.
You are not a body. You are eternal awareness in the pool of awareness that is consciousness. You are I AM. Your awareness in form is discrete, like water molecules are discrete. The pool of awareness is not finite. At every discrete point, there is an infinite amount of awareness because there is no direction, distance, space, or time to limit the pool. You are discrete awareness in the pool of awareness that is I AM.
The body, as a gathering of elementary particles, is continuous with its environment. Its particles gather, ungather, and regather into other forms. The body and other forms are not real. Their existence is transitory. Reality is eternal.
There is a continuum of stuff in the universe from which all things are made. You, me, rocks, trees, planets, stars, galaxies, etc., are all formed from particles that follow consistent laws in their relationships. Everything about you and the universe reduces to the tiniest of particles obeying the rules of relationship. This continuum has a unity of relationships underlying its existence, but still, you can change your world by changing the way you look at it. Perception is everything.
Metaphysical energy births the universe. This is the dancing that is the dance. The universe is existence as you know it. The metaphysical is consciousness. It cannot be observed, measured, described, or named. It is beyond the physical realm.
Consciousness-expressing is the movement of nothing into existence. From nothing comes the principles and properties of existence. Nothing is the emptiness that is nowhere. Expression as the existence of the universe comes in the form of elementary particles and the laws of physics. Combinations of the simple become objects of complexity. The basic components of complexity are starkly simple. They are the smallest of particles but are not objects. They have no size or shape. They seem to be concentrations of energy in spacetime with specific properties only when observed. This is the stuff of our existence.
The emptiness that is nowhere is eternal. It has no distinctions. It cannot be described. The universe expands into it as a thought of separation in consciousness. Expansion is not real because the eternal has no dimensions. One might say that the dimensions of the eternal are infinite.