The Microcosm

A meditation on the link between man, his ideas and the universe

There lies entire worlds inside our world waiting to be explored. There’s an efficient way of being which is judging things as they present themselves, without going any further. This default mode is useful, but like using a microscope to view tiny organisms normally unseen or known to us, the same can be done with our thoughts, memories, experiences and the universe itself.

Going into the depths of a microcosm grants an appreciation and greater understanding of the interconnected universe we find ourselves in. Wherever one might be, he can develop a habit of meditating on where the things around him came from, so as to find their origins, and give rise to a greater awareness to the causes that lead to the effects experienced. The representation of an object is but an infinite path sculpted by time which is constantly morphing one thing into another, but from our perspective, it happens so slowly that it’s often unnoticed.

Every person has their own microcosm, their own undiscovered territory, which most has yet to be discovered by anyone, let alone their friends or family, or even themselves. As the human brain is the most complicated organic entity created by nature, predicting the actions of humans, on the individual or collective level, is futile. Most of our own microcosm is our unconscious, since it is where many of our desires and actions stem from, but we don’t know what is going on in the depths of our brains, we can only speculate. Slowly, we can move to the edges of what’s known to us about ourselves, and our fellow humans, until we are found on shores which are not familiar, where we may find beliefs, behaviors, patterns, memories and newfound understandings we weren’t previously conscious of, from which we may form new opinions and stories that more closely represent reality.

Consciousness is a microcosm of man, born from the changes of state in the brain, but in the order it has forged, we are experiencing the chaotic order of nature itself. As everything in our universe is moving, so are the manifestations of thought, feeling and memory. The internal fluctuations of a mind are reflected by an ocean’s constant movement which shows itself at the surface. A storm may blow in, or there may be calm waters, and other times it’s choppy. Water can be deep, it can be of different textures and depths, and it can reflect different colors based on its surroundings. In this way we experience life as riding on a boat through various conditions, which no two days produce the same exact conditions, where we are in a continual desire to reach an island or body of land we have not yet visited, so as to escape the perpetual motion of life.

In the microcosm lies representations of the macrocosm, because they are not separate, but bound permanently by the same fundamental force of change. A man traversing the edges of his mind, is similar to exploring the universe itself - of nature, curious, as to who she really is, boarding her own ship to trek into the unknown parts of herself. She seeks the shore just as we, knowing or not, leading to the infinite morphing of matter from nothing, to something, to nothing once again - like a child, building a tower of blocks just to then knock them over, back into oblivion, or a thought, forging itself into existence through the brain, then ceasing into static, or some other shape. We are like sine waves, an endless stream of lows and highs, of growth and decay, of love and hate, of creation and destruction, which is no different than the eternal movements of nature along the same path.