Challenge round hahaha

Paradox stacked on paradox, opposites true together… like all the pairs of opposites, united in truth, our lives are both meaningless and indispensable. There are billions of humans. And countless species on the planet earth. Time will erase all of them. Even if I become the greatest and most legendary human of all time (ha), the sun will explode and our planet will turn to dust and any record of my existence will be a forgotten memory - swallowed by the insatiable Kala himself. There is no achievement, no good deed, no action that will cement any measurable amount of importance to any individuals one life, especially on a cosmic scale.

Conversely, this monad is the whole. Thich Nhat Hanh says it best when he describes Interbeing - no organism has independent life. There is no such thing as an independent life form. Everything leans on everything else. In one cell of my body, the entire cosmos - past, present, future, is all there. That one cell even could never exist without everything else in the cosmos existing exactly the way it has exactly in the timing it has. Our bodies are at best a whirlwind of ever changing matter and atoms. Continuity is a blessing of the mind. The idea that I am one being and you are another is just that, an idea. Forgoing individual identity, we are The Cosmic Being (God). Literally. Not figuratively. Not by way of extension. This is one point this physicist as physician are blessed to agree on at this point in our timeline.

I love the allegory of Indra’s Net of Jewels. For anyone not familiar, Indra is a Hindu deity. His jeweled net is made entirely of jewels so brilliant, all that can be seen gazing into them is the reflection of each and every other jewel. Like an infinite sea of refraction, each gem mirrors each and every other gem. I think this is probably the best allegory for the idea of an individual soul. You can look at a single jewel, but you will only see the whole. Examining any one of the jewels will yield the same vision. It is all the whole.

Like I mentioned, navigating this paradox can be difficult and confusing. Paradoxically (almost feel funny typing it by now) this is also the source of life’s greatest bliss and satisfaction, IME and IMHO. This is also largely what I personally get out of entheogens; to enjoy the oscillation between being “me” and being all of it. The contrast is beautiful. They deepen one another. My little self-aware human whirlpool in this infinite sea of consciousness occasionally remembers that is, indeed, the ocean. Obviously these are ideas and sentiments older than our written history; I’m just doing my best to put them as frankly and honestly in my own words as possible.

Thanks for giving me a reason to type all this, and thank you for being open and honest with all of us. This thread has a healing atmosphere of kindness and respect I very much dig.