Forget Yourself; Become the Universe

“A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.” ~Martin Heidegger

Down in the trenches of the human condition we are reeling. The daily grind is grinding us into a postmodern pulp. The rat race has us running around like chickens with our head cut off. The zeitgeist reeks of anxiety. These times are even more exacerbated by the pandemic and the war. We need to take a break. We need to have a laugh. We need to detach.

Are you tired of living on dead patterns? Sick of drowning in hand-me-down value systems that simply don’t work for these fast-changing times? Is your comfort zone so tiny that it’s become a bleak zone? Is life passing you by with a whoosh?

Then it’s time to jumpstart the idle engine of your existence. It’s time to defibrillate the dead body of your soul. It’s time to shock the system. It’s time to forget Alpha and Beta and go Meta.

Try this: forget the typical view for a while and encourage the Overview Effect. Close your eyes and see with Over Eyes. Engage your immaculate imagination. Think like an artist for a spell. Kick open your Third Eye. Your mind’s eye can see further and farther than your regular eyes ever could.

In this heightened state, your crown chakra will bloom in full flutter, and your oneness with all things will become paramount. You will suddenly get out of your own way. You will be free to learn what you must learn. You will be free to become what you must become.

By practicing this “View from Above”, you move into a third-person perspective. You transcend tribulation. You take a leap of courage out of small picture thinking and into a big picture perspective. You’re able to step back from your narrow view of things. Instead of seeing yourself as insignificant in the cosmos-at-large, you become cosmically significant. The Cosmos and the Self interpenetrate. You become a cosmic individual.

When you forget yourself, you remember everything else. By moving from Self to Cosmos and back again to the Self, you see how you are cosmically interconnected. By moving from ordinary to the extraordinary and back again to ordinary, you free yourself to delight in everything ordinary, seeing reality as it is. Everything becomes cosmically significant. Everything has a magic hue to it. You enter that sacred “place in the soul where logic cannot penetrate, where only poetry and magic can really help us (Ken Johnson).”

The cosmic significance that comes to the cosmic individual puts all things into proper perspective. That which does not matter can truly slide. Everything is “water off a duck’s back.” You become a conduit for the Absolute to manifest itself: a force of nature first, a person second. Shooting through spacetime, piercing through the narrowminded walls of certitude like an Arrow of Truth, your butterfly perspective flies over caterpillar complacency with a curiosity of the Most High.

When you forget the Ego, you become the Eco. When you detach, you become connected. When you transcend the ego, you integrate the soul. By moving from attached Ego to detached Eco you form a kind of wormhole that acts like a cosmic cocoon where your wormhood (an egocentric perspective) can dissolve into godhood (a soul-centric perspective).

After the dissolving, the resolving. After the annihilation, the integration. After transcendence, the cosmic dance.

The cosmic dance is the ecstatic expression of the glorious return. The cosmic dance is the balance of the sacred and the profane in action. It’s the recalibration of mind-body-soul. It’s the harmony of both your primal and your cosmic nature in fluid motion. It’s a Phoenix moving through ashes. It’s realizing that God is a worm voraciously eating through itself.

When you’re dancing the cosmic dance, you’re in flow, you’re in the zone, you’re so incredibly detached that you are extraordinarily connected. Everything moves through you, even as you move through it. You are the ocean in a single drop. You are the universe in a tiny speck. You are every star in a small spark. You are the cosmos perceiving itself. Even God can see that you are His eye. And so, you “see.”

You see how everything is connected to everything else. You see the fractal entanglement between neurons and nebulas and back again. You see the superposition of rabbit holes, wormholes, and pigeonholes. The Gordian Knot between mortality and immortality unwinds into meta-mortality, where life and death are seen as one infinite recurrence: life, death, rebirth, ad infinitum.

From this cosmic sight comes magnetic insight. Your acumen becomes acute. You become a walking beacon of hope for those stuck in the dark. You become a walking blacklight for those blinded by the light. You glow with the residue of sacred rebirth.

Your outer appearance may seem just like any ordinary person’s. There may be no special aura or superiority that marks the distinctness of your cosmic becoming, but at the same time every step will be filled with the invisible force of cosmic significance. People will sense your depth. They will feel your Over Eyes. They will taste your transcendence. They will smell your numinous courage.

When you let go of being yourself, you remember to just be. And everyone gets the hint. They feel the nudge of your soul passing through. They see how you float, disconnected and free, a fountainhead in flow, a spearhead splitting the future into possibility. And all because you were able to let go, to sacrifice self to cosmos, to surrender ego to soul.

When you forget yourself, you become the universe. You transcend the world. You’re between worlds. You’re in the sacred in-between. Where disaster hones you into a master. Where pressure polishes pain into providence. Where even apocalyptic times is merely a parenthesis.

Image source:

Unknown by Graham Yarrington

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (Forget Yourself; Become the Universe) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.