Vertigo

There's a hole in my chest. It isn't noticeable like a gunshot wound or freaky abscess. The gap is inside me, like an abyss in my soul. It's not always comfortable, but sometimes I forget to notice it. It's not the result of some heartache or tragedy. 

It's just a feeling.

A feeling like something is coming. An anticipation not unlike Christmas as a kid--that anxiety to get it over with, that tinge of fear that what you've hoped for might happen, but might not.

I bring this up because a conversation I had with a friend last night got me thinking about the feeling for the first time in awhile--not that it's gone away, I had just been living with it, riding it out. 

This friend and I were talking about, I guess, the point of existence (if I had to summarize succinctly). We started off discussing the implications of the notion of now. There are many clues in sacred texts, the mathematics of nature, and the phenomenology of consciousness that point to the relative nature of time--specifically that all time is happening in the same fractalized instant, and that separation of events and the flow of time are illusory constructs of our limited perspective. 

It seems like a nonsense theory to some, perhaps, and understandably so--because real or not, we still experience the flow of time, and what are we but the sum of experiences? Veracity has never been a requirement for an experience to be meaningful. But like the ancient cartographers who assumed the world was flat (because of their perspective), so too might our understanding of the universe be skewed. While we're on the subject of globes, consider that at any surface point of a sphere, is in a way the center of the circle. Is it so difficult to believe that time might be structured in the same way--so that each moment of time is it's own middle?

If you're quite certain that your perspective on time is accurate and that things flow logically from moment to moment, with cause and effect staying in line chronologically, remember that human beings are only capable of experiencing approximately 4% or so of the energetic spectrum that comprises reality. You've likely heard it said that the vast majority of space is empty--the gap between atomic and sub-atomic particles is so vast relative to the particles' size that it's reasonable to say that our very bodies are mostly empty space--yet we recognize the world around us as made up of solid boundaries. The dissonance between perception and reality is a constant of consciousness.  

Maybe that's where this vertigo I feel comes from.