Everything is cosmic!

There's a single frame in a Robert Crumb comic strip (I'll replace Mr. Natural here with it, if and when I find it) with a close-up of a typically bugged-out Crumb character who seems shocked and panicky—sweating profusely, eyes popping—saying, "I...I just realized. Everything is cosmic!" Yes! There's no place more cosmic than right where you are, no activity more cosmic than what you do each moment. How could there be? There's no place more enlightened than this place, no moment more enlightened than this moment, no Buddha more enlightened than this very person. Each one of us is, dude, way cosmic. We are fundamentally without bounds, without definition, ungraspable, birthless, deathless. Walt Whitman said: "I am vast. I contain multitudes." The only question is: to what degree do we realize it? Can we drop the fabricated "I" who thinks I'm in here and everything else is out there?

I'll sign off with some sections from a long, mongo-cosmic poem by Antler:

Rebecca Falls Epiphany
We wish that benificent beings from Outer Space
would land on Earth and bring us the Vision we need
to save us from destroying the world.
We wish a spaceship would come from Outer Space
and transport us to its planet's utopia
where creatures exactly like us but enlightened
or creatures very different from us but enlightened
exist.
We wonder if some of the people we know
aren't possibly from Outer Space,
Or complete strangers of unearthly beauty
or great tender geniuses of love,
poetry, music, dance, art—
are they not emissaries from "out there"?
We wonder if possibly we are
Outer Space Reconnaissance Consciousnesses
programmed not to awake till now,
Cosmic Reconnaissance Renaissance Consciousnesses
programmed not to awake till now.
What is my Mission on this planet?
What am I here for? What am I here for?
Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!
Suddenly we realize WE ARE FROM OUTER SPACE!
WE ARE CREATURES FROM OUTER SPACE!
EARTH IS OUR PLANET IN OUTER SPACE!
We don't have to go in a spaceship from Earth to the Moon
and take Mescaline and look back at our Earth
or walk in space after smoking
millions of joints
to realize we're in Outer Space!
We are just as much in Outer Space
wherever we are on this Planet
as we'd be on our moon
or any moon in our solar system
or any solar system in this galaxy
or any galaxy in this universe
or any universe in the pastpresentfuture!
We are as much creatures from Outer Space
as lifeforms anywhere in this galaxy
or any galaxy!
There's nowhere in the Universe
that is more in Outer Space
than we are!
We live in the Universe!
It's not "out there."
It's not just something we see in movies
to eerie music.
We don't have to read science fiction
to make love voluptuous cricketsinging nights
under all the stars.

Each of us should be as much an apparition as Bigfoot
or LochNess Monster!
Each of us should be as much an apparition as the Being
coming down the ramp of the spaceship
from "out there."
How dear this Earth becomes then!
How sacred every wild place and creature
that remains!
How insidious and lamentable the vast factory's pollution
and overpopulation disaster more disastrous
than all the dead in every human war!
How clear it becomes to us then
that no one should have to be a slave!
That everyone should be a creative genius of tender love
and loving creator of music or poetry,
painting or dance,
endless continued gentle passionate creations
of human mind!
Behold the lilies, they neither spin nor sew!
Think of the whales! They don't punch timeclocks!
They don't need Christ or Buddha
to be enlightened.
Everyone's life should be devoted to enlightenment!

Ah, I feel the key, for me, to perceiving, entertaining,
and embodying Infinite Space and Eternal Time's
Ultimate Implications
is to be found in the deepest solitude I can find
in the non-human Manifestation of Cosmos
in that realm called Wilderness Reality.
What does Contemporary Poetry Scene in America
have to do with this?
Do I live in America?
Do people who are dead continue to argue
whether there is life after death?
This is Heaven!
I don't have to die
to be Immortal!
I don't have to die
to be in Eternity!
To feel in this flash of existence
in the Antler form
the unending Amaze!
O Poets are Emissaries from Outer Space
descending their spaceship ramps
and their visionary message to Earth
shall be heard around the world!

Herman Hesse's novella Knulp is a great tale about the wisdom of not-knowing and our obligation to trust and rest in that vast space. It's a story about a man named Knulp (spoiler alert!) who spends his life wandering from town to town, from relationship to relationship, from job to job, never committing, never tying himself to anything or anyone. He's sort of monk-like but without any intentional matrix of practice. At the end of the story we find him dying in a snowstorm, believing that he's wasted his life. But he has a moment of clarity, a vision of God who says, "I wanted you the way you are and no different. You were a wanderer in my name and wherever you went you brought a little homesickness for freedom." What's so great about this story for me isn't that there's some secret significance or mission we each have but simply that each one of us belongs here in a very deep, undeniable way. Despite what we may sometimes believe or despite what other people or some cultural norm or government may say. Not only do we belong but we ourselves are intimately woven into the heart of the mystery of the world. If we look deeply enough we see that our lives and this mystery itself are not separate—even if we can't articulate why we're alive or what we're doing here. And even if we can articulate the whys and the whats of our life, surely it's an incomplete grasp. Surely, the most profound meaning of our lives lies far beyond words and worldly understanding. When replying to the question Who is this speaking to me? put to him by Emperor Wu, Bodhidharma famously said, "I do not know."