Simply Experience

13.8 billion years ago, or thereabouts, our universe emerged.  It took about 9.2 billion years before our sun and the solar system, including earth, formed.  So we're projecting a measure of time, the time it takes earth to orbit the sun, back across a void of time.  How many years passed, before a year even existed?

It took about a billion years before life emerged on earth.  Many forms of life have come and gone.  Our particular form has come, fairly recently, and has not yet gone, but certainly will.  How disconnected we are from reality?  Each of us views the world from the perch of a little god - imagining we are the center of the universe, feeling our own uniqueness, importance, and individuality.  In reality, we're no more than a single fleeting manifestation of the genetic information and machinery of life that is flowing along with time, constantly changing, recombining, evolving.

How can we think we are the purpose of the universe?  Perhaps we are.  But then so is everything else that exists or ever did - a mountain, a tree, a grain of sand, a star, an electron, a cockroach, a triceratops, a passenger pigeon.  The universe changes, life evolves.  Individuals of all species come and go in the blink of an eye.  Species have a longer shelf life, but also eventually perish either through extinction or evolutionary change.

As the river of time flows, we come into it, ride along for a while, and then return back to eternity.  Our minds can reach back into the past, and can imagine the future, but life is happening only in the frontier of the river of time we call the present.  The present can be experienced, but it can't be held onto, since any experience we cling to instantly becomes past, not present.

The full experience of the present requires that our self importance - that little god perched within us - be replaced by a pure acceptance and openness to experience.  We take in all that is, and take in more and more, not clinging to it or judging it - both things that instantly jerk us out of the current of the present and leave us spinning in some backwater eddy.  We simply experience.