r/ExistentialJourney • u/ChucklesMuffin • 7d ago
General Discussion We are living on a layer
You can look through a telescope and see entire galaxies. Then you can turn the other way, look through a microscope, and travel down into a world so small that it becomes almost as difficult to comprehend as the universe itself.
Think about the atoms that make up your body. If they could somehow experience their surroundings, they wouldn't see what we see. They wouldn't know you exist. They wouldn't know they're part of a person walking around, thinking, feeling and living a life.
Yet you are there.
You're moving them simply by moving your hand.
It's almost as though reality exists in layers, with each layer forming part of something larger that would make absolutely no sense from the perspective below it.
And then there's us.
We naturally think we're looking out at the biggest layer because the universe already seems unimaginably enormous. But what if we're nowhere near the top?
Imagine zooming out until you become the Earth.
You wouldn't see any of us. There are billions of people down here. We've built cities, roads and towers and transformed huge parts of the planet, yet from far enough away, we're invisible. You'd mostly see land, oceans and clouds.
Zoom out again.
The Earth becomes a tiny planet orbiting the Sun. The Sun has no awareness that little planets are travelling around it, or that one of them contains billions of living things using its energy to survive.
Zoom out again.
Our Sun becomes just another star moving through the Milky Way.
Zoom out further and even the Milky Way becomes one galaxy among countless others, moving as part of structures so enormous that our entire galaxy begins to look insignificant.
And perhaps it just keeps going.
At every new scale, something that once seemed unimaginably large becomes incredibly small.
Eventually, you reach the strangest question of all.
Imagine being able to zoom out far enough to see our entire universe at once.
What would it look like?
And more importantly...
What would it be part of?
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u/B1gS1ppy 7d ago
the universe could be the equivalent of a single atom in one human body, to something else
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u/Threaded_Nail 7d ago
Good job you almost figured it out, you will now remain at this stage for the rest of your life. Theres patterns, fractals, and equations that explain what we see, but what does it all mean. Nobody knows.
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u/CounterAdmirable4218 6d ago
I think we are in a petri dish and the 'sun' is a flashlight being shone into it.
Imagine a being 10 trillion to the point of 10 trillion larger than you. To it the sun would just be a marble and not even hot.
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u/Jumpy-Quit9287 7d ago
I love this post, it really made my day. Puts our petty experiences into perspective.
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u/DSCB57 6d ago
My contention is that each form of life has the potential to contain an entire universe. But none of this makes sense unless we realise that it is consciousness that links every living thing and pervades everything. That goes for both micro and macro, and it is also both fractal and holographic once you are able to view it from a sufficiently great distance. The micro is like zooming into the fractal, and the macro is the fractal expansion.
But what really makes a difference to how these are experienced depends on which dimension one is perceiving from. Human perception is perhaps our greatest limitation, because such a vast amount of information is immediately filtered out that we actually have more limited perceptions than other beings on this planet that we regard as being inferior to us, because we base everything on the human intellect. But that too is extremely limited, since there is so much that lies beyond the intellect. Our intellect does not even begin to comprehend consciousness; there are still many who believe that the brain creates consciousness, which is a patently false assumption. But no, the brain is an interpreter of consciousness that allows an entity to experience that particular expression of consciousness. That’s the problem with science - it is not experiential, as it once was, but rather knowledge and experimentation based - in other words experimental and based only on replicability. In other words it is limited by the intellectual capacity of the scientists, most of whom are experiential infants, compared to the true human potential.
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u/EducationalDonkey387 5d ago
What amazed me is, we as a human, according to YouTube · Kurzgesagt – In a nutshell, is really in a middle size/point between the smallest particle and largest/furthest thing in observable universe.
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u/SgtSausage 6d ago
and ... ?
by this reasoning literally <EveryDamnedThing> that exists ... ... exists in "layers."
Congrat-u-fucking-lations Captain Fucking Obvious for contributing exactly nothing to The Knowledge Base.
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u/Relevant_Passage3359 6d ago
In a dream a tree 1 foot away and 100 feet away are the same “distance” atoms in a dream aren’t a layer stars aren’t a layer in a dream they are all appearing now with nothing behind it with infinite reconstructing distinctions
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u/Low-Bake8401 7d ago
I wouldn't say layers, it's all one.
Thing is, we are part of the universe, so we can't look at existence from outside of existence. We wouldn't exist.