Alone

In the movie Chinatown, Jack Nicholson, playing detective J.J. Gittes, picks up the phone only to hear Faye Dunaway ask, “Mr. Gittes, are you alone?” To which he replies, “Isn’t everybody?”

Of course, he’s absolutely right—in the strictest sense.

You can’t verify that anything exists beyond the NOW. All stimulation comes through five sensory inputs, the “five gates.” Memory is a series of jump cuts; the “future” is a postulate that never arrives because it is always happening NOW. Verily, we are not all sharing our sensory inputs; they are ALL solitary inputs, electrical impulses decoded by the hypothalamus.

Your body is molecules of atoms, made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and then quarks and neutrinos, in a chain going on into infinity.

Where does it begin and end? Verily, you are ALONE in your own skull.

Even feeling and physical sensation is nothing but an illusion. You can’t verify that the “others” around you are any more real than anything else can be definitely determined to be. And even if this is NOT true, it is true, because at death, ultimately, everything will disappear anyway for the perceiving party (presumably you), rendering the existence of the “real world” beyond your perception of it a moot point.

For example: if a radio is playing in an empty room, and there is no one around to hear it, is it still making music?

If it is, what does it matter if, for instance, your consciousness is not around to perceive it?

Lord Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, speaks of “the Field” and “the Knower of the Field”—the Body, in other words, and that which perceives the Body.

And this is why we say, “There is no PAST. There is NO FUTURE. There is one ETERNAL NOW.”

“Nothing is real. Everything is permitted.” — Hassan-i Sabbah

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My book: Glory: A Little Handbook of the Psychic Life