The Infinite

     On Monday a couple of weeks ago, I posted a poem called "The Infinite". It was sort of an outline of my religious beliefs (if you can call something that only you believe a religion). I figured I'd explain it a bit more in depth here. Don't worry if this sounds crazy, since none of this is real. It's just a way of looking at the world that I feel makes sense. 

    To start off, there's a well known argument among philosophical types that posits that we're all living in a simulation. Basically, an advanced civilization could create a simulation that's functionally indistinguishable from reality, and then the people in that reality could do the same thing, and so on and so forth, on and on for all eternity. Since everyone living in each successive simulation would have no idea that they were living in a simulation, it's possible that we're living in a simulation ourselves and just don't know it. 

     I'm not going to argue for or against it. Plenty of people have done both, and I do highly suggest you look it up if you're looking to doubt everything you see for the rest of your life. But reading that theory I got to thinking, if we are living in a simulation, what does the real world look like? Is it filled with people? Weird alien creatures? Are we living in a sentient carbon cloud?

      What if there was nothing at all? 

      I've been a dreamer for as long as I can remember. I daydream all day, everyday. As someone who spends most of her time in a world that she knows isn't real, I'm more aware than most that the line between the real and the unreal is a lot thinner than most people think. 

     But thinking about it, it makes sense to me that not only is our world not as "real" as we might think it is, but that reality itself might be something of a myth. Think about money. It's not real, but because we all use it to buy and sell things everyday, we think of it as real. Value works the same way. Think of the internet. It's not a real, physical thing, but because we all believe in it and, importantly, agree on the rules that it has to follow, it's become real in the eyes of most people on earth. Look at society. There are no laws of physics governing society, just laws that we all agree our real and work to uphold. You could argue that the only reason we have morality is to keep society real. 

     What if our Universe worked the same way?

      What if the reason our laws of physics worked is because of the efforts of everything in the Universe, from dark energy to galaxies, keeping those laws real? What if the thing holding our Universe together is an agreement that the basic laws must be followed, no matter what? 

     I have no proof of this. I don't think that you even can prove this. All I know is that humans and animals, creatures we all agree to have consciousness, grew out of one celled organisms, who in turn grew out of simple chemicals who were just moving where the metaphorical wind took them. When did consciousness develop? There are people who argue that even inanimate objects have some consciousness, so could it have grown out of the ground down rocks that became our ancestors? 

    Importantly, I think that we all know this, at least a little bit, but most of our daily lives are spent trying to make sure we know as little about it as possible. The stars, the planets, our societies, all of it is built to keep us from forgetting that our world isn't real, and that at any point, it could stop being real forever. 

   I don't know. Most of it isn't really scientific. But I can't stop seeing it everywhere I go. Everywhere I look I see people who seem to be questioning reality. More importantly, I see people fighting against the idea that what they see, what they believe might not be real. I honestly think what makes our universe what it is comes from being built on top of a place that isn't, and never will be, real. A place where nothing matters, because everything that could happen has already happened, and is happening all at once. A place where nothing has meaning, for if it's done it will be undone in an instant. A place where physics, time, chaos, everything we know, doesn't exist, and those who exist within it are constantly trying to forget just how lost they are. 

    There are many names for this place. Some call it the void, some call it darkness, others call it emptiness. But those names don't sit well with me. It's not empty, because everything that is, was, and will be exists within it, and everything that happens is happening simultaneously. For me, there is only one name that can contain a place so vast that not even our Universe can comprehend it. 

     The Infinite.