We are the eyes, ears, thoughts, and feelings of the universe. We are the universe brining itself into consciousness.
– Carl Sagan from Cosmos, likely paraphrased
When I was ten, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was on TV in Norway as in so many other countries.
It had a huge impact on me. I remember walking out into the garden after one of the episodes, looking up at the many stars1, and having a shift of being the universe looking at itself. I am a local and temporary expression of the universe. I am made of star stuff.
Some time later, that year or within one or two years maybe, we went to our family cabin in the mountains, near the Sølen mountain. My father, brother, and I hiked up to the mountain – Sølenskaret –and slept there overnight. They were in a tent, and I slept outside. I gazed at the infinite landscape stretching below me and the dark sky filled with stars and the occasional satellite, and had another shift that was far stronger and more visceral.
I profoundly saw and felt that I was the universe experiencing itself. My identity shifted from this human self into the whole.
This is a figure-ground shift that’s similar to awakening. It is, in a sense, a kind of awakening, although it’s not as clear about our nature as it can be. Also, in this case, the strong visceral shift didn’t last although it has stayed with me for my whole life, has informed my life, and has been an aspect of my experience since.
This shift seems t be part of a longer process. It started with the flashbacks to before incarnation, then this visceral temporary shift, then the absorption into the witness at age fifteen, and then the oneness shift at sixteen – which did stay and continues to unfold.
Photos from Sølen
The top photo is similar to the view I had, just slightly below the area where we slept. The second is from where we slept. The two last ones are vies from the cabin from some years ago. The photos are very dark! I initially edited them years ago on a different computer, likely with a bright screen.
The personal and the universal
Why do I write about this?
I share because I assume there is something universal in all of my experiences. In this case, I happen to know something similar has happened and is happening to many others.
It makes it worth putting it out there to say that (a) this can happen and it’s part of the human experience, (b) it’s not that unusual, (c) you are not alone if this or something similar has happened with you, and (d) these kinds of shifts says something important about who and what we are and our nature.
NOTES
- This was in the ’80s when the sky in Ski was still dark, people mostly walked or took the bike or train, and the summers were still full of insects.
