As I wrote in Urgency., part of my being Being experience (or Being being—or, linearly, Being being a being being Being—you’re welcome) entailed being the point of view of a sun. And as crazy as that may sound, I subsequently read an article published in a scientific journal about how stars may be alive. This, of course, is still up for debate in Western science, which carefully slow-walks into discoveries, often by ignoring transcultural myths and knowledge of non-Western cultures that hold what scientists are looking for. Many such cultures throughout human history have recognized that the sun is alive, and stars are alive, but since that knowledge didn’t come by way of modern (or perhaps any) instrumentation, it doesn’t register with Western scientists.
There are good reasons to work this way. For instance, if you want to find the kernel of fact underlying what other cultures have said without getting bogged down in their religious, political, and superstitious overlay. But even so, one’s own set of rules can get in the way. Case in point, one of the elements up for debate is whether or not stars fit into Western scientific criteria for what “alive” means. Most say with certainty that stars don’t reproduce the way all other known lifeforms do, therefore, no, not alive.
Is reproduction the only way to give life? In fact, isn’t Sun giving us life right now? The very scientist who is breathing to define life as breath is only doing so because of Sun. Seems like a huge blindspot to not recognize that aliveness doesn’t have to equate with reproduction. Perhaps Sun is more of an artist than a baby factory. Then again, the diversity of life Sun co-creates with Earth is a bunch of baby factories. Sun, then, is the breath of life for Earth, who is co-creating critters who breathe. Sun might as well be a god. Or a parent.
Incontrovertibly, Sun is life and so the debate about Sun’s aliveness is silly at best. And yet, if the aliveness qualities of this immense being, who existed long before giving life to scientists, and shall remain long after they depart, don’t line up with their invented criteria, then Sun won’t be recognized as alive. You’re not a life form until a guy in a lab coat writes an exhaustive paper explaining how you are one. This is problematic on its face, but there’s another problem that fixing Western chauvinism won’t: even if researchers prove that stars are alive, they can’t prove how alive. Unless Sun decides to communicate in a way the slow-walkers understand, or chuck raisins into their morning bowls of bran, there’s no telling what “alive” actually means for the star. No way for scientists to tell, that is.
Stars are immensely ancient beings and some of us become them when we die. So sayeth my firsthand account. If they’re ancient, then they already exist prior to us becoming them, so what does being reborn as a star mean? Because what I don’t mean is that we become brand new stars when we die, necessarily, but that our human identities are erased and one may wholly assume the identity of a star that is so old, the feeling of being has heft. This speaks to a certain machination, an interplay between time and timelessness having to do with identity, doesn’t it?
Stars are aware of, and in communication with, one another. They are contented in their lives, in their being, with giving life to the nearest rock(s) that can take it. Why so, if there is no time? Because there is time, but we’re defining it wrong.
What is time, then? What is it, truly? Time is action. Precisely put, time is the action of timelessness. All time is happening right now, but within itself, time is understood in a variety of ways: linearly, cyclically, exist/doesn’t exist, multiplicity, nonlinearly (or uncomprehendingly) as in a dream, and so on. All of these time modes are happening right now. Literally, they are playing out right now through different cultures, through different beings of Earth, through different states of mind, and through different stages of sleep. We can literally, tangibly, see these modalities unfolding right now through ourselves and all of the beings around us.
There is yet another sense of time, one that the being Being experience expresses. One in which all modalities are playing out right now as if they exist in-and-as the body of a supreme being. We’re talking about time as the 1st-person point of view of timeless Spirit. In that point of view one sees and is all at once. In this point of view there is no becoming and yet all feels like renewal. Renewal in the unshakable joy of discovery that Spirit is, playing in the toy box of “its” own mind—all of which is also you.
Again, in this timeless view, renewal is always already the case. So, what we consider the linear movement from life to life, from Human to Sun, for instance, is always already on full display. There is no movement; there is only moving, expressing as joy—the ultimate aliveness with no space, no interval of time creating objects. Such a spaceless space is Loving. No nouns, only acting. Being. There is, in this point of view, no “the sun.” There is sunning, if you will. And an aspect of sunning is humaning. In my case, Jeremy experiences himself becoming the sun in another life. In Truth, Jeremy and Sun are one and so the length of time it takes to identify as Sun and not Jeremy only looks like several lifetimes from Jeremy’s point of view, trapped, as his thinking is, in time, objects, and movement. But if he understands moving and not movement, he understands… well… he understands.
Understand?
And the tell for all of this being the actual case, not theoretical, comes via the being Being experience: the fact that being Sun is knowing thy Sun self as an immensely ancient, nearly all-powerful entity, alone, in the full strength of that word, and yet interconnecting with all other stars. The feeling of being ancient is not the same as the feeling of being always. It also does not feel like an ancient being set way in the future. This is all connected to the Big Bang, or something like it. This sun, who I am, is already out there. We are extensions of one another. We are one being, although currently I identify as a human named Jeremy and Sun identifies as Sun. The way out of reincarnation is to see all of me at once.
And you, and you, and all of us. Not see it as in grasp it intellectually, but see so clearly that your identity as clarity shines forth, wholly and truly.
Shines. Shines like Sun. Shines as Sun.
You are the light you’ve been told to go to in death. Anything else is duality, another illusion for you to step into. And this is also you.
Perhaps even when sunning.