This article was first published in "Going Mental" by Daniel McGowan.
The Great Splodge
One fine day at dawn, as I was sitting contemplating my navel, a great secret was revealed to me! From the mysterious depths where the intuition dwells, came a flash that showed me what the universe really is. The miraculous, stupendous revelation came that the universe is a GREAT SPLODGE.
In the beginning, as they curiously say, God created all. But what they don’t say is that, in the beginning, God was having trouble in thinking up what to create. In fact, S/he was having a bad first day and could not conjure up any good ideas. S/he decided to do a little painting, in the hope that inspiration would spring up. But each time S/he ventured to put brush to canvas S/he stopped and stared blankly, unable to access one creative idea. Eventually, in sheer frustration, S/he hurled a huge dollop of paint at the canvas and the universe, the GREAT SPLODGE, was born.
“Hey! That’s not bad!” said God. In fact, “God saw that it was good”, as they curiously say.
The GREAT SPLODGE, together with all its little spodglings is shown in the photo above.
The explanation of the illustration is as follows:
The dot in the middle represents pure MIND, the source of all, where there is repose, inaction, no-thing. It is the invisible absolute.
The yellow central area represents “MIND-IN-ACTION”, MIND in its creative phase. This is World-Mind from which all things are made manifest. The universe is the imaginative construction of the World-Mind.
The red-coloured areas at the edge of the yellow area show the Overself of each individual being. They are all coloured red because there is no essential difference between the Overself of one individual and another. The Overself is the fundamental consciousness of the individual and is rooted in the World-Mind. This consciousness enables human beings to act and think in the so-called physical body. The three activities of thinking, feeling and willing are derived from the Overself.
The different-coloured spodglings, emanating from each Overself represent the ego of the individual. They all have a different colour, which shows the egos as countless human individuals in all their wonderfully varied personalities, shapes, sizes and colours. The world of form, of manifestation is the ego’s world. It is the conscious thinker behind our ordinary thinking, feeling, and willing. It derives its own light and power from the Overself. The ego is reflected consciousness. The Overself is eternal, the ego ephemeral.
The ego makes contact with the “outside” world of “material” objects through the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell and kinesthesia. But this is where the illustration breaks down, because it shows the world of “material” objects as standing outside of human consciousness. This is impossible, because to be aware of a “thing”,we must know it within our consciousness. Objects stand outside the body but cannot stand outside of consciousness. In this sense, the individual is the universe.
The World-Mind expresses itself – via the Overself – through each individual entity, each individual “I”; thus we are one Consciousness experiencing itself through us.
The illustration also breaks down because it cannot show that MIND – represented by the dot in the middle – is the source of all, but paradoxically all things are contained in it, as represented by the large rectangle.
This article was first published in Going Mental by Daniel McGowan. You can download the PDF of this book for free here: FREE DOWNLOAD