“Will reality still exist if we stop thinking about it and looking at it?” the boy asks.
“I don’t know,” says Mary. “That’s how it all began, after all. I don’t know how it ends. I do know that it ends.”
“Wait…” says the boy. “That’s how it ends, of course. If we stop reproducing, stop thinking about it, and stop paying attention to it, then it will simply cease to exist.”
“We are life sustaining itself,” says Mary.
“Within this circle, there is a point. That point is you. One day, you will feel as though you carry the world,” says Mary.
“I know,” says the boy.
“You will not do it alone,” Mary says. “It is a shared effort. But you know…”
“Thank you,” says the boy. “I can only do it alone.”
When you see me, I am out of balance.
I love being out of balance: as much as possible, preferably.
Then I do something extreme again, and end up in psychosis.
I need that tension, that pressure. I can't handle it when nothing is at stake.
Being in balance only says something about the whole, doesn't it, not about each individual state. I've never seen anything that is perfectly balanced at any given moment.
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If I had been a particle
For someone outside the field of physics, describing everything in terms of molecules and atoms feels very clinical. It is almost as if the experience itself is being stripped away. It is a bit like saying, “Pain is not a big deal. It is just a bunch of atoms organized in a certain way.”
What someone thinks of pain is not taken into account. You could also describe someone's opinion in terms of atoms. But that would do reality a disservice. Reality is more things at once.
It feels a bit like how people used to look at animals, as if animals could not suffer because they supposedly had “no” consciousness. It is heartbreaking.
You could argue that molecules are more a way of looking at things than something that actually exists. They exist if you look at them that way, yes.