The Overture · 4 of 5
Now set the three reminders side by side and let them touch.
Something exists, and the fact is unexplainable from inside. The fact lands in lives, usually first in children, as wonder. And everything that exists, so far as you have ever met it, appears within experiencing. Three plain observations; a mystic can sign each, and so can a materialist — all but the one school the third reminder named, which signs two, contests the third, and is not asked to pretend otherwise. Held apart, they are commonplaces. Held together, they begin, very quietly, to hum.
For if experience is where everything appears, then the universe, as you have ever actually known it, has the character of something entertained: beheld, attended to, turned over. Philosophers on both benches have granted that much — the world you know is the world as known. What this volume adds, at this early hour, is only a way of hearing it, offered the way an unfamiliar melody is offered, to be hummed before anything is decided about it:
> *The universe is a musing of Consciousness.*
A musing: something mused on, wondered at, entertained — and enjoyed, the way attention enjoys what it turns over. The volume's account of beginnings, when it gives one, stays inside the same image: when Consciousness — call it Wonder — separates from Mystery, the universes begin to form as its musings. Whether you take that as poetry or as ontology is left entirely with you, and the volume will not pretend the two readings collapse into one. It will only show, movement by movement, what becomes livable when the sentence is inhabited.
What matters on this page is smaller. A musing is not a mechanism, and the word forecloses no mechanism either; every equation you trust survives it untouched. What the word changes is the register in which the same facts are held. The unexplained fact of existence becomes Mystery, musing. The wonder in the child becomes the musing felt from inside. The experiencing that holds all appearing becomes the attention the musing is held in. Nothing has been added to the world except a way of standing in it — which is all the sentence asks, and exactly what a moment's reflection gives.
One thread remains. If the universe is a musing, what, in the musing, are you? The next page gives the word this volume will use for you from here on.
Two astronomers work the same data with the same instruments and publish the same paper, with the same conclusions. Walking to the car afterwards, one says the sky feels like something being turned over and attended to. The other says that is not science. The first agrees that it is not — and does not stop saying it.
Have the two of them disagreed about anything?