“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
— Alan Watts
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Imagine, if you will, standing beneath the vast canopy of the night sky — that incredible celestial theatre where billions of stars perform their timeless routine, utterly unconcerned with our petty human judgments. The universe doesn't give a cosmic heck about our classifications, our judgements, our desperate need to arrange everything into neat little boxes of "good" and "bad".
What a gloriously humbling realisation!
Here we are, as Joe Rogan might say, these endless bubbles of awareness wrapped up in a finite biological spacesuit, travelling on a rock through space, peering up at an infinite expanse that has absolutely no interest in what we think. The stars don't arrive with performance reviews or cosmic TripAdvisor approval ratings. They simply are. Brilliant, ancient, radiating light across unimaginable distances, completely unbothered by whether we find their arrangement aesthetically pleasing or scientifically interesting.
This is the delicious irony of human perception — we're constantly attempting to impose order, meaning, and moral judgement onto a universe that operates with a profound and pure indifference. Our starry companions have been burning and dying for millions of years, their light travelling impossible distances, and not once have they stopped to wonder, "Am I doing this right?"
It’s not just the stars, it’s all of nature. It doesn’t care, it just is and it does.
Now, how about you?
Consider the sheer audacity of our egos that attempts to plant comparison upon all of life, reflecting, as Emerson observed, that judgement and opinion is also a confession of our character.
We don't look up and immediately start comparing: "Oh, that constellation looks a bit wonky" or "That star seems dimmer than it should be"... but we do it pretty much everywhere else. It's as if we've appointed ourselves cosmic quality control inspectors, armed with nothing more than our limited perception and an inflated sense of importance.
But it all stems from our inner dialogue, doesn’t it? The judgement of ourselves as wonky and dimmer and dummer that we should be, and that character radiates out.
So know this. Instead come to terms with your cosmic “is-ness”. You are also part of this magnificent, non-judgemental system. Your very atoms were forged in stellar furnaces, your body composed of stardust. You are not separate from this grand, non-discriminating process — you are the process experiencing itself.
Alan Watts used to chuckle at our human tendency to overlay moral frameworks onto the raw, beautiful existence of things. The stars don't care if they're "well-arranged" or not. They simply radiate, transform, exist in beauty and perfection — much like we do, when we drop our incessant need to categorise and judge.
So next time you gaze outward, remember: you're looking at a magnificent display of pure being. No comparisons or judgements needed; it’s beyond all of that. Then, after you look out, look within. Experience *that* inner magnificence of pure being, whole and complete in and of itself. Needing nothing, you’re also pure existence, in all its breathtaking, mysterious splendour.
Go well,
Arjuna