Main Character Syndrome?

David Chatel

1/19/20242 min read

This little ball right here? Apart from a few jaunts to the moon, it has held our entire experience as conscious beings. In the grand scheme of the universe, it’s an infinitesimally tiny speck orbiting a small star in a random solar system, stashed in one galaxy among 200 billion in the known universe. We live on the tiny end of a system of concentric spheres that is practically never ending in either direction, big and small. Ironically, our existence is so small, and distances in the cosmos are so vast, that it’s possible for us to perceive ourselves to be everything.

For centuries, humans thought themselves to be the center of whatever existed out there, theorizing that everything else revolved around our speck, and that our planet was the main character in a grand celestial play about us. This viewpoint was a social contract with reality which necessitated that our version was the only one that mattered. One of the many detrimental effects of this contract was that it disconnected us from a truth that we weren’t even ready to understand. I’m still not sure we’re ready, but we’re at a point where moving into the future is requiring us to evolve.

While we’ve come a long way in our understanding of the natural universe, our anthropological, social, and spiritual evolutions lag behind. So many of us still subscribe to the ideology that we (as individuals or groups) are the most important thing in the universe…the main characters of existence and time…necessitating that everything revolves around us in order to prove our view of reality. Just as our scientific ignorance blinded us to the truth in past centuries, our anthropological, social, and spiritual ignorance blinds us to a different truth now.

In the story of existence, and in the experience of consciousness, there are ultimately no individuals. Just like nature, and indeed along with it, all of conscious existence is connected and interdependent. None of us is the main character. When one suffers, all suffer. When one attacks, they only attack themselves. We rise and fall together because we are inextricably intertwined at an intimate and irreducible level. If one deserves justice, dignity, peace, and love, all do. If one is denied any of that, all are denied. To the degree that we embody that truth in our daily lives, we participate in Love manifesting in and through us. Like it or not, the Beatles were right… “I am he as you are he as you are me And we are all together.” It's essential that we begin treating each other that way.