I feel the phrase/concept of "the eternal now" is accurate.

I was actually part of a religious panel (I was the atheist rep) at my university put on by the Harvarard Veritas Forum. I said the existence of all life amounted to, "What will you do next... and why." I said that for some lifeforms, the "why" might be something that they were occasionally consciously aware of.

I stand by undeniable. We are star stuff, as Sagan notes, who have evolved to be able to ponder our own origins.

@Elganned How so? It arose from randomness.

@WilliamCharles It's a category error. We're not the universe; we're IN the universe. We're made of the same stuff as the universe but that no more make us "one with" the universe than being made in part of carbon makes us one with a sack of barbecue briquettes. Having something in common or being a subset is not some kind of unity.

One often sees the opposite composition error, which says that because the universe contains conscious beings, the universe is therefore conscious.

I don't mind people feeling and expressing non-duality, if that is their wont, but there is in truth no basis for it other than a desire to spout deepities.

@mordant I still beg to differ. See the Watts quote graphic above. Watts also noted that it's less we came "into" the universe, than came "out" of it. Your organs thought of as an individual component of your life form is not you, but in actuality it is most definitely you. Its relation to you changes should it get separated from you, but reattached it doesn't stop being "you" because of the period of separation.

You may think of it in purely semantic terms, but I feel even then it supports my take. The line from Hudsucker Proxy about "merging with the infinite" is great, but considers us as having been "unmerged" from it. We're the blobby floaters in a lava lamp but we're still the lava lamp regardless of our continual morphing.

It shouldn't be such a difficult concept. The universe by definition is everything that exists. In every direction you look however small a subset you view... you're looking at the universe.

"You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop." - Rumi

@WilliamCharles I have no personal quarrel with you and I'm not challenged by such concepts. I get where they are coming from.

As a software developer I think pretty rigorously in terms of "is a" vs "has a" relationships, in terms of inheritance vs composition, in ways that most people aren't obliged to. It may be that this helps me see more clearly, or in the alternative, it may be that I am over-generalizing these concepts into an area where they don't fully apply. I have just enough epistemological humility to see that as a possibility, even though I don't think it's very likely. Peace.