Maya (Everything Is Everything Else)

After Hinduism and I (heart) Huckabees and thinking about there being no God, I’ve been wondering if everything is indeed everything else.

On a physical level, we’re all atoms, all made out of the same three particles or so.  Furthermore, I don’t have any specific claim on the particles that currently compose my body.  I’m constantly losing and regenerating this stuff.  I think I’ve heard that the body regenerates itself every seven years, and I don’t know if that’s really true or not, but certainly the body does regenerate itself, taking in material from outside to recompose cells and organs along pre-set self-perpetuating patterns.  but it means that I’m made up of parts of all kinds of things, and as I respirate, sweat, lose skin cells, and… expel waste, parts of me are pushed out into the environment where they are recycled and recombined on a molecular level into all kinds of other things.

I’m really just a part of a much larger system.  On a physical level, my separateness seems apparent, but it’s a trick.  A mental oversimplification.  On a physical level, everything is really the same as everything else.

What about consciousness?  If existence is merely physical, then consciousness is only a pattern of neurons firing and chemical reactions in my brain, and there is no mind-body dualism, which means that there really is no essential, fundamental division between things.  Between me and everything else.

But we know so little about consciousness, and we know even less about spirit (like, whether it even exists).  If mind and spirit are different from body, is it not possible that they would follow the pattern of physical existence?  That they would flow in and out of everything in the same cycle of assimilation, regeneration, and expulsion?  It doesn’t seem like my consciousness does that, but it also doesn;t seem like my body is made of the same protons, neutrons, and electrons that everything else is made of.

Maya is what the Hindus call it, the illusion of separateness.  Are mind ans spirit indeed even truly separate from body, or is there some kind of exchange that we can’t even perceive?  We know that mind and body, if they are separate, influence each other.  Psychosomatic illness, for example.  Or mental states that are dependent on physical effects like fatigue, drugs, or chemical imbalance.

Are things separate, or is everything really the same? Is everything really everything else?  Perhaps that unity or lack-of-separateness is what I would call “God.”  Very pantheistic, I guess.  I don’t know.  I don’t know anything, really.