You get to do whatever you want, you just can’t take credit for it in the end. You’re doing it on the universe’s behalf, because you’re The Universe, manifest as a possible particular pattern of itself. There is accountability here.

How successfully can subjectivity be reminded of its source? Truly? Does it want to avoid thinking about the fact that it didn’t used to exist, and now all of a sudden there’s this roaring sensory riptide happening? Egos are safe. Egos are beautiful. They are abstract shells dreamt up against the ontological reality of energy’s lack of true intention. But they’re ultimately and terribly delusional.

And I love that word, ‘particular.’ 'Particle.’ It’s a way of noticing that there is singularity as well as multiplicity happening at the same time. It’s a paradox we live every day. Here is a chair, but the chair is actually atoms. Here is an atom, but the atom is actually quarks. Here is a person, but the person is actually cells. Here is a pattern, but the pattern is actually many patterns, and the many patterns before it.

Here is emergence, but the emergence is many emergencies, because it only ever emerges harder and harder every moment until it is no longer able. We are inertia.

When we think we’re done, we’re still thinking, so we’re not. When we’re done, we won’t know. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. It doesn’t matter if it’s 80 years or 30, or eons of biotechnological cyborgism and galaxy-hopping. It’ll happen as sure as we began at all, and when it does, we won’t know, and if we do, we’ll be forced to accept it. And we will. And there’s solace in that.

The golden rule exists to remind us that what we do to others, we literally do to ourselves. The reason we know certain things are absurd, deep in our guts, is because from the very start, this thing has been itself, and inside every pattern it will ever produce, somewhere, there’s a grain that knows it.