Ronald A. Pavellas, Stockholm, May, 2025

All has been said before:

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun”.

This lover and hater of words dares (“vanity of vanities”) to add his own to the overburdened “dominion of Earth”. (Quotes from the Book of Ecclesiastes, Old Testament).

In recent years I have studied the philosophers, prophets, scientists, the holy books, poets, visionaries, artists, the saints, musicians, psychologists. I lived life (still), sometimes carelessly, but carefully enough. I was lucky—no wars called me to them, and I survived the dangers that I visited and were visited upon me. Beyond the imaginings of my youth, I have been, directly and indirectly, party to the creation of eleven (or more) other humans.

Beyond the vanity of the need to share these words, I feel an obligation to create a summary to acknowledge the blessing of life from a source that still evades (and will always evade) exact description. As I recently wrote a friend:

‘The Universe, whatever one may perceive that it is or can be, is too large for words; and, anyway, each of us is inside it and it is part of us inseparably, so we can’t look at IT objectively—if even this notion has any relevance to “The Great Everything that Always has been and Always will be.”

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I was wiser, or better with words, thirty years ago when I started writing poems:

I am a lucky man, I am
I sit in mountains watching sky
As Moon traverses showing path
For Sun to take in just an hour

The trees, my friends, stand ever straight
And radiate their calmness true
My soul’s enraptured with the touch
Of cool thin air embracing me

Six decades living now I flow
As like a river through the world
Accepting all I touch and see
As part of me — and lovingly

There is no ending to this poem
Like Nature’s patterns through us all
As we are played as instruments
In this celestial symphony …

It is clear to me now that we are most in touch with our origins, not through words and analytical methods, but through acceptance of, and participation in, the patterns, rhythms, connections with other lives, and those of the Earth / Sun / Solar System.

As for what Reality may be, here is my formula:

REALITY = the Sum (Σ) of responses to the Perceived Universe in all Sentient Entities in Existence Everywhere in this Instant

As for ‘sentience’, physicists, philosophers, cosmologists and others are perceiving, as the mystics have long been, that “The Great Everything” is itself sentient and that we each are the means through which it perceives itself.

“All are nothing but flowers in a flowering universe”—Soen Nakagawa Roshi

Drawn during a boring university lecture in 1965 while contemplating my readings of the works of Carl G. Jung.
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Addendum, 28 May

We can never deliver a confirmed Theory of Everything (TOE) in Physics.

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