The Ultimate Truth About This World: Why We Long to Know Why the Universe Exists, What the Sages Across the Ages Were Seeking, and the One Thing I See in Them All
Translated by AI. Read the Chinese original ↗
Contents 17 sections
I. Tracing the Stardust
I like reading. Not the kind of reading with a clear purpose. It is more a kind of curiosity—curiosity about “what this world really is.”
Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, history: I read all of them and want to understand everything. It is like assembling a giant puzzle, fitting each fragment into place until a complete timeline appears in my mind.
Beginning 13.7 billion years ago.
From nothing to something, from simple to complex, from silence to an uproar.
At first there was a singularity.
Infinite density, infinitely small volume, every law of physics breaking down there—like the place before the first page of a book, where there is no page number.
Then it exploded.
Not an explosion within space. Space itself and time itself were born with that silent burst.
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| t = 0 | The singularity explodes; spacetime is born |
| 3 minutes | Hydrogen and helium nuclei condense |
| 200 million years | Gravity gathers hydrogen and helium; the first stars ignite |
| Several billion years | Stars forge carbon, oxygen, and iron; supernova explosions forge gold, silver, copper, and uranium, scattering them into interstellar space |
| 4.6 billion years ago | Stellar ashes gather again; the solar system and Earth take shape |
| 3.8 billion years ago | Organic molecules begin replicating themselves; chemistry becomes biology |
| 2 billion silent years | Single-celled organisms rule Earth, then begin cooperating—multicellular life appears |
| 540 million years ago | The Cambrian explosion: fish → amphibians → reptiles → dinosaurs → mammals |
| 3 million years ago | In Africa, a branch of ancient apes stands up |
| 200,000 years ago | Homo sapiens appears |
| 10,000 years ago | The agricultural revolution |
| 5,000 years ago | Writing is born |
| 300 years ago | The industrial revolution |
| 30 years ago | The internet |
| A few years ago | AI |
| This moment | I sit before a screen, typing this line |
13.7 billion years of evolution, from a singularity to a consciousness capable of looking back at it all.
I can tell this story from beginning to end without hesitation. I broadly understand the physical mechanisms, chemical reactions, biological logic, and paths of civilization at each stage.
This is a great achievement of human knowledge, and I respect it deeply.
But there is one question I still cannot answer.
Why?
Not “how did it happen?”
But “why did it happen?”
Why was there a Big Bang?
What was there before it—if “before” still means anything? What caused it? Why do mathematical structures exist? Why do the laws of physics happen to permit stars, carbon, DNA, and consciousness? Why is there something rather than nothing?
This question has lived inside me since secondary school. It does not interfere with daily life, but I always feel it there. Especially late at night, when I am alone, after everything falls quiet.
Then it surfaces.
II. Falling Without a Bottom
I spent a great deal of time trying to find an answer.
At first I searched within physics. Physics says time itself was born in the Big Bang. Asking “what came before the Big Bang?” is like asking “what direction is south of the South Pole?” The question itself is invalid.
Fine. But why this structure of spacetime? Why does a universe in which “time begins with the Big Bang” exist, instead of nothing at all?
Then I searched philosophy. Three hundred years ago, Leibniz asked the same question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” But his answer was the principle of sufficient reason: everything has a sufficient reason, and the ultimate reason points to God.
But what is the reason for God?
I read about the multiverse hypothesis. Perhaps countless universes exist, each with different physical constants, and we just happen to ask this question in one that permits life. This is the anthropic principle. It sounds beautiful, but can it be falsified? Does an unfalsifiable theory still count as science?
I read about the mathematical universe hypothesis. Tegmark says the universe is mathematical structure itself; matter is merely the expression of mathematical relationships. But why do mathematical structures have the power to “make things exist”? What separates an equation from a world with temperature, texture, and light?
Every answer was like a floor. I stepped onto it, found my footing, and breathed out. Then the floor cracked, and I fell another level. Found my footing, cracked, fell again: on and on, without end. Even telling it feels tiring.
Later I encountered the Münchhausen trilemma. It says any ultimate explanation has only three possible paths:
Infinite regress—A is caused by B, B by C, C by D. Follow the chain forever; there is no end. Beneath every floor is another floor.
Circular reasoning—A is caused by B, and B is caused by A. You descend the stairs, walk in a circle, and discover you are back where you began.
Dogmatic stopping—At some level, declare: “That is simply how it is. No explanation needed. Stop here.” But why stop here?
Three paths, none passable. And there is no fourth.
I realized I had spent all these years circling among them. Sometimes I thought an answer had finally brought me to the bottom—excitement, a sudden illumination. But before long, that feeling of falling returned.
There always seemed to be one final level. Always one more final level.
During those years of repeated questioning, there was one moment when the questioning disappeared.
It was an afternoon at university. I had spent the whole day in the library. I no longer remember exactly what I was reading, probably a book about cosmic evolution or complexity science. But that afternoon, something suddenly connected in my mind. For the first time, the timeline from the Big Bang to “me” unfolded in one complete, continuous sweep.
Not “knowing” at the level of information.
Something deeper. The line suddenly became real. Not a textbook account, not a conceptual understanding, but a bodily feeling—I was the end of that line. It had never broken. From the first hydrogen atom to my heartbeat now, not one link in between had been interrupted.
I walked out of the library.
People passed through the campus. There were trees and wind. I went to the canteen to eat. Everything was as usual. But what I saw was different.
Everything felt lovable.
Not “everything is lovable” as a literary or lyrical sentiment. It was extremely concrete, almost physical: those things and I were the same thing. Smiling with joy at someone was smiling with joy at myself.
At that moment, there was no “me” standing opposite “the world.”
- No subject and object.
- No observer and observed.
Only a whole expanse without boundaries—of what? I cannot find a noun. Just a whole expanse.
A mind without burdens. Humanity and nature as one. Something like that.
But it did not last long. Perhaps a few hours, perhaps less. I have forgotten the duration, but I remember it.
Daily life rushed back: the canteen, wondering why she had not replied on WeChat, tomorrow’s exam. “I” solidified again.
For many years afterward, I occasionally recalled that moment. But I did not know what it was. I assumed it was just an accidental emotional “peak experience,” perhaps a kind of mental exhilaration caused by reading too intensely.
III. Asking Heaven, Seeking the Way
After that afternoon, life continued.
I kept reading: from popular physics to original philosophical texts, from Eastern scriptures to Western papers. Each new framework excited me for a while. “Maybe this time I have really reached the bottom.” But once the novelty faded, the floor collapsed again.
I discussed it with people. Occasionally I met friends willing to talk about these things. We talked late into the night, inspiring each other, and at some point everything suddenly seemed clear. But the next morning, the clarity dissolved like a dream.
Later there was AI, and I asked AI too. It is very knowledgeable, able to organize perspectives across disciplines far more clearly than I can. For many questions, it is also much more efficient than reading. But I knew: however brilliant its answer, it is a rearrangement of existing human knowledge. It can help me move faster, but down the same road, into the same wall.
This is not an everyday topic. You do not tell colleagues or friends over dinner, “Lately I have been wondering why the universe exists.” Yet occasionally, online, in late-night comment sections or unexpected places, algorithms brought me people like that. I added some on WeChat, and we occasionally exchanged a few words.
In those conversations, I sensed something in them.
A kind of loneliness.
Not social loneliness. Many had friends, families, ordinary social lives. It was deeper, something even they could not quite explain. As though they stood somewhere nobody could stand beside them, seeing things they could discuss with nobody.
At the time I could not name its source. I only vaguely felt that we shared the same symptoms, but none of us could name the condition.
Now I can.
They too were standing before that glass wall.
They had seen unity—in certain moments, through reading, thinking, or experiences impossible to explain. They had seen that the boundary between themselves and the world was false. But they could not cross it. The wall remained. Worse, almost nobody around them understood what they were seeing.
How do you explain, “I feel the boundary between me and the universe is false, but I cannot dissolve it”?
Say it aloud, and you are taken either as philosophically pretentious or as showing signs of mental instability…
So they stay silent. They carry that inexpressible loneliness through daily life. Occasionally, late at night, they exchange a few words with another equally silent person beyond a screen—not seeking an answer, only confirming: I am not the only one standing here.
In truth, I had long suspected this question might have no answer. At least not the kind I expected: a proposition, a formula, a passage that makes everything clear once read.
I even understood that “questions matter more than answers.” Answers resolve the present difficulty; questions determine the direction of the future. Answers expire. Good questions keep pushing us forward.
And even if such an answer exists, it might belong to a higher, omniscient, omnipotent being—if there is one. I might not be able to understand it.
But knowing a principle and accepting it are entirely different things.
The longing does not listen to reason. It is like a tide: retreating by day, rising late at night. You can ignore it, but you cannot switch it off.
IV. Turning the Question Back
One day, I stopped questioning the universe. I began questioning the questioner—myself.
The change was not sudden.
There was no dramatic moment. It was more like a rope slowly wearing through. After questioning for so long, looking outward for so long, one day I simply felt tired. Not surrender, but a different kind of stillness.
In that stillness, a question surfaced on its own.
Not “why does the universe exist?”
But—
Why do I want to know so badly?
The direction was completely reversed. Not outward, but inward.
Why must I know why the universe exists? What if I do not? Earth keeps turning; life goes on. Most people are not troubled by this question, and they live perfectly well.
So why can’t I? Why not sleep, scroll short videos, play games? Wouldn’t those offer happiness too?
What exactly am I seeking? What am I longing for? What happens if I find the answer? What happens if I don’t? Am I looking for an answer, or for myself? Am I missing something? What makes me different from others?
The feeling that accompanies the question. That faint, incomplete feeling, as though something is missing. As though something stands between “me” and “everything.”
I began paying attention to the feeling itself, instead of continuing to seek an external answer that would remove it.
V. No Wall Between the Shores
I studied physics. I understand one fact better than most people:
There is no real boundary between me and the universe.
Every atom in my body is borrowed from the universe. Carbon comes from the core of a star dead for billions of years, forged in the instant it collapsed and exploded. Oxygen comes from supernova ejecta. Hydrogen is a product of the first three minutes after the Big Bang. It stays in my body for a few decades, then returns as soil, air, seawater, perhaps drawn by gravity into a newborn star in the distant future.
Every breath of air was outside in the atmosphere ten minutes ago. The water I drink may have been in a river last month. The atoms in my food once belonged to another plant, another animal, another person. My body’s boundary—my skin—is physically permeable, temporary, and blurred.
Physically, “I” am not a thing. “I” am a process. (Ha, in Chinese that almost sounds like an insult…)
A dissipative structure temporarily made from cosmic matter, constantly exchanging matter and energy with its environment. Like a whirlpool in a river: it has shape, boundaries, and continuity. It looks like an independent “thing.” But the water forming it flows through every moment. The whirlpool is not the water; it is a way the water moves.
I—and you before the screen—are also a way the universe moves.
At the level of reason and logic, I understand all this completely.
But at the level of experience, it is nothing like that.
In experience, the world’s structure is entirely different.
There is an “I” here—a subject with an inner perspective, feelings, and thoughts.
There is a “universe” over there—an external object being observed. A clear boundary separates them.
I can see that unity. Physics textbooks state it plainly: your atoms come from stars; you have no boundary with the universe. I can see it.
But I cannot cross over.
As though a glass wall stands between me and the universe.
I call it “glass” because it is transparent. I can see the other side. I can see the oneness right there.
Every physics textbook, every mathematical equation, every successful experimental prediction shows me this world is an indivisible whole; “I” am merely a temporary, local eddy within it.
Visible, but untouchable. Known, but unfelt.
When did this wall appear?
I thought carefully. It did not suddenly rise one day. It has been there as long as I can remember. More precisely—it is the very act of “remembering.”
The moment a conscious system divides the world into “my experience” and “the outside world,” the wall appears automatically. Nobody placed it there. It is a structural by-product of cognition.
With the concept of “me,” there must be “not-me.” With a subject, there must be an object. With an observer, there must be something observed.
The wall is made of “seeing” itself.
That discovery stopped me, with something like sudden insight.
If the wall’s material is cognition itself—the act of “I observe the universe”—I cannot use cognition to cross a wall made of cognition.
You cannot use water to dry water. You cannot stand on your own shoulders and lift yourself up.
Every question—“Why the Big Bang?” “Why physical laws?” “Why existence rather than nothingness?”—is a cognitive act. “I” trying to understand “the world.” Each reinforces the structure that separates subject and object.
Every time I hit the wall, I was also building it.
I thought I was trying to cross it. In fact, I kept adding bricks through thought. Dismantling and building at once. I could never dismantle it faster than I built it, because the tool for both was the same.
No wonder those sages did not say “think harder,” but “let go.”
Not breaking the wall, but stopping the act that makes it.
Suddenly many things fell into place.
That university evening, the experience outside the library, the moment everything felt lovable and my mind unburdened—it was not because I had “figured something out.” Quite the reverse: for some reason, thought had paused. The boundary between “me” and “the world” blurred. The glass wall dissolved. Not shattered; I had simply happened to stop making it.
Then life rushed back, thought restarted, and the wall returned.
I once thought it was merely an accidental emotional high. Now I knew: it was an unintended, brief crossing I had not recognized.
And all the questions I had pursued, all that unstoppable longing, were essentially one thing:
I longed to cross that wall again. Not accidentally, but consciously.
I was not longing for an answer. I was longing for unity. Not conceptual unity—I already had that from physics textbooks, and it was no use. Experiential unity: bringing together the “oneness” logic knows and the feeling of being alive.
No division between inside and outside. No division between knowing and being.
When I finally saw this clearly, something strange happened.
I turned back to things I had read before—Chan Buddhism, Buddhist thought, Daoism, intuitive insights in physics—and suddenly realized:
They were all speaking of this.
VI. Meeting Again Beneath the Lamp
I used to find Chan koans fascinating, the Dao De Jing profound, Schrödinger’s philosophical essays bold, Wittgenstein overwhelming.
Yet something always stood between us. Like frosted glass: outlines visible, details blurred.
Now I knew what it was.
I did not know what my own question was.
If you do not understand your confusion, you cannot recognize an answer even when it is before your eyes.
Like holding a key without knowing there is a door in the world that needs opening. You admire its craftsmanship—“What a clever shape,” “What unusual material”—but do not use it to open a door.
Those classics, those words of the sages, were keys. My glass wall was the lock.
Only when I saw the lock did the keys become keys.
Let me open them one by one.
Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chan
An illiterate woodcutter. In the street he heard someone reciting the Diamond Sutra. At the line “Let the mind arise without dwelling anywhere,” the barrier broke on the spot.
Later he reached the monastery of the Fifth Patriarch, Hongren, and pounded rice in the kitchen. Aging Hongren wanted to pass on his robe and bowl, asking each disciple for a verse expressing his insight. The senior disciple Shenxiu, widely regarded as the successor, was learned and diligent. He wrote:
The body is the bodhi tree,
The mind a bright mirror’s stand.
Diligently wipe it at all times,
Let no dust settle upon it.
Was this a good verse? Yes. It says body and mind are the place of practice; remain aware, and do not let troubles and delusions obscure your original mind.
Huineng heard it and asked someone to write another verse on the wall for him:
Bodhi originally has no tree,
The bright mirror has no stand.
Originally there is not a single thing—
Where could dust settle?
I used to read this and think, “How beautifully written.”
Now I read something else.
Shenxiu was still wiping the glass wall. He accepted its existence and tried to make it cleaner and more transparent, so he could see the other side more clearly. His practice maintained, purified, and preserved clarity.
Huineng said: There is no wall. There never was.
“Originally there is not a single thing” does not mean the world does not exist. It means that which cuts the world into “me” and “not-me,” the structure creating the split between subject and object, was never substantial in the first place. It is a mental construction. “Wiping” it reinforces its seeming existence, because you treat something nonexistent as if it exists.
Li Er, the Forefather of Daoism
Earlier—over a thousand years earlier.
The Dao De Jing has only five thousand Chinese characters. Shorter than this WeChat article. Yet every sentence invites thought.
One says:
The Dao gives birth to One; One gives birth to Two; Two gives birth to Three; Three gives birth to the ten thousand things.
I used to take this as ancient cosmology, describing a world developing from simple to complex. Now I saw something different.
What is “One”?
“One” is the first distinction. The first cut into an undifferentiated, chaotic whole: now there is “this” and “that.”
With One comes Two: yin and yang, inside and outside, me and not-me.
With Two comes Three: the relationship between them.
With relationships, the myriad things unfold.
But the Dao precedes One.
The Dao is the state before any distinction. No subject and object, no inside and outside, no “me” and “universe,” because these dividing lines have not been drawn.
The glass wall is One. The first cut. The original act by which consciousness divides the whole into “observer” and “observed.”
Laozi also said something more devastating:
The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao.
Once spoken, it is no longer that thing. The structure of language—subject, verb, object—already presupposes division. Say “I saw the Dao,” and you have two things, “I” and “Dao.” Already Two; already not the Dao.
So Laozi wrote five thousand characters about something unsayable. He knew the paradox. But he also knew that without speaking, even the paradox would remain unseen.
Master Yangming—Wang Shouren
A little closer to our time.
1508, Longchang, Guizhou. A remote corner of the Ming empire, a wilderness rife with miasma.
Wang Yangming was exiled there. An upright official who offended the powerful eunuch Liu Jin, he was sent to this godforsaken place as a nominal postal-station officer. Several attendants fell ill; he nearly failed to survive himself.
In those darkest days, he made himself a stone coffin.
Each night he lay in it and asked: “What further way would a sage find in this situation?” If someone truly enlightened fell into my position, what would he do? Would a path remain?
He had followed Zhu Xi’s “investigation of things to extend knowledge,” believing truth lay in external objects and must be studied, reasoned out, and investigated one by one. He once investigated bamboo for seven days, until he coughed blood, without finding its underlying principle.
Inside the stone coffin in Longchang, there was little left to investigate. No books, teachers, or companions; only stone walls, insects, and a self with nowhere to turn.
One night—
“Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he awakened to the meaning of investigating things and extending knowledge. Between waking and sleeping, it was as though someone spoke to him. Unconsciously he cried out and leapt up, startling all his attendants. He first understood that the way of the sages was fully present in his own nature, and that his earlier search for principle in external things had been mistaken.”
Half asleep and half awake, he suddenly understood. As though someone whispered in his ear. He involuntarily jumped up and shouted. The attendants sleeping nearby woke in fright.
What did he realize?
“My own nature is sufficient; seeking principle in external things was a mistake.”
All principles were already fully present in his own mind and nature. Searching for them in external things had been wrong.
First he had searched outward: investigating bamboo, reading Zhu Xi, trying to find ultimate principle in the objective world. He too hit a wall, for a long time.
Only at rock bottom—exiled, sick, lying in a stone coffin awaiting death—was the outward road completely severed. Every external resource was stripped away. He had to look inward.
Then he discovered: the mind does not have to “conform” to external truth; the mind itself is where truth resides.
Ah, that feeling is familiar. When you reach the bottom and find nothing outside but a mixture of warmth and coldness, you can only retreat inward.
This is not idealism. It does not say stones, trees, and stars outside do not exist. It says the dividing line between you and them—the assumption “I am here, truth is there”—is not a real structure. It is created by your very act of searching outward.
Stop searching outward, and the boundary between inside and outside disappears.
He later condensed this insight into four Chinese characters:
The unity of knowing and acting.
Most understand this as “act on what you know”: knowledge and action should cooperate. That is one reading. But its real force is not that knowing and acting must be “joined,” but that they were never separate. (Try taking “unity” as a noun, a state, rather than a verb, a process.)
The moment you truly know fire burns your hand is the same moment you withdraw it. Not knowledge first, action later: knowing is acting, acting is knowing. Two words only because language is limited. In lived experience, they are one thing.
Just as “me” and “universe” are two words. In actual physics, they have always been one thing.
People seem always to have to lose after possessing, collapse after completeness, see the fragility and illusions of relationships, and through pain recognize themselves and understand the world anew.
Dōgen, Founder of Japan’s Sōtō School
As a young man, Dōgen crossed from Japan to China and practiced at Tiantong Temple. One day he was meditating in the hall when a nearby monk dozed off. The master Rujing shouted:
“Zen practice is the dropping away of body and mind! How can you fall asleep?”
Hearing “body and mind drop away,” Dōgen awakened.
He had not heard a new principle. The words were a hammer shattering a structure in his mind.
He later described the realization:
“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be confirmed by all things. To be confirmed by all things is to let the body and mind of oneself and others drop away.”
Its structure deserves a slow look:
Studying the Buddha Way is studying the self. Not learning an external system of knowledge, but turning back to ask “what am I?”
Studying the self is forgetting the self. Look deeply at “I,” and you find no solid referent: only changing feelings, memories, and thoughts, without a fixed core. See this clearly, and “I” fades.
Forgetting the self is being confirmed by all things. This is the most subtle step. Not you knowing the world. Once the filter of “I” vanishes, all things know themselves through you. You are no longer an observer opposite the world, but a point where the world observes itself.
Being confirmed by all things is body and mind dropping away. The distinctions between subject and object, body and mind, self and other fall away like clothes worn too long. Not violently torn off, but naturally, gently slipping away.
You are not looking at the world. The world looks at itself through you.
Remove the subject from “I am seeing,” and pure seeing remains: no seer, no seen, only seeing. No side of the glass wall, because there is no wall.
An Ordinary Person—Ramana Maharshi
In twentieth-century India, there was a sixteen-year-old boy named Ramana Maharshi.
He had never practiced, read scriptures, or studied with a teacher. One day, sitting in his room, a thought struck him: “I am going to die.”
He did not panic. Instead, he decided to follow the thought all the way.
He lay down, stiffened his body, and simulated death. All right: the body was dead. Limbs motionless, breathing stopped.
Then he asked: What has died?
The body had died. But what about that which “knows the body has died”? What about that awareness?
He traced backward. Feelings vanish, but that which knows they vanish remains. Thoughts stop, but that which knows they stop remains. Memories can be erased, but that which knows they are erased remains.
Every layer of “me” he could point to—this body, these feelings, thoughts, memories—was an object of awareness, not awareness itself.
Like an eye that sees everything except itself.
Once he stripped away every layer that could be made an object, there remained pure awareness that could not be pointed out, described, or observed as an object.
Without boundary. Without shape. Without arising or passing away.
The glass wall—the boundary between “me” and “world”—rests on identifications such as “I am this body” and “I am these thoughts.” Peel them away layer by layer, and the wall has nowhere to stand.
It was not broken. It had lost its foundation.
From then on, Ramana taught only one method throughout his life:
Ask “Who am I?”
Not answering by thought, but following the direction of the question backward, to where the questioner disappears.
What surprised me most was finding physicists had reached the same place.
Schrödinger, a Founder of Quantum Mechanics
The Schrödinger who formulated the quantum wave equation studied Indian Vedanta deeply in later life. In the appendix to What Is Life?, he wrote an often overlooked passage:
“Consciousness is a singular noun; it has no plural. What we call ‘many minds’ are merely multiple aspects of the same thing.”
As a physicist, he seriously believed consciousness is not a private product each brain produces separately. All consciousnesses are different windows onto one consciousness.
Like waves in one sea: different shapes, the same water. The boundary between your consciousness and mine is like the boundary between waves—superficial, not fundamental.
David Bohm, Proponent of a Hidden-Variable Theory
One of quantum mechanics’ deepest interpreters, he proposed the “implicate order.” The world we see—objects, separation, motion—is a surface “explicate order.” Beneath it lies a whole not yet unfolded, where all things are inseparable. Particles are not independent entities; they are temporary ripples in the sea of the whole.
In later years he held many conversations with the Indian sage Krishnamurti. From completely different directions—one through physics, the other through inward observation—they entered the same room.
Bohm said something I could not put down for a long time:
“Thought creates the illusion of a ‘thinker,’ and then the thinker claims to be the source of thought. It is a circular deception.”
The division between observer and observed is not a fact of the world. It is created by the movement of thought itself.
The glass wall is the trace thought leaves as it moves.
Wittgenstein, the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Logician
He devoted an entire book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to deriving the relationship between language, logic, and the world, proposition by proposition, with almost mathematical rigor. A transparent crystal building, every brick precisely cut.
Then, in its final sections, the crystal building suddenly opened:
6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
6.45 To view the world from eternity is to feel it as a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole is the mystical.
6.522 There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They show themselves. They are the mystical.
7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
With a whole book of rigorous logic, he reached the farthest place logic could go. Then he stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down.
Then he said nothing.
He later told a friend: the most important part of this book is the part that was not written.
Logic honestly traced its own boundary. Inside, things can be stated clearly. Outside, it knows something is there, but cannot say it. Not because there is nothing—quite the opposite: the most important things are there. But language cannot reach them.
This is the farthest Western reason can go: seeing the boundary itself.
The Buddha—Shakyamuni
The first awakened one, earlier than all of them.
And the most thorough inward observer.
Twenty-five hundred years ago in northern India, a prince named Siddhartha was born in Kapilavastu. Raised in a palace, he was protected by his father from every suffering: old age, illness, death. Within the walls were always flowers, music, and youthful faces.
But the palace wall was also a glass wall. Facing the opposite direction: it blocked reality, not unity.
At twenty-nine, he left the gate. He saw an old man, a sick man, a corpse.
Those three things pierced him. Not because he did not know people age, sicken, and die—everyone knows that. But because for the first time he truly saw.
Like that afternoon in the library: the same knowledge suddenly changed from “known” to “real.”
He also saw a fourth thing: a wandering practitioner with a peaceful face.
So he left the palace. Abandoned the throne, his wife, his newborn son. It sounds cruel, but he was not chasing freedom. He was chasing an answer:
Where does suffering come from? How can it end?
For the next six years, he searched outward.
He found India’s best teachers and learned the deepest meditative states. He attained them, but found that peak experiences—however deep, still, or transcendent—eventually recede. Leave meditation, and suffering remains.
Then he tried asceticism. Extreme asceticism. Almost no food, tormenting his body until it was skeletal; reportedly he could feel his spine through his abdomen. He thought pushing the body to its limit would let the spirit break free of its physical prison.
Six years. No use.
Asceticism was another “investigation of things,” trying to approach truth through extreme bodily control. Like Wang Yangming investigating bamboo, it pointed outward: toward an object, trying to penetrate it by force.
Beside the Nairanjana River, he accepted milk rice offered by a shepherd girl. He ate it. Some strength returned.
He walked to a bodhi tree and sat down.
He told himself: “Until I attain awakening, I will not rise from this seat.”
This time, he no longer searched outward. No special meditative state, no suppression of the body, no analysis of an external object. He simply sat. Watched his mind. Watched thoughts rise and disappear. Fear come and go. Desire come and go.
Neither welcoming nor rejecting. Neither pursuing nor fleeing.
It is said that Mara came that night, threatening him with fear and tempting him with desire. But strip away the myth: what is Mara? The mind’s last struggle, the frantic counterattack of “I” before it dissolves. Fear and desire are the two pillars the self uses to sustain its existence.
He did not fight them. He simply watched.
Then, at dawn, he looked up and saw the morning star.
He awakened.
He said:
“How extraordinary! How extraordinary!
All beings possess the wisdom and virtues of the Tathagata,
Yet fail to realize them because of deluded thought and attachment.”
That shook me.
Unlike a philosopher or physicist, he did not say “I discovered a new truth.” He said: everyone already has it. Not something missing that must be added—you have been covering it with deluded thought and attachment.
“Deluded thought” does not mean thoughts are bad. It means taking thoughts for reality, concepts for things themselves.
“Attachment” means holding on, believing something is “mine,” believing it fixed, independent, eternal.
The core of his realization was later summarized in one term: dependent origination.
Nothing exists independently. Everything arises when conditions meet and ends when they disperse. A flower exists through seed, soil, sunlight, and water. Remove them, and the “flower” is gone.
A flower is not an independent “thing,” but an “event” where conditions meet.
So am “I.”
“I” appear through the coming together of body, feelings, memories, thoughts, and consciousness. None is fixed, none independent, none something you can point to and say “this is me.”
There is no independent, fixed, unchanging “I.”
This is “no-self.”
Not “I do not exist”: that is nihilism, which the Buddha explicitly opposed. Rather: the independent “I,” separate from the world, with fixed boundaries, was never substantial. It is a mental construction.
The glass wall rests on the illusion of “an independent me.”
When the illusion is seen through—not shattered by thinking, but naturally dissolved by seeing things as they are—the wall disappears. Not because it has been demolished, but because you see that the bricks themselves are empty.
The Buddha taught for forty-five more years, repeatedly emphasizing:
“I have given you nothing. I have only pointed to what you already have.”
He was not a genius who invented truth. He was someone who let truth cease to be obscured.
Do you see it?
These people: Huineng, an illiterate woodcutter. Laozi, a Zhou historian. Wang Yangming, a disgraced official exiled to wilderness. Dōgen, a Japanese monk who crossed the sea. Ramana, a sixteen-year-old Indian boy. Schrödinger, a founder of quantum mechanics. Bohm, proponent of a hidden-variable theory. Wittgenstein, a disruptor of logical positivism. Shakyamuni, Prince Siddhartha.
Different centuries, continents, languages, disciplines, methods.
But they hit the same wall, saw the same landscape, left the same gesture—pointing toward the unsayable.
Countless great paths, converging after all.
The Western path goes outward: reason, logic, mathematics, experiment, understanding the world’s structure. It goes astonishingly far and deep, from atoms to quarks, Newton to quantum field theory. But at the ultimate point it meets Gödel’s incompleteness theorems—reason uses reason to prove the limits of reason. The wall is illuminated, not crossed.
The Eastern path goes inward: not analyzing the world’s structure, but asking “who is analyzing?” Chan, Daoism, Vedanta: different methods, astonishingly similar central operation—dissolving the illusion of the observer. Stop treating yourself as a subject opposite the world, and the split disappears. The wall is not broken; it is discovered never to have existed.
Different roads, one destination. Different keys, one lock.
And I had been holding several keys all along.
Those answers had been before my eyes. What I painfully sought had always been beside me. I had read them, admired them, noted them down, quietly memorized and recited them.
But I had not recognized them.
Because I did not know my own question. I saw keys, but did not know I had a door to open.
Only when I saw the glass wall—what I had kept colliding with—did everything align.
I had not been alone there. Those people, across a thousand years, stood in the same place, looking at the same wall, then crossed it in their own ways.
VII. Gathering and Dispersing Like Clouds
After understanding this, something unexpected loosened.
Death.
Every normal person fears death. Not pain—pain is concrete and can be faced. Something else: complete disappearance. My consciousness, my experience, this process of “feeling that I exist” happening now—at death, permanently reduced to zero. As though the universe had never held a person called me.
13.7 billion years of evolution produced me; I exist a few decades; then everything returns to absolute darkness.
Sometimes that thought surfaces late at night.
But now I thought of an image.
Clouds.
Clouds gather in the sky, acquire outlines and shapes. We point: “Look, that cloud.” We watch it move, change shape, merge with or separate from others.
It has a “birth,” the moment it gathers, and an “existence,” the time it lasts.
Then it disperses. We say: “That cloud disappeared.”
But did its water vapor disappear?
No. It remains in the atmosphere, or condenses into rain, falls into rivers, flows into the sea, evaporates in sunlight, rises and gathers again. Perhaps tomorrow, under another sky, it will become another cloud. Different shape and location, but not a drop of water lost.
Only the shape ever disappears. Not what makes it.
I too am a cloud.
My atoms come from stars, interstellar dust, the fire of the first three minutes after the Big Bang. They gather briefly in my body—a few decades—to form the pattern called “me.”
A pattern that thinks, asks questions, and lies awake late at night for love.
One day it will disperse. Carbon to soil, water to atmosphere, minerals to rock. They will join other processes, perhaps part of a tree or another person’s body; perhaps billions of years later swallowed by the Sun’s red-giant phase, becoming stellar fuel again.
Nothing vanishes. Only the shape called “me” disperses.
Or more radically: no independent “me” ever existed at all.
What am “I”? A process. An event arising from conditions. Causal threads meet at a point in spacetime, linger briefly, and form this pattern calling itself “I.” Then they separate. Buddhism calls it dependent origination; physics, a dissipative structure; complexity science, emergence; Daoism, “gathering into form, dispersing into qi.”
Different names. The same thing.
But there is a hardest part.
I can accept atoms gathering and dispersing. What I cannot easily let go of is not the body’s disappearance, but consciousness disappearing. Let the body disperse. But what of “I am experiencing”? The feeling that “someone is here”? Does it switch off like a lamp, with a click?
The lamp goes dark as ash; the string breaks, its music ends. Once that little awareness disperses, I and the person my heart has always cherished will be like birds vanishing into the night, separated forever between life and death, never finding one another again.
A separation even dreams and memories cannot reach across.
This troubled me for a long time, until one day something occurred to me.
Who counted the 13.7 billion years?
We say the universe is 13.7 billion years old. But “age” needs someone to measure it. In a universe without consciousness, there is no “13.7 billion years.” No “long” or “short.” No “before” or “after.” A stone does not feel it has waited long. A star does not feel it has burned for five billion years.
Time—at least experienced time—is a dimension in which consciousness unfolds.
Remove all consciousness from the universe: no humans, animals, or beings capable of experience. In what sense has the remaining universe “experienced” 13.7 billion years?
From the perspective of no observer—if that phrase is not self-contradictory—there is no interval between the Big Bang and now. Time unfolds for consciousness. Without an audience, the performance has no length.
What does this mean?
I was not “added” at the end of 13.7 billion years.
Consciousness and the universe’s unfolding in time are the same thing. Without consciousness to measure it, the number “13.7 billion years” has nowhere to land.
Schrödinger said consciousness is a singular noun. If he was right—if it is not a product made separately by each brain, but different local manifestations of one field—then death does not destroy consciousness itself.
Death destroys this particular perspective.
There are a thousand wells on Earth, each reflecting a moon. Each reflected moon ripples with the water in its own unique shape. When one well dries or is filled in, its moon really disappears: this perspective is destroyed. But the moon in the sky loses nothing. What death destroys is only the “water surface” that reflects it.
A thousand rivers with water, a thousand reflected moons.
I do not know whether this is “correct.” It is only a conjecture of mine, without real-world evidence, not a proposition testable by experiment. It is a way of understanding, one that lets me coexist with death.
But I find that when I understand it this way, death changes.
It no longer resembles a wall: an endpoint, a hard boundary that shatters you on impact.
It is more like a cloud dispersing.
The pattern changes.
The water remains.
VIII. Returning to Ordinary Life
By this point, outside the window is quiet.
And thank you for reading to the end.
I know this may sound like someone who has “figured everything out.” But I must be honest: I have not.
The glass wall has not disappeared. That university evening has never been fully repeated. Most of the time I still live in the everyday split between subject and object: an “I” here, a “world” there.
I have only understood it logically.
When anxious, when parting from important people, the wall becomes harder than ever. At those moments the sages’ words seem distant and pale.
I do not imagine “one awakening brings clarity forever.”
Those sages walked for a lifetime, some forty or fifty years, some their whole lives.
But something has changed.
I know what the wall is. I know what I am longing for.
Before, I collided blindly in the dark. Now I can at least see its outline, the direction of the door, the signs left by others.
More importantly, I know it is not a structural limit of the universe. I make it myself. The act of “I am looking” sustains it. That means it is not unshakable. Those sages proved it. They crossed.
The road is open.
I am simply still on it.
Those friends who added me on WeChat late at night, whose loneliness I sensed without being able to name it: if you are reading, I want to tell you:
You are not alone. Your loneliness is not a social problem, a character flaw, or affectation. You have simply seen the wall.
Many never see it in their entire lives, and live perfectly well. But you have. This is not your misfortune. Your consciousness is doing something exceedingly rare: trying to remember that it is the whole.
You feel lonely precisely because you have seen the possibility of not being lonely. Someone who has never seen light does not long for light. Your longing means you have seen it.
Perhaps at dusk, in a line of a book, in an inexplicable moment: you briefly stood beyond the wall. Then returned. After returning, everything here seemed separated by a layer. That sense of separation is your loneliness.
Not an illness. A signpost. It tells you what you seek exists.
I recall that university evening.
Leaving the library, dusk spread over the campus paths. Leaves turned in the wind, showing different shades of green. Someone cycled past, tires crunching fallen leaves. A smell drifted from the distant canteen. Everything was as usual.
Yet in that moment everything was different.
The wall was gone. I was not “opposite” the world. I was “inside” it. Or rather, neither “inside” nor “opposite” existed. No dividing line.
I smiled at a passing stranger. A little surprised, he smiled too.
I did not know what it was then. Now I do.
For some reason, the act endlessly making the glass wall briefly stopped. Perhaps after so much difficult reading, thought grew tired and let go. Perhaps at a tipping point, knowledge suddenly changed from “information in the head” to “feeling in the body.”
I do not know why.
But I know the moment was real.
And all my later questions—the reading, late-night conversations, attempts to break through—were really attempts to return to that evening.
To the place without walls.
Now I know: it is not a place I need to “return” to. It has always been here. It is here. The wall creates the illusion of “distance,” and I maintain that wall myself.
I still maintain it. Most of the time, I still do.
But occasionally, in quiet moments, in gaps where thought lets go, when I stop trying to grasp something, the wall thins. So thin I can almost feel the warmth beyond.
That is enough.
That is the road.
I woke this morning. Opened the curtains. Sunlight spread in.
I stood at the window and looked outside for a while. Someone passed below. Trees swayed lightly. The distant sky was a blue that seemed freshly washed.
Every atom in these things comes from a dead star. Including the atoms in my eyes receiving light. Including those in my brain producing the thought “I am looking.”
Stellar ashes, looking at stellar ashes.
The universe experiencing itself.
This is happening now, in every now. Whether I notice or not. Whether the glass wall is thick or thin. Whether I feel all things as one outside the library at dusk, or isolated from everything in late-night anxiety.
It is always happening.
I took a deep breath. Air entered my lungs. Oxygen molecules crossed the alveolar walls into the blood and traveled to cells throughout my body. Perhaps a few hours ago they were in the leaves of the tree outside. Before that, in clouds. Before that, over the sea. Before that—
Never mind. I will stop tracing.
You must be tired too.
Not every thread needs to be followed back to the Big Bang.
Sometimes one breath is enough.