And that's what we'll discuss next. After the oneness of the Big Bang, the great emptiness that followed...

Space is mostly empty. The space inside every atom is mostly empty. If you look out or look in, it's mostly empty space. Planets orbit around stars and atoms orbit around nuclei. It's the same shit, different scale. We string points together and give them names, but it's all just constellations in space.

Take my old friend Orion. We've known each other literally forever. He's a constellation of stars and I'm a constellation of atoms. Once we were busom bodies, crammed into a pinhead right before the Big Bang. Since then we've drifted apart, but we keep in touch. I see him in the night sky and wave.

If I am this physical body, then I have always been around. So has he. Mass is neither created nor destroyed, and neither is energy. It's all just rearranged. I have always been here and old Orion have always been here, just not in these constellations. But constellations are so fleeting. The stars in Orion's belt will eventually drift apart, and I'm spilling over my belt already. I see him some nights and think "boy, we're getting old."

We both live and die by the emptiness. We are defined by the spaces in between. Ever since I was a child I have looked into the confusion of space and found my old friend Orion, three stars to hang the night on. I have always looked inside myself and found some name to build a life around. But it's all just constellations in space.

If I am my physical body, I'm effectively immortal. If I am my physical form, then I don't really exist at all. If I am this constellation of atoms that assembled into a walking anus, why couldn't I be another constellation of atoms? It's all pretty arbitrary, like looking at the night sky and drawing pictures.

I could also be the constellation of atoms comprising me, my parents, and my children. We are all physically connected through rebirth, and we're part of a physically distinct worm that has been crawling through time for aeons. An unbroken line of DNA going back to the dawn of the concept. We stand here, at a tiny kink in time, thinking that we're so fucking important. We're just one rebirth among billions.

I could also be defined by the majority of DNA in my body. Which is microbial, not human. We're really just walking spaceships for entire viral and bacterial ecosystems, chilling in our temperature controlled innards. If you sample the DNA on and in your body, most of it isn't 'you' at all. So here we are again, thinking we're so fucking important, getting betrayed by our farts. Someone farting shows you the true nature of human identity. It's a joke.

The fact is that, as Lauryn Hill said "everything is everything." Once we all really were 'angels dancing on the head of a pin'. Everything in the universe was crammed into a point that size. We were, effectively one. We're also effectively still one, just with more space in between the points. The constellations are still violently dancing, but they always dance together. Out of the great confusion of the night sky, all is one.

Where you draw lines of me and you, birth and rebirth, is all quite arbitrary and cosmically meaningless. It's all reductio ad absurdum. Western philosophers call this a proof of falseness, but it's actually the opposite. The universe is absurd. That is the fundamental truth. If you reduce any line of inquiry—if you look at anything closely—it gets trippy fast. It's truly absurd.

In this book I will tell you about five constellations amidst the explosion of time and space, but I could just as tell you about 5 billion. I have been born and reborn so many times in so many forms that it's effectively infinite. As Billy Blake said, "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite."

The 'chinks of our cavern' that Blake described are words. These tangled lines on the page in front of you now. Black said "man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." This is the cavern, you're looking at it. Put the eBook reader on night mode, and see the letters carve out literal chinks of light in the darkness. When I reduce the infinite to five stories, that's all you're seeing. Just points strung together in the night, to tell a story. Just constellations.