I’ve never really been one for new year’s resolutions, but at the start of 2025 I set myself a list of eight goals for the year, and to my surprise it’s been going fairly well. I’ve already ticked off three and done all I can to secure another, ‘learn to drive’: I passed my theory in March with lessons starting in June and a test booked for mid-September. The other four goals are all slightly more nebulous and long-term, but I do believe I’m on track to get full bingo in time for Christmas, and don’t mind telling you that feels pretty good.

One of the goals was ‘meditation again’. I’ve been an on-and-off practitioner of different types of meditation for about ten years now, but with the recent passing of one of my all-time heroes, David Lynch, I felt it was time to have a serious go at his favoured method: Transcendental Meditation. In all honesty I haven’t (yet) sought proper lessons from a TM teacher, but have done my best to get a grasp on it myself. Thankfully I’ve found it extremely compelling and have managed to keep it up twice a day for the past month, with every intention of continuing in the future.

What I want to write about here is something that occurred to me during a recent meditation. I say it occurred to me but I’m hardly the first to get this idea. I agree with David Lynch that ideas belong to no one but are swimming around for anyone to catch. And this isn’t really my first time with this idea. In many ways I’ve been thinking about it for a long time – in fact my upcoming novel The Big Zig Zag has a lot to say on the subject (about 1000 pages’ worth) and that’s been years in the making. It’s to do with what I want to call the plurality of existence.

Let me just tell you what happened. I was meditating with a friend, doing the TM method where you just sit and repeat your mantra and try to sink into this state of pure conscious being. In the garden outside, it was a beautiful sunny day. The birds were tweeting and singing all throughout, forming a kind of background noise. Then at some point my friend’s stomach made a little noise too. In TM, you’re aware of your thoughts and senses but you aren’t focusing on them – you aren’t focusing on anything, even the mantra is just kind of passively happening. So I heard this little noise just like I was hearing all the other sounds, the birds tweeting, the very distant sounds of people and cars and what-have-you, forming one big world of sound. And I was somewhat struck by how much the little noise of my friend’s stomach belonged to that whole soundscape, how it was perfectly one with everything else, even though I also knew it belonged to her stomach – one part among the whole totality of this person.

And just as I was thinking that, my stomach made an identical little noise of its own – and like that, I was off. I saw the two of us meditating, the little shed we were sitting in, the birds in the garden outside, the network of houses around us, the neighbourhood, the town, the county, the country, the continent, the planet, the galaxy, the universe; how each of these things is separate from the other, yet part of a larger whole, and how the truth of this relationship pervades at every conceivable level. I saw my life as just as one part of an endless series of steps, rungs on a ladder, but nested in layers like Russian dolls: person, family, gene pool, species, life form – minute, hour, day, year, decade, century, millennium – body, organs, tissue, cells, molecules, atoms – shed, garden, neighbourhood, town, country, continent, planet – wherever you start, whichever direction you move in, the links were always infinite. These thoughts seemed to come from outside myself just as much as the sound of the birds, or the sound of another person – yet simultaneously it was all completely one, a single vast ocean of pure undifferentiated experience. I was holding onto it all just as much as it was holding onto me.

It’s happened a few other times since then too. In fact, with TM some version of it almost always happens, but rarely so clear or intense as that time. I believe this experience is what some call cosmic consciousness, or ego death: an experience of the ultimate Self from which all other things spring forth. Just like we collectively refer to any thing made up of component parts as one whole, so too can we see all the component parts of existence as one whole Self. And this isn’t just a way of talking, or some logical point – it’s real, just as real and true as it is of people, houses, countries, planets, microorganisms, toilets, forests, alphabets, football tournaments, chicken soup, or anything at all. Every single thing that exists is distinct in itself, yet nothing can be defined or understood in isolation from anything else; all things are one with everything.

Here is a human example from my semi-Jungian beliefs about psychology: while we like to conceptualise ourselves as singular people, it is often just as if not more accurate to say that we are made up of many distinct personalities who routinely interact and conflict with each other. This is most obvious in dreams, where the conscious and unconscious parts of the self freely intermingle to share whole conversations, love affairs, battles. But there are countless other examples of this plurality from all aspects of human existence. The process of ageing, for one, utterly transforms every single facet of a person over time. Even the simple example of briefly forgetting the reason why you walked into a room necessarily implies the existence of multiple parts to a person. Yet we call ourselves individuals – that which cannot be divided further. What is it that stays the same? You don’t have to call it the soul, but even a die-hard atheist believes they are, on some level, the same person at age 85 as they were at eight weeks old, or ten seconds ago. On that fundamental level, the individual remains – the level of the self. And so too can we see all the component parts of existence as one great collective Self.

As humans, we like that sort of personification, and the example from psychology makes for a good analogy. But the thing about the Self is that any example will do, because the entirety of existence is simply an endless series of such examples; that structure forms everything. Individual things exist purely to the extent that they are composed of individual parts, and also form parts of other things; those parts are themselves composed of parts, and so on, and so on, until you hit the source, the ultimate individual Self, from which everything arises: the garden, the stomach, the chair, the birds, the shed, the thoughts, the sounds, the people. It’s as obvious as it is invisible. 

To call this underlying oneness the Self is not necessarily a theistic thing. But of course there are many similarities between what I’m saying and different religious ideas and conceptions of God or gods. All I know is that personally I do find these ideas and experiences immensely spiritually satisfying and comforting, blissful even, as well as philosophically and morally inspiring. If that makes me religious, I guess I’m religious. 

In this state, all notions of desire, ego, and suffering really do just fall away. Life itself appears as more an endless flowing process, a river or a storm, than some personalised history or timeline – and the people populating it look more like features of a landscape than responsible, agentic individuals. From here, even those things we think of as integral to our identities – our bodies, our feelings, our thoughts, experiences, memories, achievements, pains – become different things that happened, no more, no less. Romance, hate, war, and joy are universal patterns with many instantiations, no different than clouds, mountains, waterfalls, other animals. This all might sound soulless or inhuman, but the you of it all never disappears – quite the opposite. The sense is one of becoming; not missing the trees for the forest, but finally seeing both at the same time. All these many pieces of this world, hopelessly, inextricably bound up here together – these pieces all need each other. We are all we have.

It has helped me understand the ancient adage that peace, equanimity, agape, nirvana, the kingdom of heaven or whatever you want to name it really is to be found within. And you don’t even have to try to look for it – it’s just sitting there, all the time, not even right under our noses but inside us; we are made of it. Yet we hardly ever notice. We miss it precisely because it is so simple and ever present.

Please don’t think I’m making any claims to revelation or enlightenment or something. Of course, you only meditate for twenty minutes then you go right back to your regular life. In fact, if anything I have actually been disappointed with the lack of transformation TM has yielded in my life so far. If anything, my personal tendencies towards selfishness, anger, sadness and so on seem even more frustrating after having experienced that blissful state. I know TM won’t singlehandedly cure anxiety or heal broken bones. I know I shouldn’t expect such rewards, and I’m not meditating in order to get them – I’m meditating for the sake of meditating. 

It’s just that I wish I could always see existence this way; the way it truly is. I wish I could witness myself and every other person around me, indeed every single thing, as utterly equal and integral, like seeing yourself in a mirror, or meeting your loved ones in dreams – siblings, parents, children, members of one endless family, organs of one shared body, components of a giant machine, branches of one tree, whatever metaphor you want to use. I wish I saw the world this way and treated everyone and everything as such all day, all the time, for the rest of my life, and I wish every other person did that too. I wish we could take this cosmic perspective and hold it with us forever, and act according solely to it. I’m certain that a million different horrors of this world would instantly cease.

But I know my place in all this. I am what I am, and it is just not human nature to see things like that 100% of the time. If it was, probably many great things would never happen, including perhaps my having been born in the first place (greatness debatable). I guess we need to perceive this individuality sometimes to get a lot of stuff done. I’m just happy to get a glimpse of the ocean. 

Anyway, it’s only been a month. The idea with TM is that by regularly dipping in, you can reach that state more easily and reliably not only while meditating, but in all areas of life. Your consciousness expands over time. It seemed to work pretty well for David Lynch.

I hope you get something out of reading this, and are maybe inspired, if not to get into meditating yourself, then to find your own entry into the truth of what I’m saying. Because the oneness is true; there’s no two ways about it.

Now onto the rest of my list!