In 1929, Edwin Hubble confirmed what the equations of general relativity had predicted: the universe is expanding. Every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy. The light from distant galaxies is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum - stretched by the expansion of the spacetime fabric through which it travels. The farther the galaxy, the greater the redshift. The greater the redshift, the faster the recession. The universe is not expanding into pre-existing space. The space itself is expanding. The fabric of reality is stretching, carrying the galaxies with it the way raisins in rising bread are carried apart by the expanding dough. The raisins are not moving through the bread. The bread is expanding between them.
This expansion is the most universal phenomenon in the cosmos. It is happening everywhere. It is happening now. The spacetime fabric between your body and the nearest star is expanding at this moment. The expansion is too slow to detect at local scales - gravitational and electromagnetic forces hold local structures together against the expansion. But at the cosmological scale, the expansion dominates. Everything is moving away from everything. The universe is becoming more spacious. More extended. More differentiated. More vast.
Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart is the book I give to anyone going through a dark night. *(paid link)* I've probably bought twenty copies over the years. Given them to friends in divorce hell, people losing their shit over job loss, anyone whose world just cracked open. Her writing cuts through spiritual bullshit like a knife. No false comfort. No "everything happens for a reason" garbage. Just raw truth about how falling apart might be exactly what needs to happen. Think about that ~ the very thing you're fighting against could be the doorway you've been looking for.
Consciousness expands the same way. Not by moving through a pre-existing mental space. By generating space itself. Each insight creates new cognitive space. Each meditation creates new perceptual space. Each act of releasing an identification creates new psychological space. The consciousness is not expanding into a pre-existing void. The consciousness is expanding - creating, through its own developmental process, the dimensionality that did not exist before the expansion. Before you had the insight, the space for the insight did not exist. The insight created the space it occupies. Before you released the identification, the space that the identification was filling did not exist as available space. The releasing created the spaciousness. Consciousness does not move into freedom. Consciousness generates freedom by expanding.
Why Expansion Feels Like Loss
The redshift tells us that the galaxies are moving apart. From the perspective of any single galaxy, every other galaxy is receding. The universe appears to be abandoning you. The familiar structures - the galactic neighbors that used to be close - are moving away. The distances are increasing. The connections are thinning. The cosmos that used to feel intimate is becoming vast and cold and empty. This is the cosmological experience of loss. And here's the thing that blew my mind when I first understood it: this isn't a bug in the system, it's the feature. The expansion isn't happening to space, it's happening as space. Space itself is stretching. Think about that. The very fabric of reality is literally letting go of its own coherence. And it is identical to the psychological experience of spiritual expansion. When you start waking up, everything that used to feel solid starts drifting away. Your old identity, your certainties, the people who "got" the old you... they all recede. Not because they're rejecting you, but because you're becoming more space. Are you with me? Explore more in our hidden knowledge guide.
When consciousness expands, the old structures recede. The beliefs that used to be close - the identifications that constituted your psychological neighborhood - move away. The relationships that were built on the old consciousness feel the stretch. The community that was organized around the old understanding thins. The world that used to feel intimate and coherent begins to feel vast and unfamiliar and empty. No, really.That's the expansion producing the experience of loss. Not because you lost something. Because the space between you and what you used to be is increasing. And the increasing space, experienced from inside the expansion, feels like abandonment. Like the cosmos is leaving you behind. Like the familiar is receding into the unfamiliar at an accelerating rate.
If you are serious about a daily sitting practice, a proper meditation cushion makes all the difference. *(paid link)* Look, I sat on folded blankets for years, thinking I was being all authentic and minimalist. Bullshit. My knees screamed. My back ached. Half my sits were just endurance contests with my spine. A decent cushion isn't spiritual materialism ~ it's basic respect for the body that has to carry your consciousness through this practice. When your ass isn't going numb and your hip flexors aren't staging a revolt, you can actually focus on what matters. The mind settles faster when the body isn't broadcasting distress signals every five minutes.
But the expansion is not abandonment. The expansion is liberation. The galaxies are not fleeing each other. They are being freed from the conditions that held them close. The spacetime fabric is giving them room. The expansion is creating the dimensionality that the pre-expansion cosmos did not have. And your consciousness, expanding in the same way, is not losing the old structures. It is creating the dimensionality that the old structures did not permit. The loss is the space being created. The emptiness is the new room. And the room, however unfamiliar it feels when the expansion first produces it, is the freedom that the old cramped configuration was preventing. Paul explores this deeply in The Electric Rose.
Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now remains one of the most important spiritual books of our time. *(paid link)* Look, I've read a lot of spiritual shit over the years, and most of it is recycled guru-speak wrapped in fancy language. But Tolle? He cuts through the noise. The guy takes this simple idea - that you're not your thoughts, you're the awareness watching them - and makes it stick. No mystical bullshit. Just practical wisdom that actually works when you're sitting in traffic or dealing with your boss being an asshole. What gets me about Tolle is how he doesn't try to impress you with complicated concepts or ancient Sanskrit terms. He just points directly at what's happening right now in your head. The constant mental chatter. The stories you tell yourself. The way you live everywhere except the present moment. And then he shows you the gap - that space between thoughts where you actually exist. It's not about stopping thoughts, which is impossible anyway. It's about recognizing you're not them. Know what I mean? That shift changes everything without changing anything at all.
The Hubble Constant of the Soul
The rate of cosmic expansion is measured by the Hubble constant - approximately seventy kilometers per second per megaparsec. For every megaparsec of distance, the recession velocity increases by seventy kilometers per second. Think about that. We're not talking about some vague spiritual concept here. The expansion rate is not zero. It is not infinite. It is a specific, measurable value that describes the pace at which the cosmos is creating new spaciousness. Seventy kilometers per second per megaparsec. That's the universe's heartbeat, the rhythm at which reality itself is breathing outward. And here's what gets me - this number isn't random. It's not chaotic. There's something almost... intentional about how precisely calibrated this expansion is. Too slow and gravity would have collapsed everything back into a singularity billions of years ago. Too fast and matter never would have clumped together to form stars, galaxies, planets... us. But it's exactly what it needs to be for consciousness to emerge and recognize itself in the mirror of an expanding cosmos.
Your consciousness has a Hubble constant. A specific rate at which it is expanding - creating new perceptual space, generating new dimensionality, increasing the distance between where you are and where you used to be. The rate varies with the conditions. During periods of intensive practice, the rate increases. During periods of stagnation, the rate decreases. During the dark night of the soul, the rate may appear to reverse - the consciousness seems to be contracting. But the dark night is the cosmological equivalent of the recalibration of the Hubble constant - a period where the expansion rate is being reset to a new value that the old measurement could not accommodate.
You are expanding. Right now. Your consciousness is generating new space at a rate that your old structures cannot perceive because your old structures are receding into the distance that the expansion is creating. The redshift of your old beliefs - the way they appear increasingly distant, increasingly foreign, increasingly unrecognizable - is not evidence of loss. It is evidence of expansion. The light from your old consciousness is being stretched by the expansion of the awareness fabric through which it travels. The stretching is the redshift. Here is the thing most people miss.The redshift is the evidence. And the evidence says: you are expanding. Not moving through a pre-existing space toward a pre-existing freedom. Generating the freedom through the expansion itself. Creating the space that freedom requires by the act of expanding into it. The way the cosmos creates space. Not by moving. By becoming more. You might also find insight in The Trap of Comparison - Why Measuring Yourself Against O....
I keep palo santo in every room, it is one of my favorite tools for shifting energy. *(paid link)*