Today I am going to teach you a magic trick. You’re going to disappear. Seriously. First, you need some background.
If you’re a skeptic, the hardest thing to imagine is a supernatural force. How could something be “above” the natural world, and yet interact with it? Or to put it another way, how does something that is NOT here touch something that IS here? It makes no sense.
And yet, similarly bizarre things happen all the time. The world is full of things we don’t understand. For example, did you know that there’s no way to insulate against a magnet’s field?
You can redirect a magnet’s force, and thus shield from it. But there’s nothing you can put between two magnets that will make them less attracted to each other. Magnets are connected in ways that our common sense can’t grasp.
Gravity is equally freaky. It influences things at an infinite distance without having any contact that we can see or, again, insulate against. Physicists postulate that maybe a massless particle called a graviton is at work, but none have ever been detected. Others think gravity has something to do with the state of a string, in unproven string theory, which is another way of saying we have no idea.
Much of quantum physics is like that. We have equations that work, but the common sense of it is completely missing. Scientists say the universe is bubbling with dark matter that we can’t see, and particles whose positions are only probable, not guaranteed.
The bottom line is that your existence is the sum of invisible forces operating on matter that is only probably there. From the perspective of the universe, the tiny bits of probable matter that comprise you, and the tiny slice of space-time you occupy, are vanishingly small. You already barely exist. Disappearing entirely won’t be that much of a change.
Now to the magic trick: Pick a comfortable chair, and sit with your feet flat on the floor, and your arms at your side. Close your eyes. Now stay there for a billion years.