Thank you for taking the time to read the essay.
As you may guess, the essay tries to take complicated ideas and express them in a way we can relate them to our personal lives.
You are right, "decay" would imply a finite universe. I was really trying to introduce the universal flows towards decreasing enthalpy and increasing entropy. Like a drop of hot tea in an infinite sea, its elements cool, spread and dissolve to become the sea.
Regarding your question about whether you would know about it if you were at one with the universe, the simple answer is no. Liken it to when you are reading a great book. You are so engrossed in the story that you lose track of time, your circumstance and who you are. You melt into an all knowing and then to just an all. That is not to say these trips into everything are permanent. Like a cloud which forms from a cloudless blue sky, form and conscious can gel again into another illusion of conscious. If this were not the case then we could never converse with those who have gained enlightment and babies would never be born. In some cases there is an awareness of who you were and in other cases, it has gone.
What are you looking forward to? You look forward to tomorrow and hope that what you do will bring you one step closer to understanding and being at peace with the idea that there never was a you.
