Hot night, face down in the pool. Holding my breath and lolling there, I watched dim shards of refracted light from the living room dance across the bottom. I felt the CO2 building up in my blood and idly imagined this as my end, but my simple desire for breath was more urgent than my intellectual curiosity about Death. If that ever changes then I guess it will be my time.
At some time in my transit through this life I will half-blink and never wake up. End of the line. I quickly raised my head for air, blinking water from my eyes: People must blink, but Life never does.
Flashback to an adolescent dream, still crisp and clear. An endless array of screens curved away- up, down and away into the distance, a massive sphere of which I could see only a single arc. Each screen was a life and when one flickered out, a new baby's face would appear in it moments later. Watching this process continue, I understood that all screens were outward manifestations of a central singularity. And I knew at that moment in the pool that, when my eyes eventually close for the last time, another's will open. Not mine, but another of Life's. Just as Life sees with my eyes, so does Life see with the eyes of all who live. It is the Big Continuity and does not blink.
I look to the stars and understand that the photons hitting my eye have traveled through time and space, in every direction, to do just that. If I move two meters to my left and look up again, the same stars shine down on me. I am connected to the stars and thus to all that is, everywhere, myself a node of matter in a seamless, rimless field of energy.
Certainty of this little life being not any "me" but a perceptual fragment of the greater Life is comforting, while I can sustain it. But I am more typically a frightened animal, clinging to the core beliefs of my grosser senses; of being a tiny blob of animated matter stranded on the fertile crust of this rock in space. This "I" will eventually wither and die and lives in fear and denial of that utter certainty.
I am a primitive, rudimentary type of intelligence, aren't I? Evidence of this is abundant: in the way I actively, heedlessly degrade my own biosphere, in spite of the fairly conclusive deduction that it will eventually cause extinction. Truly bright beings, at one with Life never behave this way. Maybe we are all just unwittingly reading a part in some larger, inexorable tragi-comedy, which script says Humanity is to "exeunt thus" from the universal stage...?
For whatever reason, we seem to find ourselves configured -by religion, society, whatever- to believe that our own bodies, our apparently isolated minds, delimit our existence. "I" begin and end with this flesh, these thoughts and am forever and fundamentally isolated from all others. Except for these briefest of epiphanies, I can't seem to maintain the consciousness that I'm part of the very weave of the universe. I wonder why it is that I appear to work this way...?
Biology is our hardware template perfected, that which we are bending some of our very best minds to decipher. Rolling with this assumption, why not look instead at the very-buggy software societies that have blindly accreted over millennia as that which stands in the way of true understanding? Could it be that the very attempt to intellectually apprehend in language the inner workings of this existence also shrouds it from our subtler perceptions? Language does exert an insidious either/or influence, as we try in vain to label all phenomenon within which we are subjective component.
Intelligent design...? If I were The Big Creator, had crafted paradise and the heavens beyond... and then set Life loose within it... it would be more my intent for those into whom I had breathed life to be getting on with the grand game I'd set in motion than to sit around on fat, gilded arses, quibbling about Rules - and certainly not slaughtering each other's children over interpretation.
Occam's razor belies any such teleological excuse for our origins. Given our big brain, wanting to know "what's in the box" is quite natural. Defaulting to 6000, 2000 or even 800 year old campfire stories to explain things we haven't yet devised the tools to dissect, calling this "faith" and foisting generations of ecclesiastic denial onto the burgeoning empirical data of accumulated individual experience will one day seem rather quaint and funny. But for now the consequences of Faith are so sad and deadly.
That Life is a brilliant form of intelligence, who alive will dispute? I, for one, am happy as a clam being this little outcropping of Life, small and insignificant as it may be. But maybe the simplest explanation (what was it Einstein said? "something any five year old could understand"?) involves stripping away such embellishments as are embodied in words like "should" or "could". Why don't we accept that Life ALWAYS just "is".
To properly reduce that, however, observe what "is" really means: isn't it just a linguistic equivalent of the mathematical symbol "="? Seen this way, the statement "Life is" or, "Life =" begs a balancing item, but this is the trap of words and language and the illusion that they are somehow inherent in what they purport to represent. Philological tails wagging epistemological dogs - that mustn't be allowed to lie when conscientiously sniffing after The Truth.
Describing what "Life =" then becomes easy - just not simple: in the space to the right merely place the sum total of all within which life inheres - from birth till death. That is a correct answer. It may not be exciting, but it is nonetheless absolutely and unassailably correct. "Life is like..." many things, but -unfortunately for our enquiring nature- it is otherwise not reducible and that is why we can never really catch more than these odd glimpses of Truth about the whole thing... a billion reflections of the same object in the shards of the shattered mirror that is each and every one of us - except it ain't shattered. We just seem to think it is.
Maybe our destructive tendency is a valuable evidentiary manifestation of our inability to grasp that the universe really is perfect and has no gaps - that each of us is an integral, seamless component of a larger whole? Maybe for us to understand and really demonstrate such understanding we would need "the faith of a mustard seed," to make such a leap from "should" to "is" and declare, "we are not here to strangle this planet, to kill ourselves and each other. Such phenomenon is surely evidence that our perception to date about truth has been somewhat less than the whole and that now - more than ever- we need to come together; to strive fearlessly and relentlessly forward in search of The Truth."
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