I'm not a religious guy. The fire and brimstone stuff is kind of a turnoff, I enjoy sleeping in on Sundays, and the idea of God as some old man in the sky doesn't really sit well with me. I also find it very difficult to believe the almighty creator of the universe decided on a whim to come to a microscopic speck of dust such as Earth and walk among us in human form 2,000 years ago. It doesn't jibe.
But going back to that microscopic speck of dust thing, it does occur to me that we are tiny little insignificant things floating about in a massive fantastically large, for all intents and purposes infinitely gigantic universe of which we effectively know next to nothing about. I think it's pretty safe to say that there's something out there greater than ourselves.
Throughout history humans have liked to walk around thinking we're a pretty big deal. I think the really miraculous thing about life though isn't the existence of humans, per se. It's the fact that anything exists at all and that we're able to perceive it. I've come to think of humans as little radio receivers whose brains are tuned in to the true essential reality and this is what we have come to know as consciousness.
So I've come up with this little model of life. It's a gross oversimplification of some pretty complex stuff, but here it is. There is a great and vast ocean. This ocean is filled with an infinite number of droplets of water and these water droplets represent everything that is, everything that ever was, everything that ever will be, and everything that ever could be. Now humans are tiny little vessels not unlike water balloons. We are suspended upside down from a platform over this great vast ocean, only we are used to being suspended upside down so we perceive ourselves as being upright. We possess sensory organs such as sight, hearing, smell, etc. Although maybe not consciously aware of it, we all also have a connection not unlike a hose that feeds directly into the ocean. We can't detect the connection with our other senses, but it could perhaps be described as our sense of consciousness. This isn't really so strange because if you think about it you can't detect hearing with your eyes or seeing with your ears.
So anyway this hose allows us access to droplets of water from the ocean. Our perception of time is really our perception of being filled with more and more of these droplets. Each of us gets our own droplets which contain different aspects of the fundamental reality. Nobody has the same combination of droplets and that's what makes us unique. Moreover some of us get droplets that make us sensitive to music or sports or physics or math or whatever. It's what makes us good at things. As you move through life you get filled up with more and more of these droplets of water and like a water balloon you begin to fill up and grow. Also like a water balloon you eventually pop. Since we're suspended upside down over the ocean all of the water droplets that were collected inside of you fall back into it. They don't go away they just re-join the vast ocean. Part of what was inside you may eventually end up inside someone else, but the exact combination of droplets that made you YOU will never again be collected in precisely the same way in a single vessel.
Imagine if you were in a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and you dipped a glass over the side and filled it with water. Then you dumped the glass back into the ocean and dipped it in again and refilled it. What are the odds you would have the exact same drops of water in the glass you had the first time? Astronomically small, I would suppose. And the great cosmic ocean from which we draw the essence of ourselves is infinitely larger than the Pacific Ocean.
So death is really the end of the vessel, but not the end of what was inside it. That is the fundamental stuff of existence. It never dies, it just recombines in different ways. So you can think of the ocean as God, if you want. I'm willing to buy that. Maybe it's what the universe itself is. I don't know. But if the ocean is God and we are all made of the ocean, then we are all God. Cool, huh?
Hey what was in that brownie I just ate anyway? Just kidding. I've just been thinking about this sort of stuff, like, for reals.
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