Right now, the light from the computer screen you’re reading is bombarding the retina in your eyes. The patterns of light are registered by your nerves and brain and translated into words and concepts. The concepts make an imprint on your brain that you will apparently remember even when you’re not consciously aware of it. My words, whether you accept them or reject them, are impacting your consciousness and thought process and will remain locked in your skull for years to come.
The air around your body is entering your lungs and absorbed by your bloodstream. Similarly, the meal you had this evening is slowly being digested and absorbed into you. Ten years from now, every particle of your body will be replaced by another particle. The matter that makes up “your body” is actually a stream of particles going in and coming back out through food, water, waste, air, bits of skin (that makes dust and is in turn eaten by dust mites) and so on. You are dependent on every animal and plant you have ever consumed to live another day, and every rain drop that has fallen to grow it or send water to your house. Even your skin breathes, rather than being a barrier it absorbs a bit more of the environment around you. You are constantly bombarded by radio waves, light, heat, radiation and other forms of energy. Your bodily makeup is also shaped by the genetics that were passed to you by your parents, your parents’, parents, and so on until you get to the first “real” humans and according to scientists, to archaic creatures that are long gone that once survived and throve. If you have children, you too will pass your code down though the ages to every descendant in the future. After you die, your body will be broken down and absorbed back into the earth and air. Every atom that once took part of your body will still exist in some form and will one day witness the death of the our sun.
Going back to your brain, every memory you have had shapes who you are now. Your parents, teachers, pastors, friends and enemies have left their imprints on your conscious and unconscious awareness. Every book you’ve read by authors living or not has also been stored away and affects your worldview, your choices, your desires and dislikes. Every television jingle and telephone call, every internet web page and magazine article, and every holy book or blasphemous piece of literature, just like these words on the screen before you, have been recorded and stored away for future reference. Each choice you make, emotion you feel and thought you think is the sum and more of all these bits of information stored in your brain. It works the other way too. Every act of charity or dishonesty, every word you’ve spoken or written, every meal taken with your family, beer had with friends, arguments lost or songs sung has rippled out from you and forever affected everyone and everything around you. This includes the air, the animals, strangers and lovers, your pets and plants, the street you drive on. The sea will eventually hold your waste and the sky will hold your tears. The waves from your life and the waves from theirs intermingle, collide and flow out though eternity.
According to scientists, before there were humans there were still planets and stars. The ground you stand on, the clothes you are wearing and the hair on your head all originated in the same matter that forms the earth below us. The earth in turn was formed out of the same energy that formed our sun and this solar system and before that the milky way galaxy all back to the big bang were everything was one tiny dot of infinite potential. Einstein showed us that time is relative. in a real way, the past still exists and the future is already here. With a small stretch we might imagination that the unity of the primal singularity that contained all the matter and universe still exists right now. Quantum physics suggest that past and future and conscious awareness are more intertwined so that in a real sense the things you observe around you are affected by your mere observing and stream backwards and forwards though time and space faster than the speed of light. I’m not making any of this up.
Some people believe in God. Throwing aside individual religious opinions and getting back to basics, what if that is true? What if God is everywhere and God is all knowing and God is love? If he is everywhere, God is in our midst right now, holding the atoms and quarks and quantum fluctuations in place and is in the space between the electrons and between you and the farthest galaxy. He is in every rock, mountain, cloud and photon beaming from the sun. He is in the brothel and the temple. He is in every cell and protein of your body and that of your neighbor and her yappy dog, as well as the trees and grasshoppers and the crab nebulae. If God is all knowing, that means every action and thought permeate the awareness of the divine in the same way your actions and words ripple into the minds of others around you. If He is perfect love, that means God is truly connected with you more intimately than you can imagine, and though he may not approve of everything you do you cannot separate yourself from Him anymore than that electron He is holding in its orbit around its nucleus. You’re not always consciously aware of this Love but then your not consciously aware of your own neurons firing.
Knowing all this, how all the matter and energy are connected to you as are all other living beings and dead things on this planet, that past and future and present and space are all one, and that you are dependent on everything and everything is dependent on you, and finally that God is everywhere and in everything and in every person.
Knowing all this, can you answer this simple question:
Who are you, really?
Craig is an agnostic, skeptic and political moderate. He is a practitioner of zen meditation and has respect and interest in many religions, but not a subscriber to any of them. 