Pantheism...

 

               Pantheism claims that everything is connected, everything 

                                                                 is Divine…

Although I don't like the labels that encourage us to isolate and categorize, "Everything is Connected, everything is Divine" makes so much sense to me that it seems rather obvious.

A given.

But we want answers, to the big questions about our place in the scheme of things. All the religions, superstitions, myth and conjecture about who, what, where, why, and how, are often no more than mental masturbation combined with struggles for power and control .

The fact is, I don’t know, and you don’t know either.

As metaphor though, the stories can help us understand things which cannot be understood. I think walking on water, because you believe you can, is about as cool as it gets. Doesn’t happen, but it’s a great metaphor for the power of belief.

Too often the metaphor is lost and “my way or the highway” becomes the norm with each group. The insistence that everyone else out there, look like us, be like us.

Oddly, each group is the only one to have all the answers. Just them.

Very divisionary, given the fact that we’re all more alike than different.

Democrats and Republicans lead the way with that stuff, insisting that it must be one or the other. No middle ground.

For any thinking person, that’s absurd.

Almost everything has middle ground and shows up in shades of grey.

Almost everything.

The one absolute and unchanging power that controls it all, everything, everywhere, are the “Laws of Nature”. One “H” combined with two “O” under the same conditions anyplace in the universe, yields the same wet results. Another miracle… as are we all.

“OK, then who put the Laws of Nature in place? It must be God.” No, that’s simply a personification our ego is unable to step away from. We want to create the story, rather than the other way around.  The story created us, bit players at best.

We can’t grasp the idea of something that just is, without a beginning, an end, or a creator.

Call that creator God if you wish. But know that the rules apply evenly across the board. It’s level. There are no such things as miracles, no god sitting comfortably in his observation office who may decide to suspend the laws of Nature if we pray hard enough for Aunt Minnie to not be dead in the recliner over there. She may look dead, but she either is or isn’t, there is no appeal process to push it in the direction of your own private wishes.

No little miracles, no anomalies outside of “The Laws”.  The miracle is all of it, everything that ever was, is, or will be.

The first sunlight peeking over the distant tree line? Now that’s a fucking miracle! Pick up a freshly fallen leaf and look at it under a microscope. Another miracle. A drop of lake water? Ciliated hairs drive protozoan bumper cars through chaotic traffic. Worlds within worlds.

No big deal. Just another miracle.

Our ego is so great that we question the possibility of life on other planets. “Could anything as wonderful as us exist elsewhere?” In the not-too-distant future I believe we will know the answer. Yes! Of course. Life is everywhere, but we’re in our infancy and the universe is rather…vast, so it takes time to discover.

But it’s out there… because the meaning of life…(drumroll…)  is life itself.

Life pops up like a weed between cracks in city sidewalks. It has the potential to exist in any environment… and does. “Alien” life probably won’t look like the undernourished human child with a head the size of a beer keg that we may envision.

As with ourselves, it all depends on the environment. Life grows, tailored along the way to fit its environment perfectly. Fish in water, birds in air, lots of creatures walking about encased in bodies made for their specific gravity.   

I wonder if we are up to the challenge of trying to communicate with a life form similar to a lichen? What of common ground? Could an alien be turned on by a bevy of deep-sea tubeworms 5,000 feet down in our oceans, all belly dancing seductively around a fissure? Perhaps one of those frisky snipe eels that hang out at the same club hoping to get lucky, would do.  Alien life may well look like another protozoa, swimming through the drop of pond water that is space, its own solar system simply another atom in a giant’s world.

No matter the lens we choose to view it through, life just is. Our own value judgements “good” and “bad” don’t apply other than when we ask: “Good or bad for whom?”. 

When that young Impala grazing on the savannah, a vision of beauty and vibrant new life, has its throat torn out by a Cheetah hiding in the grass…is that good or bad?

That’s life, a full spectrum. We’re part of it, connected by the elements that we all share, the stuff of life, stardust.

Everything is Connected, everything is Divine…