Special Cases

If you look around, there are no special cases of anything. Everything is a part of the whole; our minds separate and classify because that's what they do, but the divisions are arbitrary. Books and elephants are collections of quarks and bosons, with a lot of empty space in between. In this view of the universe, God/Yahweh/Allah has no place. The separate Creator becomes an impossible construct. It exists somewhere in the Platonic worldview, where perfection is personified in some place. But where would this be? We've looked into the heavens and into the atom, and not seen God – unless God is what we are looking all along. As Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you.” I would take that one further and say the that kingdom of God is you, and everything around you, no less in a mouse than in a king.

The permanence of the formulations is an illusion. Everything is constantly in flux – growing, deteriorating, old cells dying off, new ones being formed, or not and the whole thing moving off into some other form. Identity is a fragile concept. What continues when memory fades, when reason lapses into dementia? Is that the same person we knew? If the touchstones of identity can slip away so quickly during life, what could exist after death? The soul? What is that? Where is it? Do we carry our Platonic ideal around with us, like a Chinese eunuch carrying his testicles in a little shrine?

What would eternity mean, when the universe itself is not permanent? It was born, it expands and someday will either contract back into a singularity to start all over again, or it will spread out into an entropic chaos and die. Where would our soul be in either of those cases? Eternity meant something to the ancients, when essentially nothing changed, but in our longer view, it becomes apparent that aion was an approximation at best. “To the end of the age” is a better translation, and that age is our age: you are blessed as long as you can hold that thought in your mind. When you lose that ability, the concept no longer has any meaning.

That doesn't make life pointless. On the contrary, it makes every moment sacred. Working is necessary because it sustains us. Gaining knowledge is necessary because all of us together contain all human knowledge. Love is necessary because it connects us. It exists because we love. So work, learn, love - today. It's all you've got.