Solar Eclipse

 

            A solar eclipse is the perfect metaphor for the human species on the brink of a new millennium.  The sun is our signpost, our beacon to the rest of the universe.  Someday, if we are equal to the challenge, we will leave our Earthly womb, travel beyond the limits of our Solar backyard, and visit the neighborhoods of other stars.  Wherever the spirit of adventure draws us, we  will always look back to see the sun, our shining star, lighting the way home like a candle in a window.

 

            Normally, we cannot bear to stare directly at the sun, just as we cannot bear to look clearly and plainly upon our true natures.  A solar eclipse is dangerous because we can stand to look at it for a time, but the result can be blindness.  What we know so far of our own reality can be equally dangerous, but stare at it we must.

 

            Ever since we first awoke as a species, in order to avoid the stark glare of reality, we have worshipped all manner of imaginings, believing all the harder the madder and more contorted the imaginings have become.  As science explains more and more once thought mystical, believers have had to disconnect the soul to save it.  Our souls were once what connected us to the universe.  Now they are that which separates us.  To have a soul, we must declare it something separate, something distinct from the "soulless" universe.  In the end we are forced to choose between blind faith in the unreal and absolute faith in nothing at all.

 

            Belief in nothing is as mentally easy as it is emotionally painful, as it is isolating, as it is emptying.  If each of us is alone, then nothing really matters at all.  From nothing.  To nothing.  With nothing in between but futile delay of the abyss.  The mind is but an electric picture show, full of sights, sounds, imaginings.  As with our second-most-used electrical device, the television, once the circuit is broken, the picture is gone.  Nothing before or beyond.  No purpose anywhere.  Everything happens by chance.  Absolutely everything.  Except, of course, for these keystrokes.  And these.  And these.  And these.  I choose the keys to hit, so there is purpose.  But there can be no purpose in nature.  Only thinking beings have purposes.  But wait, animals hunt and build nests and do all manner of things with purpose.  Life, which causes and allows these purposes, must be supernatural.  Or there can be purpose in nature.

 

            "Supernatural" is a one-word oxymoron.  What could be greater than what is?  Something either exists or it does not.  If a thing exists, whether ghost, goblin, curved space, or bump in the night, then it is real and a part of nature.  I read once that natural laws break down inside black holes.  I don't think so.  Natural law, reality, nature, these words include everything that is, every set of circumstances that could be.  If something is, it is a part of nature.  If it ain't, it ain't.

 

            The knowledge we have gained the last few centuries of this rapidly ebbing millennium has allowed us to glimpse our own reality, just as the eclipse lets us glance at the sun.  But, as with the eclipse, if we look too long, we may go blind.  That is, if we concentrate on what we know, and ignore the immensity of what we do not know, we end up seeing no more clearly than if we had never looked at all.  Believers in the supernatural immerse themselves in satisfying a natural need to be part of an immortality immensely greater than themselves.  Even if the supernatural is untrue, illogical, or at the very least undemonstrable, the essence of this need and the source of its satisfaction are more true and more important than any concrete statistic.  We are immortal.  Every particle and every electron of our bodies has existed for billions of years, and will continue on long after the individual life has passed.  The "individual" life itself is part of an ongoing system of life inextricably entwined with the "non-living" universe.

 

            The soul of man lives in this real universe.  We are not something else.  We are not intruders, despoilers of someone else's home.  When we act irresponsibly, either through wars or pollution or mindless procreation, we weaken our greater self, the world, the very universe of which we are part.  Without the soul, without awareness of our interconnection with the immortal universe, humanity is atomized to its most infinitesimal unit, the individual life limited to its finite dimensions in time and space.  As individual atoms we are the least we can be, lost, meaningless, without purpose or hope.  As part of our greater self we are immortal and infinite, the greatest of the great.  The hope of the new millennium is that we will learn to see beyond the petty pretensions which would eclipse our soul.  We must reach for a new level of understanding that will allow us once and forever to stare unblinking at the true greatness of all we are.

 

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