Sunday, June 3, 2018

THINK THE UNTHINKABLE






TO THINK THE UNTHINKABLE
The Sabbath is the time to reflect, to think of God and perhaps of the deeper truths of the Reality we experience. Pause for a moment and imagine the unimaginable: What if you didn’t exist? Can you imagine a world without you in it? It is reasonable to believe that the world existed long before you were born, and will continue to exist after you die. But, can you prove that it did, or that it will? Is it possible that you have always existed in some form?

I’ve seen my great-grandfather’s German Bible with his name and the date in the 1800’s inscribed on the overleaf, and I’ve read a message that was jotted in the margin of a book in 1637. I’ve seen Egyptian hieroglyphs and cartouches carved in stone; I’ve seen petroglyphs scratched in cliffs by stone-age people, and I’ve seen fossils encased in Ordovician geologic formations. But who’s to say it wasn’t me, or some spark of the consciousness that now inhabits my body that wrote those lines, or carved those petroglyphs? Who’s to say my bones weren’t among those that sank to the bottom of a shallow sea 400-plus million years ago? Perhaps all these memories are recorded in the DNA of our cells, the DNA scientists call “junk” because they don’t know what it is there for.

-Think the unthinkable-

I look out over a deep green valley and marvel at the beauty; trees waving in the summer breeze, white clouds on the horizon, the sun gleaming on flowing water far below. And nearby, the soft gurgling of a cool, clear spring. I ask myself: how many have marveled at the beauty of this scene, or another like it, in the past? But, were not those souls the same as mine? Who’s to say that they weren’t me in another form? 

-Think the unthinkable-

ERC 6/3/18


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