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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