The struggle to find meaning in life seems almost to be a basic human impulse. Those who choose to engage in that struggle will find it both difficult and rewarding.
Finding true meaning, for me, doesn’t come from made up stories, or from superstitious, mystical explanations of consciousness and the universe. It comes, simply, from the inherently staggering beauty of nature, and from the puzzles and contradictions that arise the deeper we examine it. It is the thrill of finding truth, an answer to a question.
When I attempt to comprehend the totality of our unusual, subtle, and elegant universe I feel ecstatic to be a part of it. I almost feel like walking around, proselytizing to anyone I meet of the great joy I feel to be on this earth, full of hundreds of beautiful species, each the current pinnacle of their own evolution.
Contemplating nature, I sometimes feel like I’ve tapped into a power greater than myself and I can feel it’s love flow through me, fill my soul and spill out into the world around me. I can glimpse the fullness of perfection and realize that wherever we find it’s absence in our world, we should strive to implement and exemplify it. I am utterly connected, and surrendered, to the absolute. The infinity of existence.
I could go on and on, but at the end there I kind of lost my steam. The words stopped naturally flowing from this caffeine buzz I’m riding and I started using random abstract concepts that sound nice, but don’t really mean much. But the language is powerful. Humans have this amazing ability to channel the essence of our emotions into words. The thing is, words can get confused.
So, basically, I am Jesus. Wait. Not literally. What I mean is, I could sit and make up a million different ways to say, basically, ‘I’m feeling good, I want to sustain that feeling and share it with others. And I want to encourage others and myself to do only good things.’ You know, the stuff Jesus talked about, spreading the love. Except for Scientology, which, of course, we all know started as a money making scheme by science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard in the 1950’s, most religions probably start with a normal person, an endorphin rush, and some unique circumstances. Anyone could be Jesus. We all experience this love and we all have the ability to share it.
One thing I really do wonder about, though, is why none of these religious founders ever taught that we humans ourselves are the source of this great, infinite love. Just us. Except for maybe Buddhism (I’m not too clear on how that whole thing works), typical religious training is that some being greater than ourselves must be responsible for our love.
I don’t believe in a ‘power’ greater than myself. I am the greatest thing this universe has ever created and so are you. I exalt in the realization that my consciousness is just a transcendent property of my neurons firing, unique to me and my physical brain. Giving credit to a non-physical soul would cheapen the stunningly complex, yet simplistic nature of what we are. Atoms dancing with each other.
Because we are just atoms, and through how they interact, we are able to know ourselves, and learn about our universe. Sadly, this amazing gift is rarely nurtured. People are kept ignorant. The joy of discovering the truths of our world is robbed from children, their education reduced to a mind-numbing game of question/answer regurgitation. Children should be led down a self-directed path of
discovery, allowing them to freely explore their curiosities with a wealth of information at their feet. Not graded and compared, or made to compete and experience humiliation for failing to learn fast enough.
The most successful tool we have for discovering what is true is the scientific method. And yeah, the scientific method is strict, very strict, because if we want the truth, it has to be. It demands proofs and repetitions, continued experiment and revision. Truth is beauty and truth is power and science works because it is self-aware, self-correcting, and utterly devoted to the truth.
But being strict does not mean that science has to be cold and uninspired. The spiritual and philosophical power of what has already been discovered should not be dismissed. Us, plants, animals, water, the air, all of nature, all of almost everything, is made up of atoms forged inside of stars. This is a fact. Also, every being on the planet gets it’s energy, in one way or another, from the sun. As Carl Sagan put it, “We are star stuff harvesting star light”.
It is humbling to realize that beings as complex and experiential as we, could, and did, evolve slowly over time through nothing more than subtle interactions between atoms, exchanges of force particles and photons, gluons, quarks, and neutrino’s. The universe dancing with itself. When we get down even smaller, many physicists think that all these particles are made up of strings. All the strings are the same ‘stuff’, they just vibrate, and resonate with each other in unique harmonious ways (through ten spacial dimensions no less!), and from those harmonies the natural world unfolds. The orchestra has been building for 15 billion years, and it looks to me like we might be at a crescendo.
We currently face a choice. Will we continue this battle we rage against our own species? Become extinct, a sour note, allowing the symphony to continue on without us? Because it will. The fall of
humanity would be but a minor stumble, a single trumpet player faltering for just a moment, when we consider the vastness of this universal production. Or do we learn to resonate with one another, as our atoms and our strings do, and create music so beautiful that some seem to think it impossible, or unimaginable?
I find that sad, because I don’t just imagine this beauty, I can see it, read about it. Science has shown that humanities long-felt, deep connection to nature is a real and tangible thing. We are all dependent on each other: plants turn sunlight into our food and we spread their seeds, they breathe in our CO2 and we breathe in their Oxygen. Bees that pollinate flowers, bacteria that help us to digest our food, animals that eat each other… everywhere we look we seem natural examples of living things being ‘plugged in’ to one another.
These realities raise our consciousness above vague, spiritual statements on connectedness. They empower us with the realization that we are physically, demonstrably, and irrevocably intertwined. We are extensions of one another, aspects of one planetary organism. We have come to see nature as neither a force to be reckoned with, nor an enemy to be vanquished. Nature is a set of highly interdependent variables that when broken down into smaller components can be known, recorded, understood, and ultimately influenced and maneuvered. This is what science shows us. This is the power we have been discovered to be holding.
Facing the future and all of it’s uncertainty, the search for truth through science, and it’s humanistic application to the way we live our lives, could be the key in the engine of the next revolution. A global, but personal and truthful revolution that implements institutions not of power, but of facts, and truth.
