Life

Hello, and welcome to the first post in a three-part series.  If you can already guess the other two, 3 points.  Life, as I’ve said before, is an amazing thing that I am extremely grateful that I have.  Especially since I don’t know what the alternative involves.  Life is a beautiful thing.  How did it start, though?  We still don’t know.  Some people would say it started from a god, but I am inclined to believe that if the universe started from a god, it probably just started it all those billions of years ago and didn’t intervene much, if at all, after that.  But more on that in the next post.  So life arose through chemical reactions that just chanced to form a molecule that could replicate itself, and the rest is evolution.

Now, many people don’t quite understand evolution, especially those creationists who fervantly deny it.  But creationists are silly.  Besides, the ideas of the universe being created is not mutually exclusive with evolution.  It’s only when you want to take literally a 2000-year-old book that contradicts facts that are now obvious that you run into problems.  We have no idea how life began, but we know how it changed.  When you have random changes in life, such as what happens when it reproduces, the stronger mutations survive to reproduce.  You give it several billion years, and all the complexities of life arise.

That is one of the most amazing things about life; you start with something extremely simple, and over time, due to completely natural laws– not even laws, due to logic; strong survive, weak die– it grows complex and intricate.  And if you keep life for the four billion or so years its been on Earth, you get things as complex as a whale, or an oak, or an eagle, or a human.  Which brings me to another marvel of life: intelligence.

I am a sentient, self aware being.  I can think.  How is this possible?  How am I doing this?  I am capable of abstract thought; I can think; I can think about thinking.  And I can communicate what I’m thinking.  This is incredible.  I often am deep in thought, only to suddely snap back to reality and realize I exist.  I am alive in this body.  This is very strange.  Thought is such a mystery, really.  What causes thought?  No one knows; the inner workings of the mind are extremely mysterious.

There are, of course, theories, as there is for everything.  But does the entire process of sentient thought arise solely from bioelectric chemical reactions in the brain?  How does a bunch of neurons clumped together form a person.  I am inclined to believe that there is something more at work here.  But what?  And how does it work?  I doubt thought can ever be fully explained, really.

Oh, life is a spectacular state of being.  So many mysteries to contemplate.  So many things to experience, to think about.  Which was, really, one of the purposes of this blog to begin with.  Well actually, I had begun hoping I would think up some answers.  I’m starting to doubt I’ll come up with many.  But it’s just as well, really.

Love

Okay, I realize that I said my next post would be again on the subject of politics, only I’ve been reading up on some theories as of late, and have changed my views.  I want to get my views semi-coherent before I make a post on the subject.  I’ve changed my views about a few things lately.  It’s been a while since my last post.  Things have happened; life is busy.  But I’m not going to make an excuse every time I don’t post for a while.  This blog is updated haphazardly.

One thing I’ve changed my views on is I’m not quite what you’d call an agnostic anymore.  It’s hard to say what I am religiously because it doesn’t really have a term.  I suppose you could say I’m somewhat of a spiritualist.  So what brought about this sudden change of convictions?  It was experience, pure and simple.  A few days ago, I experienced something profound.  It is nearly indescribable to one who has not experianced such a thing, suffice to say it was powerful.  And I know I am not just crazy, because my girlfriend experienced it with me.

I love her.  There is something powerful in love.  Something strong, and also completely unscientific.  It defies explanation.  And this is why I know there is something else to the universe.  Before, I wasn’t sure.  Now I know.  I felt, that night, a connection, an energy between us.  And more than that, I could see it, in my mind’s eye.  An aura of white light surrounded her, and a connection, like rope of light joining her heart and mine.  If this is the point where you say I’m crazy, I don’t care.  I know what I felt.  What we felt.  It was a feeling in my heart like it was expanding, and pure pleasure, like I’ve never felt before.  It was love, plain and simple.  It was magic.  And I could not explain it for the life of me.

So, having a scientific mind, I do what I do when I can’t explain something: make a new theory.  There has to be some force at work here.  So I call it now what my girlfriend calls it.  The Divine.  I have no idea as to the nature of it, but divine seems to describe it.  There was something magical going on there night, and there is something magical to love.  If you haven’t experienced it yet, I hope you do, for it is amazing.  And it threw out everything I thought I knew, or rather, thought I didn’t know about the universe.  In that now I know.

There is something.  There is a divine force.  There is love.  There are auras of energy.  We saw them.  And I mean literally, my girlfriend saw one around me.  I saw it too, altough it was faint.  And there is a sort of telepathy.  How it all works, I have no idea.  I doubt I ever will.  But the mystery is part of the magic.  I’m not expecting anyone to believe any of this.  I’m not trying to convert anyone to anything, any religion.  I don’t even know what religion I am now.  It doesn’t have a name, and it has only two followers.  But maybe I can give people hope, if I tell them, I know there is something out there.  And it is wonderful.  And there is love.  And it is wonderful.