Muddle

The clouds loom large in San Antonio. I'm used to seeing the sky against the trees and rolling hills of inland San Diego, or as the backdrop to the San Gabriel mountains in Los Angeles. Even Tucson, flat pancake in the desert that it was, had the Catalina range cutting shapes into the horizon, and more distant mountains when you looked west toward the freeway or south towards Mexico.

San Antonio is not like that. Some days, the sky seems all-encompassing and the clouds are monstrous. When you drive over the bridge towards downtown and peer over the suburbs and the buildings, it all runs toward a flat horizon.

It's a different sense of scale, but I don't mind the clouds so magnified. There's hardly a blue-sky day here, because the clouds are always floating across the atmosphere, journeying somewhere in gentle clumps. Sometimes I take a moment to watch them on my lunch breaks at San Anto.

Associations between God and the sky are nothing new; same goes for the clouds. But I've always thought that God must live in them.

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All that's to say that I'm about to get really, really existential. Bear with me. It's all been bumbling about in my head for several days.



We were at a party two weeks ago, during which I stumbled into a conversation between Abby and one of the hosts. They were discussing life on other planets and Abby raised the point, originally theorized by someone else, that the universe is so old and its scope so vast that there may in fact have been life somewhere, entire societies and civilizations, whose time came and went. After all, just because we're observing the universe now doesn't mean other lifeforms have to also exist now. Maybe they've already been there, we just weren't developed enough (or even alive) to find them. If our time as the human race ever ends, maybe something new will eventually develop on some other life-sustaining planet, far away.

Later on, I had a dream about a vaster universe. I don't mean the universe as we commonly think of it, the one with stars and comets and a lot of black space (which is plenty vast enough), but an expanded universe of us. Of whatever "we" are; assuming the existence of souls for the sake of the argument, it's possible that "we" - all these consciousnesses around us that we recognize as mother and friend and celebrity and stranger - aren't restricted to appearing as the human species. Maybe we have been other things, once or twice or many times, but it has still been "us", at the core of it.

Am I making sense? That is, in this expanded universe of us, we may very well have been these alien civilizations, far away and long ago. If we were to die and become souls again, we might recognize each other once more, as friends who have been traveling together for a very, very long time. We would know each other's names.

It's an extreme exercise in solipsism to suggest that the human race has carried on in some way over the ages and ages of the universe. Compared to the lifespan of the cosmos, the lifespan of a human, let alone the amount of time the human race has even walked the earth, is astonishingly minuscule. Even so, is it not possible that souls themselves might have been born with the beginning of the universe?

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Sometimes Christianity is preoccupied with eternal life. I read some Catholic treatise once affirming that the point of the faith was to re-attain the eternal life lost to Adam and Eve when they disobeyed God and let sin (death) enter the world. The idea was that God's desire for humankind is to dwell in eternity with God, and to do so, one has to strive to be in good standing with God by following the Catholic rituals so that by the time you die you're good enough to have eternal life again. (This is a shortchanged description of Catholicism, of course.)

I wonder if it isn't kinder to acknowledge death and live a fulfilling life despite it, rather than subscribe to a religion because you want to avoid it somehow. What is the point of an eternal life, anyway? Is it at all worthwhile to live? What do you do for so long, and the time after that?

Reincarnation seems to be a more practical idea. You may live "forever", in a sense, but because you don't remember all of your other lives, you don't live with the burden of carrying around all your former memories and relationships. The mercy of no memory means you start every life with fresh eyes and fresh energy. There is, of course, the question of where all the souls come from relative to Earth's population growth. If souls are constantly reincarnating, and there are more and more people each generation, is there like a whole waiting room of souls that pop in once a new body is created? Do souls divide themselves, like amoeba? Did the human species start out as a handful of souls which have been dividing and dividing as more people are born? Is that why there's such a thing as soulmates, because you run into another part of your whole soul?

Or maybe lives are just one, and that's it. You are a unique biological being brought to existence by two other beings, and once your body wears out, your time as "you" has concluded. If there's an afterlife, it must be hella crowded, because can you imagine the scale of billions upon billions of unique human beings that have existed since our species began? 108 billion is the estimate. 108 billion unique souls and counting.

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If you think of what everything is, it comes down to atoms. Everything is a manifestation of atoms in different arrangements; energy vibrating at different speeds. Humans are the same. We're a conglomerate of buzzing, energetic atoms.

I take solace from the idea that humans are born from stardust. It makes things easier to understand. We can be broken down into minerals and water and bursts of energy. You have only to look at us under a microscope to see that we are not something special and separate from the cosmos. We belong here because we are part of the "here". It makes me feel connected to everything there is, more so than being told I am shaped by God or an heir to sin.

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I sometimes get frustrated because I wonder if we're not all wandering around in a dream. As if there's something else the human race is supposed to be doing, a way of using our lives to their fullest potential, and instead we've settled for less in comfort and cheap amusements - without even consciously being aware of it.

What really needs to be done, and how do we mobilize ourselves to do it? How do you tear through the ideas you've let other people sell you about what life is supposed to be like?

I think that's all I can squeeze out for now. Does any of it make you think?

Until later,
Caro