I’ve been on a spiritual stroll through life since first attending (read: being compelled to attend) catechism in the Roman Catholic church as a child. And I believed it all, for some reason.
Most children in the 1950/60’s just considered church one more place their mothers drove them to along with brownies or cub scouts, birthday parties, grandparents’ house, doctors offices, and musical instrument lessons. This one was on the weekends and more boring than the others.
Later, I flirted with atheism, zen Buddhism (it was the 60’s,) after which I was vacuumed up by the Youth for Christ movement stalking my high school, the Norwich Free Academy. This caught me with a passion with which the rest of my life could not compete.
Here I should note that in Russian literature, Dostoyevski in particular, family members often assumed one of several roles. One was the ne’er-do-well. One the captain in the Tsar’s army. One the intellectual. One the businessman. One the revolutionary and another the monk. I became the ‘religious one’ in my dysfunctional Russian family.
I went to a Christian school in the 70’s. There I took classes in biblical history, I can tell my Josephus from my Eusebius and my Jerome from my Jeremiah, attended a highly intellectual evening discussion group, we thought of ourselves as latter day Inklings, and generally believed that I was preparing myself for an adult life doing something. Something important, even. I awkwardly pursued the crime of attempted dating with the female population. All I achieved were a series of misdemeanors, suspended sentences, and lots of awkward encounters. And a lot of rejection. Except once, ominously.
There, I was severely challenged in the belief, and the non-believe, in anything. Though not quite nihilism, I adopted whatever-ism. It was obvious that my Bible degree would get me nowhere in the workforce on this side of the gnostic plane of existence and I couldn’t make a career out of it. I obtained a sheepskin in what I would tell people was ‘History,’ and passed the revolving door of adulthood confident that I had a ‘degree’ I could put on a resume. All they cared for back then was that you had a degree in… something.
In the late 70’s I married a girl who was bad for me, as I alluded to earlier, but that’s another story, got a job in a restaurant, I always was a good cook, and went back to night school pursuing an exciting career in the up and coming field of Data Processing. I got various ‘real’ jobs, starting as an office job in a shipyard as a clerk, then an actual job as a COBOL programmer for the Travelers Insurance Co. in Hartford, CT.
Somewhere during this time me and my bad-for-me wife had a daughter, while I got the job in a shipyard in Groton, CT. I remember asking coworkers for help when said-wife called me at said-work about said-daughter having a tick embedded in her scalp. One of the suggestions from the bastion of folk wisdom in Navy gray desks that was my coterie of co-work companions was to hold a lit cigarette next to the critter until it either extracts itself from said-child’s said-scalp or was fried in the process. Either one was good. Note: Pretty much everybody smoked back than so a lit cigarette was a necessary part of everyone’s EDC kit.
All this time my religious persuasion was the Anglican Church, which means that, though I did not actually come full circle back to my origins, they rhymed. We attended a little Episcopal church in eastern Connecticut with stained glass windows from Tiffany’s workshop in New York. Yes, that Tiffany’s, though I never had breakfast there.
I attended bible studies with the boys, ahem: Men’s bible studies. I moved through a full field spectrum from shipyard to insurance company to shipyard’s data center and finally to the University of Connecticut’s data center. All while keeping my family, fatherhood, and marriage as much together as such an arrangement had the patience for.
My spiritual acumen drained from the spiritually and emotionally wracked spiritual body I was supposed to possess, or so said the Apostle Paul. Though by then I wasn’t even sure that Paul was a historical character, let alone the chief evangelist to a Son of God and someone to pay attention to. After all, Achilles, Perseus, Krishna, Osiris, or any of God’s other only sons, never had apostles. Krishna might have. Now that I think about it. It sounds like something he would do.
Still. I had to believe. There must be something more than just this.
I got a divorce, with custody of my then 10 year old daughter, worked two jobs, paid alimony while getting zero child support, the patriarchy you know, and continued to insure that my daughter would be clean, well fed, and clothed while ensuring she got to flute lessons on Saturday, church on Sunday, girl scouts on Tuesday, softball sometime, though that was only in the spring, and to school when appropriate.
I was a single father, but nobody cares about one of those. The matriarchy, you know.
Gradually, my daughter grew up as is their want. My life got a little easier and she and I joined a community theater group in Putnam, CT. At the same time she entered high school and did her own transition from confused child to quasi-adult.
She attended college at the university where I worked at the time, so the tuition was waived. At about the same time I was working on a masters degree in Anthropology, also thanks to the generosity of the University of Connecticut. Education all around. With a side of culture.
The muses were well attended to in my house.
I went from being a church goer who went on religious ‘retreats’ to more attempted dating after my divorce, until my college whatever-ism reasserted itself.
I became complacent.
I remember one summer the art gallery at UConn hosted some Buddhist monks from Tibet to create a sand mandala. They spent the summer patiently shaking tiny shovels of blue, green, yellow, and red sand over a drawing of a lotus blossom filled with gods, demons, and palaces on a card table in the middle of the main gallery of the Benton museum. I got over there at least once a week to absorb their progress. It fascinated me, though I don’t know where I was on the spiritual barometer at that time. Probably somewhere around, ‘Stormy.’
Someone asked what would happen if someone made a mistake? “What if one of the people watching accidentally knocked the table and scattered the mandala?” People could come right up to where the monks were working with just a velvet rope’s separation. An accident was not likely but it could not be ruled out.
And the question was a good one.
The answer was that the monks believe everything happens for a purpose. It’s not that it was meant to be, but that this is what happened and they must accept it as such. As John Lennon sang (though he did not originate,) “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”
I wondered if I could accept that for my life? At least up to that point.
Now, seven decades into it and still going strong...ish, I have decided that there must be a state space of all possible occurrences in our lives, our world, and our universe. Somewhere, anything that can happen, will happen, is happening, and will happen again. All our laughter, all our tears. All our sacrifices, all our atrocities. Every giggle, every sigh. Every grift, every gift. All of it is an expression of that infinity that we label, ‘God.’
Everything that happens in this spacetime is a direct expression of the divine.
Forever.
Mathematician and Nobel prize holder Roger Penrose believes that at the end of the universe, instead of a restaurant, there is just the forward edge of this universe, the prow of a ship breaking through eternity, if you like. At that point all motion will stop, all matter will evaporate, and time and space will effectively cease to exist.
No, they will become irrelevant. These are the same conditions that existed at the edge of our universe we call the past: The heat death of a universe. So beginning and ending are identical. Every twist and turn will cancel out and result in-nothing.
As is past, so is future.
Another big bang will not just be a possibility, it will be a certainty. And before every big bang is an earlier big bang and after every one is a later one. It’s big bangs all the way (up and) down and universes between them like sausage links.
Assuming that sentient life is part of the state space of universes and that we are nested in that state space, then we are eternal. Or at least an instance of us is eternal, like a program that can exist on a hard drive once but can be executed unlimited times. The instance of you that exists in this universe might be similar, but not identical, to all of the other you’s. Today’s ‘you’ is just another expression of the ’you’ faithfully stored in eternity.
Or perhaps consciousness is a fundamental property of all universes and it contains our souls embedded within. Along with the inscrutable maths of infinities and logical conundrums and the quantum mechanics where, “Shut up and calculate,” is the norm.
Like Vishnu we float in a sea of absurdity.
Along with the fields in quantum field theory there must be a consciousness field which is at right angles to its fellows. Or maybe it is completely divorced from the rest. Just there, unique, different and alone. Eternal.
From there we derive our sentience. Our senses. The ‘Ouch!’ in a pinprick, the ‘Ah!’ in a kiss. Our experience of red as a real, tangible color, not just electromagnetic radiation of around 700 nm wavelength.
Something intangible, inexhaustible, and exquisitely above all of the other rules of the game. Something that persists from one universe to the next. Just being. Existing. Aware but not aware of anything because nothing else exists. Until it becomes infused into another creature of time and space. Until it becomes part of another universe, another sausage on the way down. From there it lives another day.
We will just reincarnate endlessly, past and future. That's our blessing. And our curse.
I don't know how I feel about that.
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