I've been re-reading my most private journal, the one where I record the range markers of my personal inner quests, the journeys of the soul usually conducted during episodes of lucid dreaming, and came across this little passage, thought I'd share it here, since for the moment I don't feel quite as alone as I usually do...
From the first flickering of awareness in the womb the infant is not alone. The sound of a heartbeat is always there. There is the other, the one who is not me, and the other is all about me and keeps me warm. And love is as guaranteed as it can be, the system providing love with every calorie, every gram of calcium, every flicker of the endocrine telegraph. And then, in a remarkable foreshadowing of old age, the universe becomes to small, and motion is reduced, and there is a time when pressure breaks the bond and we are alone in the cold. So much like the end of the life we live on middle earth, here between heaven and hell. The universe is to small to hold the deterioration of aloneness, where there is no umbilical to bring in the nourishment and the love to hold us in place. And so we waste and wither and fail, slowly or suddenly, and then once again there is a narrow passage, with no certain knowledge of what lays beyond. Does the infant have a clue that there is a life, an awareness beyond the vagina? Probably not. There has been nothing in the (to our perspective) little one's life experience to let it know for sure that there is more. Perhaps muted sounds, dreams telegraphed from the parent, but little more, and no perspective to place them in. Is this why we so soundly believe in an afterlife? We all remember that first passage, and confidently expect the next to be much the same? No knowing, not for such a little one as I.
And yet, is not our deep longing for "something more" an argument for its existence? How can we hunger for something that does not exist and we cannot know?
ReplyDelete