"The world is still full of divinity and
strangeness, Mr. Shawnessy said. The scientist stops, where all men do, at the
doors of birth and death. He knows no more than you and I why a seed remembers
the oak of 20 million years ago, why dust acquires the form of a woman, why we
behold the earth in space and time. He hasn’t yet solved the secret of a single
name upon the earth. We may pluck the nymph from the river, but we won’t pluck
the river from ourselves: this coiled divinity is still all murmurous and
strange. There are sacred places everywhere. The world is still man’s druid
grove, where he wanders hunting for the Tree of Life.” - Ross Lockridge
God, the great Spirit who breathes through
existence, who expresses Himself through a reality that manifests beauty and
love and meaning.
God penetrates, enables, and sustains, this
whole reality.
"Our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we
live in... But even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a
set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations
and makes a universe for them to describe? Why does the universe go to all the
bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about
its own existence?" - Stephen Hawkings
Here Hawkings is entertaining the most
wonderful existential contemplation. In other words, what is the life-giving
factor that enables the very concept or necessity that something should exist?
Much more a rationally perceiving reality?
There is a vibrancy and life-giving factor
to that infinite mind-boggler that is exploding with divine miracle and
mystery: the glorious positive that
there was not a chance or reason in all of nothingness that anything should
ever exist, but then that it DOES, and this reality BECAME, not out of
nothingness, but because this all-encompassing eternal Truth, 'I AM', this
principle Being called "God" exists. Exuding out of the Infinite
comes an expression, a reality. This is beautiful to me. When my mind goes to
this place I can only say, "Wow."
What common people take for granted, that
is, to be, is a wonderful, ineffable miracle that is exploding with mystery and
life.
Once I was not, but now I am.
Existence exists.
When I look around and touch and hear, I
am astounded. What is it to be? What is existence?
“The most unfathomable schools and sages
have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three
months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment
at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common sense. - GK
Chesterton
I think what Chesterton was getting at was
more than just astonishment at the universe, but astonishment at being. Once
you were not, and now you are. And the utter fascination with suddenly
perceiving, fascinated with reality. Seeing, hearing, touching, a universe. It
is a return to truth, a return to a most primal truth, a return to a certain
innocence, and for some it might border on the ridiculous. But it is a basic
necessity. To never leave this truth of the wonder of being, and all that it
means.
Think of the miracle of human
consciousness coming into being. A man and a woman engage in a passionate and
ecstatic union of body and soul, and out of this a fusion of the man and woman
begins and a new conscious being is conceived into the universe.
Locked in the dark womb, it pushes and
struggles out into... a universe. Imagine the wonder.
Now, it must awaken to God.
The more I ponder the nature of existence,
the more I become a child. I am sent flying into a wonder I never knew was
possible. Life is magical, and so the reality of existence. As Einstein
related, there is a deep, inextenguishable wonder that can be awakened within
us that makes us children forever. "We never cease to stand like children
before this great Mystery into which we were born" (Einstein). And
Einstein was right when he said that it is mystery, wonder, beauty that
the spirit of man thrives on and that is at the center of the spiritual life:
"The most beautiful emotion we can
experience is the mysterious. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no
longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable
to us really exists, manifesting
itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull
faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms -- this knowledge,
this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness." - Albert
Einstein
It is the reality of the Infinite, the
Ineffable, which allows for a reality to be. And this God simply is. This God revealed His name as "I AM", the simple reality of Being, the reality that He IS. He is all and in all. The peak
of wonder is when the mind entertains this highest existential pondering of the
"Is-ness" of pure and necessary transcendent Being, the One whom we call God. This is what is sought to be captured in the ideas of the otherness, the holiness, the divine transcendence. But no finite words can ever describe what can finally only be wondered at. The highest state of the souls rapture of awe is
awakening to this Being. In this we are always children, and we will be
forever. In awe of the magical world that God breathes into life, that God
Himself streams through.
We must be continually fascinated with the
miracle of existence. If you ponder existence long enough, you will be
dumbfounded by the mystery into which you born.
First, that something rather than nothing
exists and the miracle of all which that fact entails.
Furthermore, earth, water, wind, fire.
Dirt that is a perfect substance for fertilization and the growth of plants,
grass, trees, fruit, vegetables, enlivening the earth with wild, living
vibrancy. The gigantic burning ball of fire suspended in space, its energy outpouring
in every direction for lightyears, which we on this planet spin around in such
a way that its light touches nearly every part of this sphere. As the sun
rises, do you ever think that it is not rising, but that we are sitting on this
massive ball floating through space and revolving into view of this huge cosmic
light?
We are in a cosmos.
It's spectacular.
There are endless wonders of this
existence. The beginning of wonder is the miracle that anything should exist at
all. From there, we are dazzled with the endless miracles which make up our
earth, life, consciousness, the sun and stars, space, time, and the universe.
What is the principle upon which existence
finds it reason and source for existing?
What most people do is just go along in
life, conditioned into the normality of existing, accept reality as a given,
try to get by, and do as their told, never stopping to wonder at their
existence. But nothing should be seen as a given. The existence of existence is
not necessary, unless for a purpose behind it all.
What gives existence the right and
necessity to exist? That's the point I am trying to make. To attempt to rip the
blinds off to show that existence is not a given, it's not "natural".
When you begin to entertain this way of thinking, you begin to be in constant
wonder of it all, and I think wonder is a deep truth to existence. You feel
most alive when you wonder. Nature is not ultimately natural. Nature has no
basis in itself. There is not a natural state of things. What we see as nature
has its source wholly in something supernatural and transcendent.
Now, sit back and ponder this. Existence.
Look around. What do you perceive? Reality. Is it really just a given? Is there
any reason at all why anything should be? You’ve grown up in existence.
You’re use to it. You go day in and day out, working, going to school, going to
sleep, existing, and you’re use to it. But what is it all and what makes
anything necessary?
Now put your fingers on something and
touch it. Go ahead, touch something. Why does existence exist? There is a
divine ultimate that fuels existence for a purpose. Existence is a miracle,
completely unnecessary, except for God.
Think about Isaac Newton. Before him we
just thought it was a given that we were walking around on earth. Things stayed
on the ground. It was a given. People sat, laid, stood, and walked without
giving it a thought. Surely there were curious souls who pondered why things
were drawn to the earth in this way instead of flying off into the sky. But it’s
just life that things are bound to the ground. What goes up must come down. We
knew nothing else. Things on the earth stay on the earth, and why should the
question arise of why?
Then one day, as tradition has it, Newton
observed an apple falling from a tree.
A sudden moment of realization hit him, “The
apple is accelerated. Its velocity goes from zero as it hangs motionless on the
tree and then is accelerated as it moves towards the ground. There must be a
force that acts upon the apple to cause this acceleration.“ And by pondering
what was normally a given, he discovered the law of gravity.
It is this way of thinking that we can
apply to existence itself. It is not just a given that things are bound to the
ground, it is because of the law of gravity, a force that pulls them. But wait,
is the law of gravity itself a given? Why does the law of gravity exist? This question
could be applied to everything until we arrive at existence itself.
We are accustomed to gravity, and it took
a brilliant mind to think out of the box as to why things moved towards the
earth. But we can apply this same thinking to existence. We are accustomed to
existing, many times bored with it. We don’t regularly ponder the great strange
wonder of existence. And so we go about our lives as if existence is a given,
chasing money, and possessions, and power, and influence, and fame. Sometimes
in the back of our minds there might be a faint whisper, “There is more to
this.” But rarely ever does it make us arrive at the breathtaking wonder of
existence and the deep-seated longing for the truth of our existence.
God, the Beauty of all, eternal life-force
that enables every atom in the universe, allowing the existence of something
rather than nothing, animating it into the reality which we perceive, birthing
rational human being out of these atoms, making possible every movement of
wonder in our hearts. Eternal Necessity in all, yet transcending all. He is All
in all and beyond. Stand in awe. Thank Him for existence. GOD forever.
The presence of ineffable beauty within
reality is the echo of eternal truth.
This is when life makes sense.
