Profuse connection and abundant writhing change. The two things we truly know.

There is a collection of molecules called “I”. They change completely every three years or so, but the “I” continues. Isn’t there a clue here? There will come a moment when a particular set of atoms that is known as “me”  finally disperses amongst billions of other creatures. Bound by covalent bonds to the molecules that are in new generations of  you and me and  billion of others. New realities emerging.  Physically we are a constantly exchanging bubbling molecular soup. We’re not separate at all – either from each other or the rest of the physical world.

Metamorphosis.  Water becoming ice. Caterpillars pupating, emerging into butterflies. We journey together into wondrous new states. Society has a reality separate from the individuals that it is made from. And we as individuals in turn have emerged as something new, from the molecules that constitute us now. I am a co-evolving emergence from one state to quite another.

Yet; mostly we think of the material world as static and secure. How strange. We manage that by focussing on short time segments.  Thus we ignore the riverine flow of rocks, the evolution from raw plasma to chemicals to biology to ideas; and  we are also blind to  “now”, the window to eternity.

Why? Fear, I suspect, is to blame. The terror, the existential angst that is located in our ego – which of course is definitely an ephemera. This is just a trick of light.  Look past the surface of the pool with its (reversed) image where  we see our “self” reflected. There, within the water, is the flow of life which is our home. We let our egos rule over us, when – just here, just now (always here, now), in the flow  of the universe is our real deathless self. As Rupert Brookes  puts it “..  a pulse in the eternal mind, no less”. Like Narcissus, we are transfixed by inner absorption rather than an awareness of all-that-is.

Humanity has been at the leading edge of the evolution of consciousness. But consciousness is a wave, a process. Yes we are (now) at the crest of that wave, but we are not, some fixed centre of existence. We are not the wave –  but something different and far bigger –  we are the ocean. Together, we carry all the tides and tsunamis. Constantly flowing and emerging into new realities.

Profuse connection and abundant writhing change. The two things we truly know.

Where to? Where from? Why? God only knows.