The Universe and Everything In It

In the Spring of 1996, I hiked with a few friends along the Appalachian Trail where it crosses through Berks County, Pennsylvania. Our destination was The Pinnacle, a dramatic outcropping of rocks that sits at the top of a 1200-foot climb spread out over four and a half miles of trail. The plan was a tent campout--a casual overnight before the end of the semester, when we would all split up and head to our respective homes for the Summer.

I was 19 years old, a philosophy student dipping my toes for the first time into existentialism, and there among the crags and crevices I had a religious experience, although perhaps not in the traditional sense. It did not coincide with a near fall or a miraculous rescue, nor did I encounter a burning bush unconsumed by its own fire. No. But I found something to believe.

* * *

Existentialism, as I was coming to understand it, is framed around the basic assumption that life is comparatively short, and generally limited to what can be predictably experienced--that is, whatever can be observed by the senses in the period between birth and death. As a result, the answers to all of life's questions are to be found within the finite measurement of your own earthly existence. According to some, life is a sum total game, so the one reliable way to make your short life significant is by focusing your attention on living richly in every moment; according to others, life equals death, all adds up to zero, and you are free to live your life--or end it--however you want, because the measurement of your existence from beginning to end has no intrinsic value at all.

Either way, the basic principle is that you live and you die, that is all you can count on, and where you find meaning is entirely dependent on what you make of the time you have.

For my own part, I wasn’t raised with any particularly fervent religiosity; that is, I grew up going to church, but I couldn’t say that I ever really got religion. I tried, sometimes quite hard, but it just never took. No matter how hard I wanted to believe everything I was told during my Judeo-Christian upbringing, somehow it never felt like mine. It could be that I just wasn't able to form a deep, personal association with a belief system that required somebody else to tell me how it worked.

Existential atheism, on the other hand, I found to be quite easy to accept, and academic agnosticism even more so. I was young and unattached, with generally more questions than answers, and found that nothing ends a string of whys and what-thens like Nothing. Being the youngest sibling and practically a child myself, I had no tangible experience with birth, and only passing experience with death, and so it was simple enough for me to accept that everything comes from nowhere, headed toward nothing. Or, at the very least, that no one could reliably prove otherwise.

As one professor put it, “Everyone dies; there’s no point losing any sleep over it.”

So I could regard my life and my death as entirely my own, owed and attributed to no one and nothing outside this earthly realm. This made good sense to me, and brought a sort of comfort to my young spirit.

* * *

When we arrived at The Pinnacle that day, we unloaded our gear, and my more experienced friends began to set up camp. I wandered off to explore, eventually clambering down inside one of the crags, and found myself climbing in and out of the seams between the huge rocks that make up the farthest tip of the formation’s peak. I was thoroughly enjoying myself, practicing at working my fingertips around the surface of the rock face, seeking purchase with my toes as I maneuvered in and out of the sunlight, and at one point even climbing out along the outer edge of the mountain, high (or high enough) above the treeline below.

I had never climbed rocks before. In truth, I had barely hiked or camped before that day, and so for a while I simply thrilled at the experience of being suspended above the ground and not falling. I was climbing on an actual mountain. How cool was that?

As I moved my hands and arms along the surface of the rock wall deep inside one of those crevices, grasping and feeling around for a sure hold, an unexpected feeling came to me--I suddenly had a strange sense of embrace. In that moment, I wasn't just stretching my arms across this rock on this cliff, but was wrapping my arms around it all, feeling the bare surface of the entire earth laid out beneath me. I paused, resting my cheek against the stone. It was cool on my skin, and yet somehow warmer than I expected--and I experienced a feeling of communion, of oneness.

I felt the vast thrumming of the earth where it came in contact with my skin, and was aware of myself as an extension of its subtle vibration. The mountain that laid so still beneath me was alive, and not just alive but somehow even patiently aware, and I believed in that moment that if I made myself still enough, listened carefully enough, I would be able to feel its expansive inhaling and exhaling beneath me.

I eventually disengaged myself from the rock and made my way back to the surface. I was reminded of the feeling we had as kids, emerging from a darkened movie theater into a sunlit afternoon after a matinee, disoriented and a little alarmed to find the world just as it was before.

I rejoined the others and we had our campout. We cooked, we ate, we slept--I don’t really remember. In truth, I have little recollection of any of it, or the hike back down the mountain the following day. Life resumed as life does, and I packed away my singular experience and took it with me.

* * *

Time passed. Days and weeks gave way to months that unfolded into years, and somewhere within me there lingered the feeling I’d had while clinging to the rock. I couldn't shake it. And as it continued to take hold of me, I began to be bothered by a nagging concern, inspired in some part by my exposure to a vast number of disparate writings on philosophy and religion: How could it be that so many people could believe so many different things? And in a world that continued to surrender its secrets under the hot light of scientific analysis, and rational and empirical data, how could there still be so many divergent answers to the same human questions?

Already familiar with the questions themselves, I began to look for answers to the answers, intending to construct a belief system about belief systems, a metaphilosophy--a bridging point whereupon everything I'd been taught about creation and death and all that comes before and after within my own Judeo-Christian upbringing might find a commonality with scientific discovery, so often deemed incompatible with the tenets of religion. Along the way, I thought I might find a home for my own nascent beliefs, and to provide myself with even better explanations than any others I'd heard.

I hoped that I might find a place where the mind-bending, face-melting mysteries of existence could be granted more than the perfunctory "Because that's how it is" so often reserved for questions of belief, without pulling back the curtain on anyone's personal Wizard of Oz to reveal the world to be a cold, predictable, and entirely indifferent clockwork. After all, even after the answers were answered, there were still bound to be plenty of fascinating unanswerable questions left behind.

* * *

After multiple distillations, the basis of my blossoming explanation of The Universe And All That It Contains was simple enough, and was built upon a basic framework of interconnectedness:

Essentially, every particle on every plane of existence is alive and conscious, but is aware only of the alive-ness and consciousness of those parallel beings within its own plane. Those planes of existence, in turn, enfold one another, so that each successive plane is actually an incorporated part of the larger one above it. Just as planets make up solar systems and solar systems make galaxies and so on, so too are we part of the composition of our own planet, just as our component parts are part of us, though they are no more able to comprehend us as individuals than we are able to fathom the awareness and intention of movement of our entire planet or the solar system beyond it.

The mechanics and composite parts of this construct I then extrapolated and expanded in granularity over the span of a 50-page senior thesis, incorporating laws of physics and mathematics to help tie one end of the creation of the universe to the other. But for me, the end result was the same: whether I was able to convince my academic advisor or indeed any other reader, I realized that I had already convinced myself. Whether or not I had formulated the basis of a good academic paper, I had succeeded in engineering a basis of belief and universal understanding that preserved my own sense of awe and wonder while also answering enough questions to provide me with a sense of peace.

So, when the paper was done and graded and my academic career was ended, I did what anyone with a new and fully-formed structure of personal belief would do: I quietly shelved it and moved on with my life.

* * *

And then, almost before I realize it, I am in my 40s. I am sitting around the dinner table with my wife and our three daughters, ages nine, six, and the youngest only 19 months. In the four years prior I have lost the last three of my grandparents; my wife lost her father when our oldest was only one. Two close friends of mine passed away before the age of 30. By this stage of life, birth and death have become real to me--real and familiar.

For some reason we are talking about God. The two oldest are enrolled in a Waldorf school, where the curriculum teaches the stories of the saints (alongside Aesop's fables, a two-fold illustration of morality), and even though it is not presented as a religious doctrine per se, there is really no avoiding God when you are learning about the saints, even if your kids are just asking you what a saint is.

My wife and I have not shielded our children from religion, and though we were both raised in the Christian faity, we by no means consider ourselves to be religious. At Christmas we can celebrate a miraculous birth without elaborating on its doctrinal import, and there is enough natural rebirth to celebrate at Easter without a need to mention the horrors of scourging and crucifixion. Both of our elder girls have been to church (mostly funerals), and we can be honest with them about the symbols and language of Christianity (and any other religion they may encounter, for that matter) without ascribing ourselves to the beliefs that they represent.

But when death comes calling, it is a delicate dance to address the subject without intimating some promise of a life after this one. Where did our beloved cat Wally go when he died? We will see him again, won't we? And what happened to Baba Grammy and Mumu? Is it alright to put their bodies in the ground? Are they lonely? Will they be scared? (After my grandfather's funeral, my daughter wanted to send him a letter: "Dear Papa, I'm sorry that you died.")

As parents without a religious framework to fall back on, we have found ourselves trying--perhaps a little irresponsibly--to shield our children from these complicated questions, not wanting to tell them something promising and hopeful that we don't actually believe, but also not having the strength of will to watch them suffer in their grief without being able to give them something to ease the burden.

On this particular night, the subject does not seem to be about death and what comes after, but rather about the nature of God itself. Is God a man or a woman? Maybe neither? Maybe both.

Our nine-year-old thinks God is a man (though we suspect this is the stories of the saints talking). Our six-year-old, on the other hand, says that she thinks that God is the Sun, probably not the Moon, because the Moon is a rock. Or maybe God is a star? Or maybe the Ocean.

As usual, I am a bit uncomfortable when the conversation turns to God and Heaven, because I know that my wife and I were not the source of this information. But untended soil will grow whatever seeds land there, will it not? And we have offered little in the way of alternatives to these conventional beliefs.

At this moment, on this night, it occurs to me rather suddenly that I have never spoken to my children about my own beliefs. For twenty years they have resided within me, bolstering me and carrying me through my own times of grief and despair, and being bolstered themselves when I witnessed the birth of my three beautiful babies. Unwittingly and perhaps unknowingly, I have turned to my own creator, The Universe And All That It Contains, when I felt overwhelmed by life--jobs, relationships, money. Times may be hard, I'd tell myself, but the Universe is still humming along. These problems you are facing are small, mere artificial constructs that do not even register in the attention span of the all-encompassing fabric of space and time. Don't sweat it.

So there at the table, amidst the talk of God as a man or an object or a celestial body, I tell them about my long-ago trip to The Pinnacle, about climbing on the stones, about how I felt the earth thrumming and pulsing under my hands and body and face. I tell them how I came to recognize the earth as the major lifeform upon which we all live, and out of which we grew, and about the fundamental connection between galaxies and humans and atoms. I tell them how the atomic structure resembles a solar system, and how neuron connections in the brain closely resemble cosmological models of the structure of the Universe.

And then I go on, into the next phase. I tell them I believe that when I die, I will become a part of the earth, and thereby transmuted into its vast consciousness, and that my own consciousness will be expanded and assimilated into this far more complex and currently incomprehensible state of being.

I explain that this process would continue over the vastness of space and time, and how each body and each planet would in turn expire and decay and break apart to be absorbed into the next state above it, until all the composite elements had become cosmic dust, woven indelibly into the fabric of the Universe itself. And with each expiration, and each passing over into the next phase, we the composite particles would be absorbed into the larger consciousness of the being above us, until--sometime in the far distant future--we would know complete unity and harmony with the Universe, and experience at last what it was to truly be at one with our creator.

Finally I tell them how I believe that those we love are all around us, incorporated into the earth and all things that come from the earth, and that we can feel happy--not because they have left the earth and gone to Heaven, but because they hadn't left at all; they had simply moved on to become part of something bigger, in a state of continuation we can't really be expected to comprehend.

The conversation carries on, and we talk about other things--about my father-in-law's belief in reincarnation through heredity, as well as the possibility of reincarnation through the incorporation of some prevailing element of our consciousness into another living thing somewhere far away, on the other side of the universe, maybe millions of years after we have ceased to be alive on earth.

As we talk, I am pleased to see that the new ideas I have presented have not filled my children with dread, or that my specific mention of death and burial has not driven the mood of the conversation into the ground. Instead, as I had always hoped, there continues to be a great sense of wonder at the many mysteries still remaining to explore after the questions about our place in the universe have been given an answer.

* * *

Someday I hope to tell them more. Someday I would like to tell them about my belief that the laws of conservation of energy and its resultant momentum within the universe made all things occur as they must from the very first moment of the very first blink that set all the waves of existence in motion. I'll tell them about how we are all effectively on a predetermined course set in that first moment, but that our conscious minds are also an intrinsic part of that course. And so while "Free Will" as it's termed may be technically illusory, it is no more dispensable an illusion than our mind's translation of photons into color, as perceived by of the rods and cones in the human retina.

But these are much headier explorations of the original idea, and I'm not prepared to bet that even the most precocious nine-year-old needs to tread into that kind of territory.

* * *

Maybe my children will come to believe what I believe. Maybe they will take comfort in it as I have, and maybe they will even pass these same ideas along to their own families. Maybe, like me, they will find that they need to find their own way of understanding the world and their place in it, and they will look in another direction for meaning. Maybe they'll turn to a more widely accepted, more organized system of belief, or maybe they'll go off in another direction entirely.

With the significant advances in technology and the sharing of information since I was 19 or 21, it's easy enough to explore online and discover that these ideas of mine, or at least ideas like them, are not unique, and by now plenty has been written on the subject. But even if I were to come across someone else who had drawn all of the same conclusions that I did in my idealistic youth, I don't imagine that I'd feel a diminishing of my sense of ownership of my beliefs, or feel any less connected to them.

Perhaps this same feeling of connectedness, of stumbling onto a system of belief that speaks to my perception of the world around me--perhaps this is what other people who come to religion experience when they find the faith that speaks to them. And maybe everyone's relationship with their own faith and their own beliefs is truly uniquely their own, regardless of how that religion may present itself officially. Maybe that's something that we all--regardless of our specific doctrine--can find that we have in common.

Maybe.