Looking For God

I went to the “Bodies” exhibit. It could be a little disturbing in a way. I’ll tell you how it affected me: I realized as much as I have suspected all along: I will not live in this body forever. There is no way. I looked at a large collection of deceased humans who have donated their bodies to the exhibit. At first, I found myself considering the display as an art exhibit, and then I began looking at the bodies on display and thinking about their contributions. There they were, still as a statue and just as lifeless. But I thought about the person who may have lived in that frame at one time. Some of the bodies looked like they died in the prime of their lives. I began to wonder how each of them died. Some lungs were on display; a few healthy ones and a couple of smoker lungs. You do not want to be a smoker.
Of course I began to wonder about the afterlife. That subject is my life’s quest. To consider dead bodies is to completely accept the inevitable. When I go to a graveyard, I still find myself considering the person resting peacefully in a satin-lined bedroom down under the soil. These bodies on display, however, are not resting. They’ve been plasticized somehow. I didn’t read all about the procedure. But the curators have placed the perfectly still bodies with almost natural looking poses throughout the exhibit. The display creators carefully installed fake eyes in some of the bodies so that you’d get the feeling they were watching you as carefully as you were watching them. I felt like a dog carefully walking into a strange room filled with stuffed animals, wondering if they might be alive, yet very still. After being in there for a while, I realized that the creatures were lifeless. I knew that whatever life they once held had vanished.
You know me, I began wondering mostly about their soul. I looked at first one and then another body and wondered how they must have, at some point in time, bound up one soul each. Here was the body; where was the person who used to live there? I couldn’t answer that question.
This question is not new. Throughout our time here on earth, men and women have wondered about such things. Many have offered religion as a possibility. Religion is really just a novel that is part fact and part fiction. By mixing historical characters with imaginary ones, the stories seem a little more reliable than something entirely made up. In many cases, when someone is religious, they accept the findings or philosophy put forth by someone else. If we are completely gullible, we can simply follow any religious concept regardless of how abstract it may be. Our own principles can be based entirely on theoretical ideas; even if the theories are not tested. This may be the healthiest attitude toward religion. If you can accept anything offered up, you can conclude any matter without dwelling on it for years as I have.
I don’t consider myself to be struggling with these questions. I consider myself a scientist with a passion for a completely unchartered realm. Of course you could consider any ancient text to be a map. I don’t mind unrolling these old maps and setting off the way Columbus did; using Erikson’s general directions to a new world. When we only had Erikson’s maps, very few people believed in what we now know as America. I am sure that not everyone cared about finding this new world the way Columbus did. But for him, it was the most important thing there was.
Some people are happy to feel that Heaven must be real. They are happy to feel the presence of God in their hearts. I, for one, cannot be convinced of something based entirely on feelings. I’ve felt many emotions in my lifetime. Regardless of what I discover, I am completely convinced that there is one emotion that we refer to as love; it is a pleasant feeling and it regards the subject of our affection to be more important than self. Love, therefore, is an out-of-body emotion. With each religious discovery, I become more convinced that love offers the best proof. Love is the best reason to believe that there could be more to life than our in-body experience.
Love
It’s almost worn out. We use the term for everything. We say that we love chocolate. Is that true? Do we really regard chocolate to be more important than our own being? Probably not, but that would be the correct interpretation if taken literally. So that’s not the kind of love we need to consider if we are planning on using it as a navigation tool. If you want to use love in order to find God, you would want to consider the person you actually love the most. That love is the force that points the needle toward God.
Finding God is like finding a small island in a vast ocean. It is not likely that you can simply float aimlessly and hope to accidently run into Him. Early voyagers might have used quadrants, astrolabes or cross-staffs to explore the world. These methods may not have been completely accurate, but they gave explorers some idea of where they were on an ocean and, if they had some idea of where they hoped to end up, they might use instruments like these to get close.
In the same way, I use many ideas about God while on my own journey. I’ve found many methods to be helpful, but not completely accurate as far as longitude and latitude is concerned. With many of our most religious methods, the sun has to be shining incredibly bright in order for the instruments to work. The water has to be incredibly calm as well. The obvious problem is the same problem early mariners had: waters are seldom perfectly calm and the sun is not always shining.
It may sound crazy and it may even sound religious – in spite of my determination not to be religious – to suggest that LOVE is what we need. If our goal is to discover God, I believe that Love is the magnetic force. If The North Pole has a natural, magnetic pull, I suspect God has one too. I’ve considered many devices, but only Love continually points in only one direction. Allowing Love to point freely, without any friction to resist its pull, a “loaded” needle will always point in the same direction. If this force is real, then there is a North and there is a South. This field of natural energy is what all religions are built upon.