The Mystery of Spirit

There are things in the world that fill us with awe. Something as simple as a blue sky in the morning can bring an untamed joy to our sleep heads. A wildflower may arrest our stroll and attention with its beauty and delicacy.

Yet there is no beauty inherent in any of these things. The symmetry, delicacy, color, and scent of the flower are not good or bad - they are just what they are. The experience of beauty resides solely inside of the observer.

Here is the mystery - how does a conscious, feeling, experiencing being arise out of a mechanical and unconscious universe? How can a ghost live within a machine, so alien to its nature? While our bodies obviously belong to the earth, and we share many similarities with the animals and other life forms, our spirits - our consciousness, our feelings, our interpretation of what we experience - seem alien to this world. We look around, and we find ourselves alone among in our experience of wonder and despair.

Yet, like the voice of a gospel singer rising freely above the supporting steady rhythm of the choir, there is a glory in our wild spirituality that sores so high above the rational and physical world that created us. It is only human beings who can understand how wonderful the world is, and who likewise will understand the depths of the tragedy should it not survive.

The miracle is not the beauty of this world - the miracle is that there are human beings that stare in awe and wonder, and are filled with feelings of incredible joy when they behold it. It is only within our experience of the universe that the miraculous lives.

Comment posted by Anonymous
at 8/10/2006 8:14:00 PM
What a fascinating subject, the mystery of spirit, how our life and consciousness on this fragile planet came to be, and what we are and what we are part of, and where we might go from here. Faith in creation by God conflicts with the scientific view of chemical events and evolution of life on a hospitable planet in an immense universe coming from a big bang, and out of these ways of thinking I wonder if our seemingly cold and material universe might have some kind of consciousness--spirit--, that some may call God, that is reflected in physical laws such as gravity, and in nature and life and in our human consciousness, even though this universal consciousness does not come from a physical brain as our human consciousness does. Humanity must realize its potential and destiny, not only to survive, progress and improve itself, but to explore the universe and search for other intelligent life. On this subject, some might enjoy reading "Starmaker" by Olaf Stapledon, an imaginative story of a man whose mind explores the universe in search of other intelligent life and the Starmaker, which is God.--Andy