Scene 4: Smoking Gun?


Spot:
-- As I was saying the last time, I think it’s time to drop my disguise. Maybe, moving from one identity to another will serve as a good exercise for all of us. Suspecting in God depends upon dropping an old perspective and taking up with a new one. Thinking of me differently and yourself differently is somewhat similar and might begin to prepare you for the rest of your journey.
-- Whatever, it’s the sort of thing that might happen with this book-being-written thing, as it’s too late now to go back and never introduce the Primer characters. This is real life. (But then, it’s also the Internet…)

Jane: OK. I’m with you.

Dick: Me too.

Spot: Down the rabbit hole...

Me:
-- OK.
-- Vaguely, I remember being 7 years old and having my first doubts about G-d. G-d was a nice idea but I was beginning to think that he was just another Santa Clause. After all, the evidence for G-d was even weaker than that for Santa Clause and Santa Clause had just been exposed.
-- On top of that, I had prayed to G-d one night that I should wake up the next morning as Superman. I didn’t. I ran outside that morning and tried to pick up the house. Needless to say, it didn’t budge any more that morning than it had the previous morning. My first controlled experiment was a flop. (Not really, but I didn’t know it at the time.)
-- By the time I was 11, I was having a serious problem. I hated to admit it, but God didn’t make any sense, and if God didn’t make sense, there probably wasn’t any afterlife either and the idea of eternal oblivion was just about more than I could stand.
Importantly, there seemed to be no one around that appreciated my struggle. I don’t know that I asked anybody about it -- I was too embarrassed to express my doubts to my parents or any other adults. And those who were talking about it -- ministers and Sunday school teachers -- just kept repeating the same old tired inanities, No one was dealing with this issue epistemologically -- except those who didn’t believe.
-- As far as I was concerned, those who did believe, or claimed to believe, couldn’t begin to support their own arguments.
-- And, I was rooting for them!

-- Whatever, I didn’t get much (worldly) help through this trying period. But, being an extremely curious and persistent kid (something like a cat with a bone), I couldn’t put the issue down and I did, as it turns out, have a “clue”. That clue, and the trail it provided -- off into the recesses of my own consciousness -- eventually led to what I can only call a “revelation’. At 14, 1 had a revelation!
-- I suddenly saw what my clue had been alluding to all that time and that I had been missing all that time. I could suddenly see that my own awareness was nothing short of a miracle -- and that, I could not not-exist…

-- Mom, Dad, Susie (my younger sister) and I had just been out for dinner. Susie and I were in the back seat of the car riding home. I must have been doing my usual musing, when all of a sudden it hit me. All of a sudden, it became perfectly clear and I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen it before. I couldn’t understand why everybody hadn’t seen it before.
-- All of a sudden I became conscious of a conclusion (or perception maybe) of which I was already aware. Somehow, a part of me had seen it coming but couldn’t report it. It was like that word you’re looking for and can’t find. You know the word, you just can’t think of it. You can’t call it up. The difference, in this case, is that I had never been conscious of this “word” in the first place. See what I mean?
-- Maybe it’s one of those left-brain/right-brain things.

-- I could finally see a pattern that had been forming for some time -- I just hadn’t been able to “see” it before. I kept going back, thinking I had missed something.
-- I had been looking right through it, so to speak. In a sense, it was like stepping back and being able – suddenly -- to see the forest. Up till then, I could only see the trees.
-- Then I could see that everyone else, mostly, was still up close looking at the trees... They didn’t get it. They couldn’t see the forest.
-- And, it wasn’t like I could point to it. I tried to explain to them that all they had to do was step back, but they couldn’t, or didn’t know how to, step back, and I couldn’t explain it to them... They were looking right at it but didn’t see it…
-- And, ‘that’s how some revelations are. We get this sense that we had just been looking through the truth. It had been there all along, and in some sense, at some level, we had been aware of it all along -- or at least, much before we became fully conscious of it.
-- Note that Mark, from Field of Dreams, didn’t stop what he was doing, dumbfounded, when he finally saw the ghost ballplayers. He asked, “when (my emphasis) did all these ball players get here?” In other words, he couldn’t remember when he began to be aware of them. He had just been looking through them for awhile... somehow aware of them, but somehow, not aware of them also. Aware of them, but not conscious of them.
-- My consciousness, somehow, was suddenly raised —- or something...

-- Last Christmas, I got my first 3-D Christmas card. It was decorated with a bunch of little Christmas trees, but when I relaxed my focus the right way, and let my eyes go out of focus really, all of a sudden all those little two dimensional Christmas trees turned into one big three dimensional Christmas tree.
-- Again, it was like stepping back from the trees, or maybe, rising above them, and seeing the forest, or, in this case, stepping back from the forest and seeing the tree.
-- And many who inspected the card never did see the tree. It isn’t something you can point out to others. It’s like leading a horse to water. You can drop him off in the vicinity, but he has to drink for himself.
-- And this is why religion is religion.
-- But then too, if you KEEP dropping him off in the vicinity, he might eventually get the idea.

-- The suggestion is that there are “aspects” (of things) that we see, but never "notice." There are aspects of things around us of which we are somehow aware, but with us are never "registered." But then, if we keep playing in their vicinity, they might begin to register.


You:
-- Well, that’s all very interesting -- and well and good -- but when are you going to drop me off in the vicinity? I mean, you’ve been leading me around in circles for a long time now and I’m getting pretty thirsty. Be sure to let me know when we get there.

Me:
-- I'm sorry. I should have told you. We're there already! Don't you see it?
..........

-- Of course you don't. That's the whole point. It's all around us, but you don't see it. Most of us don't see it. We slipped down the rabbit hole while you weren't looking -- which is all the time.
…
-- Let's see if I can open your inner eye. But, remember what I told you... Don’t be frightened.
…
….......


-- Would you exist if your parents had never met?

You: What?

Me: Would you exist if your parents had never met? (There’s a long pause here.)

You: I don’t think so. Not the same me. I’d be different.

Me: Yeah, but would it be YOU?

You: What do you mean?

Me: Well, would your “awareness” exist? Your consciousness -- would that exist? (Another pause)

You: Oh, I see what you mean... No. I guess not. It would be my brother or my sister but not me.

Me: What if your grandparents had never met -- on either side of the family?

You: No. I guess not. Then one of my parents would never have existed and my parents could never have met...

Me: Right. Now you’ve got the idea. And you could track that on back through all your family tree, and if one of those rendezvous had never taken place, you wouldn’t be here. Right?

You: Right.

Me: And of course, it doesn’t end there.

You: It doesn’t?

Me: Not unless you included your pre-human ancestry in that first mix.

You: Oh…

Me: That, of course, should include all of your links back to the very beginning of “life on earth.”

You: Of course…

Me: And, why stop there? Starting from the Big Bang -- at least – there must have been a near infinity of events that had to transpire in order for you to eventually get here.

You: (Silence.)

Me: But then, actually, we may be able to drop all of that, right up to free will. Assuming that there is such a thing as free will, before it became a part of the mix, everything that happened was just one big pre-ordained event. Whatever, that one – really big – preordained event had to be just as it was (pretty much) in order for you to ever have a chance of existing.

You: I’m getting sick.

Me: So you’re pretty lucky to be here, don’t you think?

You: Mmmm.

Me: And there’s more. Your Dad probably produced a quadrillion sperm cells in his lifetime. That’s one with 15 zeros behind it. You are the result of only one of those sperm cells in combination with only one of your Mom’s ova, and she was born with about 500 of those. If your particular sperm cell had met up with another one of your mom’s ova, the result would have been your brother or sister,.. not you. And you never could have existed...
-- What about all those combinations of your Dad’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 sperm cells and Cleopatra’s 500 ova? They really never had a chance.
-- And then, what about all those combinations of your Dad’s quadrillion sperm cells and all the ova of every woman who ever lived, during any but the 50 years of your Dad’s reproductive potential? I don’t know if I said that quite right, but you know what I mean. They didn’t have a chance either.
-- And, what about all those other potential combinations of sperm and ovum in human history that never had a chance because the carriers didn’t live at the same time?

You: (Silence, again.)

Me: And then…

You:
-- All right, already. I never had much of a chance. But, here I am! What do you think of that?
-- But come to think of it, I’m not here for long. I’ve had enough! I’m outa here.
Seeya next time. (Next)