What I Believe

You need to know a secret:

The life force inside each of us is a flame that started burning on Earth over four billion years ago, and has never gone out. Inside each of us is a living thing that has existed on this planet for nearly a third of the entire 13.7 billion year history of the universe; living here, patiently, with a wisdom, and for an eternity greater than any of us can comprehend.

You might confuse this with "God." This is a mistake. Whatever this vast, practically eternal life force is, it is a temporally and physically finite being that is bound (just as as we, as individual manifestations of it are) to the Earth; afloat on a tiny speck in a vast universe, which itself is possibly but one of an infinite number of "universes" comprising all of existence.

Perhaps this life force on Earth is a manifestation of a greater life, a God, that permeates the whole of existence in something like the way this life force permeates each of us. I don't know. I can see and feel the life around me on Earth, with which I am intertwined. I sense the flame passed on to me from my parents as from one candle to the next, and I believe it came to me that way, one ancestor, one organism at a time, from the very beginning. But I cannot see or feel how the life of Earth is connected to the life of other planets across interstellar and intergalactic space. Perhaps an invisible, "supernatural spirit" spans the vastness of space, connecting us to far flung life beyond our own. But even if there is such a thing, is that, then, "God"? The "creator" and "sustainer," as many people say, of all that exists? Or just another creature, another facet of this miracle of existence?

If I ever come believe in God, I want it to be the real God, not just someone's idea of God—least of all any feeble idea of my own! Thus I forgo the easy security of "faith" in the hope of someday comprehending a truth that transcends any doctrine.

And you need to know another secret:

You are asleep, and you need to awaken before it's too late.