with all your mind

After fitting a few mores stones atop the desert floor last evening, I found myself alone, for the others had already retreated to the dining room, so I found what I believe will be the exact center of what will be the completed labyrinth and laid down and gazed up as the night sky quickly chased the final bits of twilight away, then the stars came out. Then I pulled out a tiny Sony Memory Stick Voice Recorder, Bro. Clarence used it on his recent trip to New Mexico and assured me that it will hold 3 hours of dictation. So here I am, blinking as the Milky Way slowly makes its appearance, and I holding this device and attempting to disregard it and just talk to the stars, talk to the night, and talk to God with the hope that my tongue will be stilled if my thoughts are unworthy.

Darkness fills in the spaces between the stars.

And darkness is the rule, and not the exception in the universe that we find ourselves, more so when we can only come up with the word "dark matter" and "dark energy" to describe the over 90% of the unknown in the universe (some physicist estimate that dark energy makes up 75 percent of the universe and dark matter accounts for another 23 percent, leaving ordinary matter and energy with 2 percent) ... so the unknown is what I gaze at in this night sky, I see the unknown, because it nicely fills in the spaces around the twinkling stars, I see the unknown by inference, or in other words, inside the darkness of my skull, inside the darkness of the tissues of my brain, I know darkness not by sensing, but by thought. This same brain creates light or the appearance of light within its dark clustering of brain tissue, and it is this reconstructed appearance that shapes the outer world with the help of my eyes. Of course the eyes only provide data for the brain to use in reconstructing this outer world.

I just saw a shooting star.

Mind, soul, religion, are all concepts that our brains have constructed, and with well over 90% of everything still in the category of unknown, I live within these concepts, and as a child and youth lived within the concepts as defined by others, but as I collect more time in my being, I slowly exchange the definitions of others for what my own brain now seems to be figuring out.

What about the heart?

In Deuteronomy 6:5 is the commandment "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." Yet Jesus adds "with all your mind." In ancient Hebrew thought the heart was not merely a pump, but a center of mind and will. But Jesus added the Greek context in which the mind inside your brain, rather than inside your heart, defines personal being. Yet heart is not dropped from the commandment, perhaps the mind knows full well that without the heart, it doesn't exist.

What about the unknown?

Are the electrochemical processes within my skull the totality of my thinking (along with "hard" input from the senses), or does some of that 90-plus percentage of unknown, that something outside matter, does it figure in the mix? What about quantum entanglement or the scores of other ideas that physicists ponder over. Nobody knows in a scientific sense if some of the unknowns interact with my brain. As I look to the stars I can imagine the Creator's hands in this unknown mix. Could the unknowns be part of a kind of blueprint, a blueprint that guides all matter to exploit its potential, a potential built into every particle? Such thoughts are just that, thoughts. So for now I have to make do with what I have and that means that I must live life without the grand blueprint, and neither the theologian nor the scientist can claim to have it, yet everyone things they do. And those scientists who study evolution yet believe not in a Creator, they work to construct a blueprint that never was, for evolution by happenstance could not have a blueprint, so they attempt to reconstruct the past events and thereby construct a history, and this history provides for them evidence that everything can simply be simply by happenstance. But what about the unknown? For me total happenstance just doesn't make sense. All of everything that I've been a part of, the entire universe, makes my mind point like the needle in a compass toward a Creator, a Creator I can imagine outside the universe, outside in respect to not being governed by the laws of the universe, a Creator outside time, outside space and matter, a Creator that created this that we find ourselves within, and created by ways and means beyond our thinking. And that is how I read Genesis, humankind created in the image of God, the image being my being able to think such thoughts.