Enlightenment...


"Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose--no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and still more wonderful, between the things of the intellect and material things. Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that the material world, and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light, and an element of thought, disseminated and indivisible dissolving all, that geometric point, the self; reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating--who knows, if only by the identity of the law--the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last is the zodiac."
- Victor Hugo, "Les Miserables"

The title supposes that both eternal life and enlightenment are possible. This is the simplification:

The universe was not made for humans alone. Humans are part of a tapestry of molecules that has been emerging gracefully and cataclysmically for more time than they can conceive. They have limited control. The world is a mirror of the pattern of the universe and is based around complex relationships and feedback loops of plants and animals, which also mirror climate and even more miniscule changes.The human world is based on a fixed rational framework separated from intuition and thus separate from growing structures; linear structures do not represent reality. The explanation for existence is inexplicable through reason. Existence is, and understanding existence is understanding itself. Being is not singular, and in order to be responsible for oneself, one must also understand one's place in the entire process of being. Humans are rational and intuitive. These cannot be seperated indefinitely.The process of mind is singular, but the mind is contingent on collective memory and mutual assistance. Humanity is not seperate. Humanity is on a learning curve. Eternal life is obtained through harmony with nature and passing memory on to children. God is inherent, and is still creative; God makes the world that we live in every day and our values and relationship with ourselves and with nature are the contingent factor for continued life. God is understanding and creation

This is what I have come to understand, and I accept that it is my own conclusion.

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