Pink Worms
We are one.
I read a short story some time ago. In it one of the characters, a psychic, could tell a person the exact moment of their death. This was because the psychic could see each of us as a continuous process from birth to death. To the psychic, we looked like giant pink worms. It was as if that person could see every moment of your life simultaneously. To the psychic, each moment of our life was like a single playing card in an entire deck fanned out on the card table. Everyone else could only see each moment as a single card, a single slice of time which would momentarily appear and then be replaced by the next...until there were no more cards. The psychic could see the entire deck from first card to the last.
In my opinion, the author didn't go far enough. If you think about it, really think about it, then if we are like pink worms when viewed over the entirety of our life, then our "worms" are inextricably intertwined with that of anyone else whose path we cross or who crosses ours.
Taking it even further, we are not separate from our parents. Only our consciousness makes it seem to be so. Our worms branch off from those of our parents at the moment of conception, through birth, and hence to our own children. Our parents are extensions of our grand-parents and so on, and so on. Think back through time, and see that all our worms join together like the branches of an unimaginably great tree in the womb of some common ancestor. And that ancestor is merely a branch of yet another tree that connects all living things back to the single moment when life was created on Earth.
We are one.
All life is one being.
We just have no awareness of it, just like your fingernail has no awareness that it's part of something larger (or maybe it does, and we just aren't aware of that).
In fact, if you really think about it, animate and inanimate are similarly connected at the point of Ultimate Conception when life began.
You and the screen that you're reading this from aren't really as separate as you think.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
--Blake
I read a short story some time ago. In it one of the characters, a psychic, could tell a person the exact moment of their death. This was because the psychic could see each of us as a continuous process from birth to death. To the psychic, we looked like giant pink worms. It was as if that person could see every moment of your life simultaneously. To the psychic, each moment of our life was like a single playing card in an entire deck fanned out on the card table. Everyone else could only see each moment as a single card, a single slice of time which would momentarily appear and then be replaced by the next...until there were no more cards. The psychic could see the entire deck from first card to the last.
In my opinion, the author didn't go far enough. If you think about it, really think about it, then if we are like pink worms when viewed over the entirety of our life, then our "worms" are inextricably intertwined with that of anyone else whose path we cross or who crosses ours.
Taking it even further, we are not separate from our parents. Only our consciousness makes it seem to be so. Our worms branch off from those of our parents at the moment of conception, through birth, and hence to our own children. Our parents are extensions of our grand-parents and so on, and so on. Think back through time, and see that all our worms join together like the branches of an unimaginably great tree in the womb of some common ancestor. And that ancestor is merely a branch of yet another tree that connects all living things back to the single moment when life was created on Earth.
We are one.
All life is one being.
We just have no awareness of it, just like your fingernail has no awareness that it's part of something larger (or maybe it does, and we just aren't aware of that).
In fact, if you really think about it, animate and inanimate are similarly connected at the point of Ultimate Conception when life began.
You and the screen that you're reading this from aren't really as separate as you think.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
--Blake