Adam Blatner

Here’s another mythic construct: I get to be a point of “focusing consciousness” in the cosmos. It’s sort of like a pollen grain. Staying with that metaphor, the cosmos has been spending billions of years in constructing:
– a star not too hot or cold, and a planetary system with at least one planet capable of sustaining life
– a planet having gone through sufficient chemical composition and evolution to sustain basic and perhaps slightly advanced plant life
– an ecosystem supportive of a plant life, and a plant able to grow in sunlight and rain
– a plant mature enough to create a flower with pollen, and all that implies, unknowing in itself of what if anything will have co-evolved to pollinate it—bee, bat, whatever…

Admittedly, this metaphor is a little far-fetched, but not too far for me to imagine that we, too, with all our intelligence, have evolved (and co-evolved) to help each other bring the fruits of our experience, so very multi-dimensional, into the form of offerings: I offer here what I’ve learned, and how in varying ways and degrees (sometimes only a tiny bit) how I’ve “fertilized” innumerable others.

So I re-imagine the fruits of activities as a sort of mind-pollen. We fertilize each others’ growing mind in ways that can hardly be imagined. In this metaphor, God is an emerging consciousness and we, with whatever intelligence we have, are nonetheless vehicles for “seeing” and “thinking” and reflecting on what it’s like out-in there.

This myth works for me, satisfies me to presume to imagine that God absorbs it all, metabolizes it, and uses it to ever-so-gently influence or guide the further evolution of the cosmos, which represents God’s own projection into three-dimensions of space and one dimension of “linear” time. I know this myth in my mind hardly does justice to the actuality of the dynamic, no more than an infant can know about its mothers life. Yet the baby does know a little—that facet of the mother that interacts with the baby. The baby knows little else, but it’s okay for that limited sphere of development.

In summary, resting into my role as contemplateur feels good as I approach my 77th birthday. I look around and realize that, comparatively, I’ve been fortunate in having seen a good deal of the world, although it’s been less than some. I feel grateful and fortunate to have been able to contemplate a fair amount about life, with the help of my brilliant wife, with whom I chat amiably.