Power

Buckle up for this one.

Everyone lives all lives. How am I to even explain this? I remember having this idea when I was in my mid-thirties, early forties. This was a time of introspection, a time to practice gratitude, meditation, sobriety. I had just become sober. I had just become married. The two of those things are usually mutually exclusive, most people recommend you don’t attempt them together, but that’s a different area for discussion.

The meditation and introspection I was experiencing was leading me to a place where the similarities and commonalities of people – and for that matter all living things – were paramount. Forgiveness is a shared experience, when you forgive universally in meditation it seems to transmit more readily – in a more global sense one can forgive everything that exists and because you are a part of everything, you’re forgiving yourself by proxy. Maybe that’s too cosmic a concept for this discussion, however, it’s a starting place so we can see where the truth lies.

I became interested in the common connections between all people, emotion mostly. We are connected most persistently by our shared experiences and our emotional reactions to those. We are all alike. We involve ourselves in love, pain, happiness, ennui with the same seed – and our experiences then grow from this and our reactions to situation. But the seed is exactly the same for all of us. This is the commonality that had me begin my understanding.

Do we live these lives all at the same time? Our consciousness limited to one point of view, but still – a part of every living human being on earth? Or is time something that only exists in our instant – and we will and have lived every life that has ever been alive on this planet, or in this universe for that matter in a string of experiences randomly strung together from all the available ones until we’ve experienced them all. And then what? Repeat?

I like that one. I like that I have lived every life that has ever been, from start to finish. And moving through history slowly – or randomly – changing pieces, making different decisions, so that history may not be the same after I have seen a single moment in another life, but that life will move forward by that moment and the changing of history will not effect the fact that every life that exists at that instant has and will be lived again by me and everyone else who exists now or ever will. That’s a thought that slices a sliver of eternity – off of the block of all that has ever been.

It\’s like there is a machine that runs on the energy created by love. It gains immeasurable power when lovers first find one another – millions of volts of electricity for each love that begins. And then the machine churns with this energy for a while – but the real drive – the billion volt injections of power – these are transmitted by the collapse of broken hearts – like the collapse of stars that release immense pulses of power – the breaking of hearts is the biggest surge of energy the universe knows – and it\’s these recurring events that make this machine continue unstoppable – into the future where nothing is certain except the sustained flow of this power – from hearts that will not stop entertaining the notion that love, perhaps this one, will finally last.

Maybe this should become a religion.