I distinctly remember many instances from my childhood, lying in my bed, where my mind/soul would reach out to the sky above in profound yearning for some type of explanation. The types of words they teach you in school to explain certain things had not yet been taught to me, but the emotion is the same as when I feel it now. I would not yet be at the threshold of half-sleep half-awake, but I would imagine my own life in respect to the world, the world in respect to the universe; how black and void is the immense domain in which we live, and how few are the comforting, shining stars which shine against its infinite depth.

Along this line of thought would my mind and emotions wander, and then bam! It would suddenly hit me: the overpowering emotion of the yearning mind which exists in this domain. The realizations:

-This experience we call life is a great mystery, and this mystery can not be solved.

-We are very alone in this mysterious experience. While surrounded by others who endure a similar experience, and with whom we can reasonably communicate, our true feelings are untranslatable into any language. The complete pain of suffering is ours alone, and the insane happiness of joy is ours alone. Our individual experience is unique, and we can not share it with anybody else.

The reaction:

- How sad is the idea of traveling through this experience of life, if we can never fully communicate our experience with another, and if we can never know the mystery of the experience? This sadness brings an image of floating about in a black void of nothingness, alone, unknowing, and hopeless. To somewhat allude to Plato's cave: you lock yourself in a dark, soundproof room and shut your eyes and let the mind work. Sooner or later, you begin to imagine sounds that aren't there, and those flashes of colors which randomly appear before your eyes begin to take on forms, shapes, and eventually names of people. Events take place, and time marches on, but there is a remarkable disconnect between the thinking, feeling self, and the rest. This imaginary world then, however minimal, does exist to you, and is but a fraction of the normal human experience with "real" sounds, colors, and smells, and "real" people. But how much of what you see and "know" is real, and how much is created by the mind?

"I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness..." asking for truth.

Maybe if we could entertain the experience of a solitary fish which dwells at the deepest depths of the ocean, where there is no light, we could understand this extreme. Or, perhaps more extreme, imagine being a person who is blind, deaf, dumb, and paralyzed.

And then, if in one space of reality where we have the black void of nothingness, and if another we have our "normal" experience of life, surely there must also be the opposite "extreme" of this void, consisting of the experience of "all knowing" or the "eternal light", or what other name you may choose. This experience of "eternal light" would allow direct emotional communication with whatever else is there, divine knowledge of the movement of life, matter, and its history. Complete understanding and peace.

Perhaps this relative understanding is what inspires my hope. That we find what is "good" by avoiding what is "bad", and we find the light by running towards it, out of the darkness. Even if we are certain that the "all knowing" state is unattainable, we can survive by knowing that it is there.

Some people might share these types of thoughts. More people though will tell me to "stop thinking so much and have a few beers". Well, if the light is unreachable, the beer can make the darkness more bearable. :cool: