It's been a while-

I am gathering my wits, caught streaming in every direction, except towards my blog or the viewfinder. In attempt to lure my self-will onto the page and strengthen the disturbance I am nurturing I will dedicate time not only to pictures on the screen but also to works of word. I shall stretch out my arm to a distance well beyond visualized capacity, stoking fires brandishing dim coals hard for the eye to catch even in the blackest black.

Last night, over a couple of drinks, a kiss told me that some people are genetically predisposed to religious experiences . . . if a certain part of the temporal lobe cortex is stimulated by electrodes, the individual will have a 'divine' moment of insight. (Actually they ((they being the powers that be)) made a device for this specific sort of stimulation; a sort of helmet called the Transcranial Magnetic Fibulator

that delivers a slight current to the surface of the brain activating particular regions allowing the resulting effects to be studied.) “This is why some people with epilepsy experience the finger of godly understanding”, the kiss whispered, “what happens during a seizure is similar to what the helmet does”; she was very excited by this knowledge. Leaning forward and towards me, gesticulating with excitement, the kiss asked, “What does this say about a divine creator? Our own small existence within the universe? Enlightening religious experiences? Our universe is too perfect.” she said, “Gravity, the coming together of atoms, the particles of life . . . is it all too perfect to be chance or are we a random occurrence of matter coming together?” There is a theory, a multiple universe theory, which suggests our universe is the only one that could possibly support life. In all of our perfection, assuming that divine intervention is not a rational possible report, this theory states that there are a ga ga ga gazillion universes folding in and around and on top of one another and it took the spontaneous crashing and flinging and marrying of all those infinitely numbered particles and atoms to finally come together in a sequence that allowed the just-so-happening of things to create life. Life, therefore, is mere statistics; it just took enough moving around for it to finally happen . . . eventually, it was bound to come about.
So, with the experience of the divine a mere tickle of a frontal lobe region and with the perfection of our universe being nothing more than a bound-to-happen-given-enough-tries statistic, where does that leave human beings and the meaning of life? The only meaning, the only significance life has is what we apply to it. I say this, and after chewing on the information the kiss gave me, I still find it hard to believe . . . or rather I do not want to believe it. I do not think I am one of the fortunate souls who feel the significant experience of religious ecstasy burning through my blood. Instead I find a hole, an abyss when directly looked at elicits vertigo sucking in conscious thought, creeping toward my breath, stealing it away while encouraging my hands and feet to fail me. It flags me down in the middle of the night, forcing me to search wildly for something big enough, distracting enough, lovely enough to fill that dark space knowing that it will never be enough and I will never be able to stop looking for a substitute. Perhaps it is the awareness of this abyss, be it produced by the profound cultural emphasis on religion or it’s inexplicable reality that keeps me from wholly accepting our spontaneous molecular existence or a mere electric tickle of the brain to sum up divine experience. The kiss concluded by drinking her last draught of beer. She leaned in close so our lips were almost touching, millimeters apart and whispered, “It’s just like the space between . . . an infinite amount of particles ebb and flow. Nothing ever really touches, it is only our feelings and longing that create sensation, ecstasy, pain, meaning . . .”