There was a time in my life when I seriously wondered whether there was intelligent life on other planets. As a child, I believed that we human beings here on the planet Earth were God's only children. I learned early on how special we were: we were made in God's image, to look after His planet. There was no other force in the universe (which I envisioned as a big, black void with our planet in the center) that could compare to us. Our planet was here for our convenience; it was home to everything that we thinking, feeling human beings needed to survive. The survival of Man, I thought, was the only purpose for anything else being alive. I can't lay the blame for those self-centered beliefs on anyone or anything in particular, but I'm sure it had a lot to do with bits and pieces I'd heard in church and Sunday school, where they never, ever discussed the possibility that other beings, living on other planets, were just as favored in God's eyes as we were. I definitely grew up thinking of Man as an only child. When I was fourteen, I was fortunate enough to meet the neighborhood cynics, a lovely couple who thought and felt differently than anyone else I knew. My inquisitive self loved them the minute I met them, since they were willing to talk about all kinds of things and didn't feel the need to draw any conclusions from talking, which, to their opinion, was sometimes just 'thinking out loud.' When I asked if they thought there was life on other planets, they laughed. "I certainly hope so," Jim said. "If we're the best that God can do, the Universe is in a lot of trouble." That simple sentence, said with soft laughter so many years ago, set a new direction in my thinking about life on other planets. I understood his point, even as a teen-ager; we thinking, feeling human beings don't always think straight, and very often let our feelings get in the way of good choices. I had a tendency to agree that somewhere in the universe there had to be life forms that were more on top of life than we are. As years went by, and the concept of life as a learning experience for souls became a part of my belief system, my ideas about whether there was life on other planets, and whether they were equal to, above, or below Man fluctuated a lot, depending on what I was reading and who I was talking to. It never occurred to me, then, that life wasn't as much about 'being on top of things' as it was about 'being in the midst of it all.' Sometimes I just don't see the forest for the trees; it took me a long time to figure out that the 'other levels of life experience' and 'other levels of consciousness' I was always talking about was probably one and the same with 'life on other planets.' Since then, I've done my homework and put the pieces together in a way that is comfortable for me and fits in well with what I believe about God and the universe He created. In high school, we don't study music in the same room where we study auto repair. Our environment (which is really our classroom) is always specially designed to support the lessons we're there to learn. It makes sense that each planet would offer the perfect environment for a different set of soul lessons; it also makes sense that the physical form (or lack thereof) that a soul enters at birth would be one that can thrive in that particular environment. I'm sure, now, that there are more planets in God's universe than we could ever hope to count, with more forms of life than we have the conscious ability to comprehend. If life is as infinite as God himself, then so are the ways in which we, as souls in process, can experience it. It took me a long time to appreciate the fact that every living thing on this planet is equal in the eyes of God; it took me even longer to appreciate that every living think in this Universe is on the same spiritual path we are, learning the same basic spiritual lessons in their own unique way. Sometimes I still have a hard time truly comprehending that all life on this planet is inter-connected, and that what we do to one we do to all. It makes perfect sense that every life form on every planet in God's universe is connected as well, and that what we do to one we do to all. All of this soul-level spiritual understanding being gained through this experience we call life binds us all together in our shared efforts to get back to where we started from: being one with God. It adds a whole new dimension to 'being a part of The Whole.' |
