Getting a Big Bang out of life!

   Apparently the universe started as a result of an explosion of unfathomable proportions almost 14 billion years ago. This is what is commonly referred to as the big bang theory. I am quite prepared to believe this and am in no position to question it. Brilliant men using brilliant technology have come up with this and the theory is not as recent as you might think. Thus, I am prepared to believe it.
   No mention is made of God in this theory, no thought toward whether He may, in fact, have lit the big bang fuse and then watched it sizzle on down to creation. This is also fine with me, as I suspect God had nothing to do with it. I also suspect that God is a man-made entity anyway. And did I mention that I was suspicious of the Bible.....?
   So here's what I think. I think that there was such an explosion way back when, the earth was formed, it cooled down and life began. Mainly because it did and I don't ask questions. I imagine it began microbiologically and the next thing we knew we were running around on two feet, hitting each other with sticks.
   Somewhere along the way, we began to want to make sense of everything. Then we began to notice that things happened in patterns, beginning with the sun and moon. Soon, seasons started happening. At this point, there was such a regularity to the patterns it must only have seemed that someone larger than us puny humans was in charge. At this point, God showed up. In many shapes and forms and all over the place. He was benevolent and caring at the same time he was the almighty punisher. He was even a she, if it worked. And because half the time we were scared shitless of the world around us, we were quite happy to have him in charge and watching out. We were so happy, in fact, that we began to worship him and all the other gods it made sense to worship. Life has gone on like this for millenia and still does. As is apparent, we continue to be strong in our beliefs, to the exclusion of other people's. We also seem prepared to kill, if we think that's what God wants us to do.
   Now, just because there are patterns, I don't think this necessarily means there's a God. I think there are patterns because the earth spins and planets orbit and because it's all just circles of one kind or another we tend to end up at the same place, doing the same things. Thinking that someone must be in charge. And because occasionally the unexplainable miracle occurs, we think it must have been orchestrated somehow. Totally incredible coincidences somehow seem to be the work of God as well as major catastrophic disasters. If someone's in charge, the age-old question begs to be answered---why so much pain and suffering mixed with so much love and benevolence!?
   It could all just be dumb luck.

   In a nutshell, here is my own particular big bang theory. The universe began with a completely unimaginable burst of energy, an unimaginable length of time ago. The laws of physics declare that energy does not peter out, it simply changes form, one way or the other. I believe that this happened, the earth and universe was formed, and that it all came out of this initial burst of energy. I believe that all living things grew out of this energy and here we all are. Because it's all the same energy we started with, we are all inter-connected. We are one with the earth, as the expression goes, we are not just connected to other people, we are connected to plants, the air, the water, other animals and on and on.
   Energy is an amazing thing. It is an amazing thing to harness and it is amazing when unleashed. It is sometimes controllable and, more often than not, outside our grasp. I don't believe we understand most of its capabilities. I believe if we understood it fully, our conception of God would become clearer and perhaps make more sense.
   I went and visited a psychic once, for the first time. She, of course, spent some time tapping into my energy and, apparently, a little bit of the energy of the important people in my life. She talked to me about personal things she could have known nothing about. She also talked about the odd thing I have no idea about or simply haven't been able to understand yet. I am prepared to be as skeptical of stuff like this as the next person and believe it's quite possible to be tricked into giving people like psychics and mediums little bits of personal info that they then feed right back to you, as if they have divined it. But I didn't have a skeptical bone in my body after I left this woman and I truly believe that, through and innate gift and many years of practice, she had developed the ability to wade into the river of energy that surrounds us. And then tell us about it.
   Did this experience have anything to do with God, or the gods? I don't believe so. I tend to believe more in the physics of it. I believe if it was something we could see and therefore believe in we would somehow then make it measurable and describable, with characteristics. For the moment, though, this is impossible and so some of us chalk up psychic experiences as hocus pocus.
   Once again, I believe that there is this river of energy that surrounds us. Some of us are able to use it, some of us are unaware it exists. I believe it explains such things as ghosts, answered prayers and deja vu. As weird as it may sound, I also have a theory that there is a time-travelling element to it. Einstein himself believed that time travel was a viable theory (you need to Google einstein time travel as I don't have the time here for an explanation) that centered around the speed of light and its specifications. He developed this theory in the early 20th century and scientists now are able to verify much of it. Mechanically, we have no ability yet to utilize this theory due to the difficulty of moving things at the speed of light. In the river of energy, though, I don't believe we are hindered this way. That is possibly why there is that that unsettling experience called deja vu, wherein you find yourself experiencing something (sights, sounds, sensations) that you could not possibly have already experienced but somehow you know you have. It may be possible that some of your own energy has travelled ahead in time and that you are now remembering this! Most of us have no way of controlling or channeling this so it just pops up randomly and we call it deja vu. 
    What about reincarnation? Ghosts? Possibly just collections of energy left behind as people pass on. I tend to think of it as energy with a consciousness; Billy the Kid passes on (with assistance) and little bits of his conscious energy that  get left behind mingle with a new life's energy and all of the sudden you end up with someone who believes they may have been Billy the Kid in a former life! A whole bundle of conscious energy gets left behind after another person passes and this becomes a ghost. This energy is strong enough that it makes its presence felt; the living see it, or hear it, perhaps just sense that it is near. There may be enough consciousness to this energy that it has a actual agenda. It may want revenge or simply to warn. Just theories, of course.

   Did I mention that I don't trust the Bible? I did, didn't I. Well, I don't trust it because it was written by men. It is not the word of God although parts of may have been written by someone who thought he'd just seen or talked to God. I believe it was written for the most part by well-intentioned men who were trying desperately to discover the meaning of life and to make sense out of all the patterns they'd noticed. I believe it was written by men who desperately wanted someone to be in charge, other than themselves. I also believe that the writers of the Bible sometimes had their own political agendas.
   Speaking of the Bible, and the river of energy, isn't it interesting that so many of the world's religions have their own great books that mirror many of the same things in the Bible? Out of that one great burst of energy that created the universe and from all the earth's distant corners this flow of energy has been tapped into by men desperate for direction and much of what they've come up with has sounded similar. And isn't it interesting that, in civilizations which have not been historically technically advanced, the connection to the earth and nature has been a large part of their religion--they did not place all their faith in a Deity but, instead, realized the connection between themselves and the energy surrounding them and made worship to this. And if there was some sort of Deity involved, it was simply the god that provided the earth and all its resources.
   Unfortunately, I will not find out if any of my theories are true until I die. I occasionally find myself jealous of the dead, as they have been imparted with all the answers. I have many more theories on good and evil, heaven and hell (hell, by the way, is writing a really long blog entry!) and what you find there in the afterlife, but all that is maybe for another day. Several times I have gone back and reviewed what I've written in this entry and realize that it may be difficult to follow and that it may even sound like a mad man's ravings. All of this under the assumption that anyone is reading it and that could be a major assumption! Hopefully those who know me and have read any of this will not shy away the next time our paths cross. It was an interesting process to undertake and gave the opportunity to ramble on about something which does not often pop up in daily conversation.
   Thank you for reading. As always, I have enjoyed the writing part!