I visited a cave recently. In the depths of the Earth I witnessed a formation of water-shaped rock drippings more than fifty feet tall. Its shape disgusted me, reminiscent of strange sea creatures and the dwellings of insects and the organs of an immense beast. This disgust turned my thoughts towards God who shaped all things. I considered how narrow my perspective as a man was, how unknowable God was to me, how the designs of all life, of all the things on Earth, indeed even all the stars and galaxies, were for the larger part foreign to me. I thought of the formation of life and the mystery of how all the varied forms of living things came to be. I thought of the strange and often disgusting purposes of living things and systems. I thought of the uncountable dead planets and empty suns beyond ours. I thought of the fragility of life and of the tiny moment of time which one man, or a nation, or an entire race occupies.
I then thought of love and of God. I thought that despite all my wonderings, there was indeed a purpose to existence, but one that would likely remain obscure for all time. I thought that in some ways the Hindus thought the same of God as I did, that the great mystery of divinity was at once nearer to us than our innermost self and more immense than everything in the night sky, that fragile humans were, for the most part, simply not equipped with the capacity to understand. And I thought of history, how Hegel thought of it as the never-ending dialectical movement of opposing things towards absolute Freedom, how God walked as a man in a time and a place on Earth, how at every moment mankind strives towards what he knows not and moves upon the waves of an ocean whose surface he cannot penetrate. I thought the distance between the individual and the species is continuous and not discrete. I thought of Adam and of the Last Man of Nietzsche and of the world to come.
Maybe God spoke to me in that cave. Maybe I just thought things to myself. I wonder if there's a difference.