March 18, 2016

One of the reasons I particularly like watching Stargate: SG-1 is because, although the television show can be enjoyed at a superficial level as an action-packed science fiction series, it also conceals hidden layers of meaning for the thoughtful observer to ponder. My mother and I watch the show together—at the same time, in the same room, but for very different reasons. She is entertained while I am inspired. She is captivated. I am enlightened.

In the eleventh episode, “The Torment of Tantalus”, archaeologist Daniel Jackson finds, on an abandoned, stormy planet, a meeting place where four highly advanced races would gather. In a central room of the ruins, he discovers a pedestal-like piece of technology that, once activated, generated a three-dimensional holographic array of lights in various colors, sizes, and configurations.

After careful examination, Daniel realized that the different organizations of lights—small blues spheres orbiting large clusters of red and yellow ones—represented atoms. The device, he noted with enthusiasm, was essentially a book written in a truly universal language—a language consisting of the individual building blocks that comprise everything that is.

The elements.

My mom thought that was a cool idea, but I saw something, a glimmer of a thought, perhaps, that intrigued me. More than a year later, I finally understand that brief idea of a thought that had come to me.

Everything is connected.

People may fight wars over their religious beliefs. They may fight for land, for resources, or even for power. But when boiled down to our essence, we are all so much more alike than different. The same elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and all the rest—comprise all of us.

I see a great cosmic beauty in that observation. The molecules of water in my body—keeping me alive—have, in a previous life, quenched someone’s thirst, watered crops that fed a hungry child. Even composed another person.

Even if all the religions of the world are wrong and there is no afterlife, no continuation of the consciousness after death, I find comfort knowing that those molecules that make me who I am will live on in an endless cycle, giving life and beauty to the world. When I die, everything that makes me who I am—a small, sentient speck in an unfathomably large cosmic whole—will be cycled back into the Everything That Is.

Ad infinitum.