Young Writers Society

I only ask that you take ten minutes out of your day, and read this with an open mind, it will be worth it. Whether you're religious or not, I'm simply trying to open your eyes. I'm not trying to put down any of your beliefs, I'm not trying to convert you to some religion or anything like that, I'm only trying to help interpret your beliefs in a more understandable way, that won't conflict with science, logic, philosophy, or any other religion for that matter. I believe in love, I believe in peace, I believe in life.

To start off, nobody argues that every religious script we know has been penned by man, and translated so many times, it's utterly impossible to say that any of them are the literal word of God. People need to stop arguing about who's right and which is historically accurate and often killing so heartlessly over it, and open their eyes to see that it's not important which one happened and which didn't. What's important is that it's written down for us to read and learn from it. Virtually all of the world religions are saying the same thing, and you can sum it up pretty simply; Love everyone as yourself. Gandhi did, MLK did, the Dalai Lama, Jesus, Buddha, Abraham, Hermes Trismegistus, the list goes on.. Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and all of it's varieties, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, you name it. Even non religious people teach it, here in the USA, it's against the law to teach religion in public school, yet I still learned the Golden Rule; "One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself." I think it's safe to say that loving the entire world as yourself is how to truly be happy and radiate that happiness to those around you. And there's a simple answer why. We are all one. Everything. I know that sounds blasphemous when I just say it like that, but hear me out:

A recent scientific study has shown that mitochondria have some form of conscious thought. They put mitochondria in a maze with food at some ends, the mitochondria would navigate the maze, and any end that didn't have food, they wouldNEVER go down that way again. This proves that there is thought process, possibly even complicated thought, I know I get lost very easily in hedge mazes and find myself in the same place a lot. Mitochondria are only a small small part of a cell, and the fact that single celled organisms existAT ALL, proves that cells are a conscious being on some level, and to think that all those mitochondria living their lives inside a cell, have no idea that they are part of a larger living organism, living their life, and those cells probably don't stop to wonder if maybe in fact they are a small part of a larger conscious being, such as you or me, or even a tree. That's right, you are an entire civilization of cells, built with a wall of skin for protection and warmth, allowing your cells to thrive inside of you, their home. With that said, nobody can argue that it is very possible that we too are only part of something bigger than us. I believe God, is everything. He's not separate from us, he is us. It even says this in the Bible and other religious texts.. God is omnipresent. What does that mean? That he takes up all the space around us? WHAT SPACE? That's all taken up by gaseous elements, only different between them is us is that we're made up of solid and liquid elements, so if God can exist in the space, he would exist is us too, right? Wouldn't God be everything? The stars and planets are God, the mountain and trees, and all the creatures of the world are God, every one of them. You are God. Hard to imagine, considering you only have one point of experience in this world, and that's your physical body, but that single physical body has a very real effect on everything that will ever happen.

Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect? Where hypothetically if you go back and time and do anything as simple as killing a butterfly, the effects on your time when you return home could be catastrophic, which is also saying if I kill a butterfly now, a thousand years from now the world may be infinitely different than it would have been if I didn't kill that butterfly! But don't worry, I wouldn't kill a butterfly! But for example, I just snapped my fingers. Snapping my fingers made typing this note take a little longer, and the thought process in my head will certainly change what I write from here on to the end of the paper, and it already has because I'm talking about snapping my fingers. And the fact that you just read that will effect you, maybe ten minutes from now you would be doing something different if I hadn't snapped my fingers, and think about how much different that could make the next hour, or day, or year, and how much that could change the life of every single person you interact with for the rest of your life, and every person, being, object or place they interact with for the rest of their lives, so on and so forth. Just because I snapped my fingers! But here's a secret.. I didn't even snap my fingers, and I just changed your ENTIRE life, even if only in the slightest, most unnoticeable way. So it's safe to say that we are interconnected, every action any one of us makes effect the entirety of this planet, and this entire cosmos for that matter. So even though you can only experience the world though your own physical body, you have had a very literal effect on the entire world since the day you were conceived, and every person in existence has had their effect on you too. Which brings me to my next topic, who are you?

What makes you, you? Why are you different than anybody else? Well, the answer to that is pretty simple as well. You have a physical body, you have a personality, you have a soul. Let's start with you body, how did you get it? You got it from mom and dad, and you look probably look kind of like them too. They got theirs from their parents, and if you believe in evolution that will go all the way back to the first single celled organisms on Earth, and you could trace it back further to the stars above, if you believe all that. Which frankly, I don't understand how the world could work in any other way. Now I'm not hear to change your beliefs, but if you don't believe in evolution because you think it conflicts with creationism, think again. If God really is everything, then wouldn't evolution still be creationism? Ask anybody who believes in God and they will say God works in mysterious ways, who's to say evolution isn't Gods way of creating us and all of the plants and animals, fungi and bacteria, and everything else. I'm not necessarily saying we came from monkeys, and I'm not saying we didn't come from monkeys either, I'm just saying we didn't all pop up out of nowhere one day as the life forms we are now, I think the fact that you have parents and didn't birth yourself is enough proof of that, and honestly, if you ask me evolution is one hell of an impressive way to create, and really just enforces my belief in God more! So.. let's rewind a little bit back to your physical body. You are a product of the universe, constantly working through reproduction and natural selection to make a stronger, smarter, better being, and we all branched out of each other, as a family tree illustrates so well. And that body has a very real effect on who you are, because it changes how you see the world. If you're six feet tall you're going to see the world differently then if you're four feet tall, and if you are a dog you will see the world differently than if you are a human, or even a mushroom or a tree. And the world will see you differently too, and that will greatly effect the outcome of your personality and who you become.

So lets talk about your personality. Understanding that your body is a big part of what makes you who you are is half of it. But even identical twins come out different, because they don't live the same life. Even if they grew up in the same home with the same parents, the same things didn't happen to them, and the entire world is seen from a different angle, and everything that happens to them will effect who they become as a person, so that explains why no two people have identical personalities, because no two people have lived the same life, and even if they did, no two people have the same physical body, and even if they did… the couldn't take up the same space at the same time, so they couldn't live the same life. So that kind of explains what makes us who we are, and why we're different from the people around us, and the animals and life forms everywhere, yet still so interconnected and all part of one and the same. A favorite quote of mine, from Alan Watts says; "There is an interdependence of flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers. They're really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. So it's interconnected! And so the many many patterns of interconnections lock it in together into a unity, which is, however, much to complicated for us to think about."

So back to who you are, I've explained your physical body, and how you becomes who you are, in terms of your ego and personality, but this still leaves your soul. This is a difficult one to explain in words, but I'll do my best. I'll start by saying your soul certainly is not your mind or your thoughts, Your mind is just another addition to your experience. You experience sights, sounds, smells, feelings tastes, and you experience thoughts. You can observe your thoughts just like you observe any other object, now I ask you, who, or what, is doing that observing? Maybe that who, or what, that's observing from inside, is the same soul that inhabitsEVERYliving being in the entire cosmos. You can't say I'm wrong, because you haven't been any of those other beings, at least not as far as you can recall. But thinking that beneath our personality and ego, beneath our body and situation, beneath our experiences and life path, that we're all the same, is really a very comforting feeling, and it would explain so much! That would explain why you generally tend to like people you get to know better, because you can relate to them. Relate what? If we're not the same then what is there to relate? We have different bodes and lives and personalities, what is it that allows us to relate so well to each other? Sometimes as if we've even lived the same lives! Maybe what LOVE really is, is being able to see somebody for who they really are, deep deep down inside, and recognizing that you're looking back at yourself, you're looking at God's divinity, the same divinity that resides deep inside of you, deeper than your body, life, or personality. Deeper than you.

Isn't it just starting to make sense, that at the core, we're no different from another. If you can really open your eyes to see that you are the entire world, so to say, and you can recognize the divinity in everything, wouldn't that be as if you loved the entire world as yourself? Just like every great philosopher, prophet or god ever taught. And even if you don't agree about that, understanding simply that everything that happens will effect you, why would you want anything bad to happen to anybody at all? It's obvious that this is the world you're going to live the rest of your life on, and your children's lives, and grandchildren, and their children. Spreading harm, disrespect, unhappiness, and sorrow will only add to the harmful, disrespectful, and unhappy nature of the world we will all have to live in, and personally, I don't want that, I really hope you don't want that either. So before you say or do something mean, stop to think about why you're saying that. Stop to think about who that person is, do you get anything out of being unjust? Do they get anything out of you being unjust? Is it really worth it? Even if that person deserves it.. If you understand that at the core we're all the same, and aside from that we're nothing more than a mere compilation of our life experience in the body we've been given, and you really can't control who you're born as, or what life you're born into or what happens to you along the way, so no matter how horrible a person may seem to be, you need to recognize that is not is a horrible person. That is a living being, and something in their life caused them to do what they do, and as much as they may have chosen to do that, you can't blame them because something caused them to choose to do that. For all you know, if you lived the same life as them, you would do the same thing. Well you would. If I was born as Adolf Hitler, and I lived the life he did, I would have killed millions of people and started a World War, indefinitely. But I was born as Andrew Ludolph. And I have lived the life I have lived, and I chose to write this note. You chose to read this note, and I thank you for that. Now I only have one more question, who are you, and what are you going to do with your life?

"Don't stop chasing the dragon, because one day you will understand the dragon. Then you won't need to chase your tail anymore."