I learned something from my Earth Science classes that has made a huge impact on me and been worth all the effort. Everything has a temporary shape. There is nothing in my world that remains the same. “Form” is a creation of my intellect and has no lasting existence. Anything I can identify as material is different than it once was and different than it will be. This is most obviously true of anything alive, including me.
The world before the dinosaurs looked nothing like the world I recognize around me. The last of the dinosaurs looked around themselves at a landscape unlike the world of their ancestors. Today, we see a world the dinosaurs would scarcely recognize.
The shape of land masses, the look of plants, and the appearance of animals running about has dramatically changed. Everything continues to change shape. No form has remained the same. Yet the same material has always been present. It gets continuously recycled.
We now have plants that we call trees and that look like oaks. We have flowers that bloom. We are surrounded by biped animals with hairless skin. Yet all living things are made of recycled material. We have all existed before. My body is made up of everything not my body.
I find it amazing that the same matter simply keeps changing shape. There has been no lasting form for many billions of years. But the matter has remained the same.
In me there are molecules of water that fill out my body. They do this just as they filled out the bodies of plants and animals many times before. Parts of me supported life in animals and plants that existed before the dinosaurs. My most recent breath recycled forms of oxygen the dinosaurs once breathed, that plants before them put into the atmosphere, that came from outer space before the time of our young sun.
Everything that is part of me is not me. There is no part of me that has not pre-existed, most of it as part of another living entity. I really had no beginning, I was never born. All of me has pre-existed and has been part of the universe for all time. And so it will be in the future. I will never die, all parts of me will continue to exist when I stop breathing.
My whole world has constantly changed shape, been devoid of any permanent form, since the Big Bang of my universe. Perhaps, even since before the Big Bang. Nothing has an essence or a form that has prevailed or continued. There has been no observable permanence.
Earth Science has helped me to understand and experience the changing world. Now I can see, in a single glance, how my world has evolved over billions of years. Earth Science has opened my understanding that behind it all, there is no permanence, no lasting form. I am fascinated by this new experience I have of emptiness. What I experience as real is now something other than the forms I once considered real. And I am connected to it in a most intimate way.
I recognize that the forms my mind created have been a practical response to an experience of an emptiness that lies beyond my senses. I am grateful that I now get to peek behind that veil.
Occasionally I can touch a corner of that emptiness, and it feels like arriving home. Even time loses its shape and form, and I am at ease. There is only a hint of before and after. The empty place is a lovely spot to be. I love to go there as often as I can.