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The big picture is this. There is a reason why we exist, why consciousness exists, but we don’t know what that reason is. We feel like we are missing something important, but we don't know what. We are driven on a quest to find the missing substance to quench our thirst for meaning, but we find we are in a bit of a spiritual desert.
We are all, to some extent, Zombie-like and robotic. There are constant pressures in our society to Zombify us. We are conditioned to believe that everything is mechanistic, including life and ourselves. We are in awe of the advances science has made in helping us to understand how the universe works, and grateful for the advances of technology, but in terms of our outlook on life, our philosophy and our hope for meaning, the pendulum is swinging towards scientism and nihilism.
In our search, language is woefully inadequate. I lament its inadequacy and ineptness. It is a crude tool that breaks, distorts and maims attempts to express the deepest matters. Metaphor is the best we have, and that old compendium, compilation and collection of books we call the Bible is a rich source of apt metaphors.
In the very first book of the old Hebrew Torah, the Spirit of God moves upon the waters. The waters of life feature prominently in the Prophets, Jesus offers living water to the Samaritan woman at the well, saying she will never again thirst after tasting it, and in the Book of Revelations the New Jerusalem features a fountain of living waters flowing deep and wide.
And we all do have one thing within each of us that goes beyond our conditioned, robotic behavior. If you look within, you will find a deep well of consciousness that no one can take away from you or deny. You can dip your bucket deep down in the well waters and pull up refreshment that is not merely mechanical, not reductive, not Zombie-like and not robotic. This deep well of consciousness is there within you and you can access it at any time and believe in its reality and its significance.
If, despite all of the evil that you see in the world, you believe it possible that God’s love could be an infinite ocean of living water capable of sustaining your consciousness forever... then you can quaff the elixir of the ages.
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