Life Cycle

Conception, Birth, Infancy, Childhood, Youth, Adulthood, Old Age, Death. These headings represent the human life cycle and form the basis for understanding the 'maturity' of a character. Many different attributes can be juxtaposed onto this scale. For example, the notions of Independence and Free Will. Or personal responsibility. But the life cycle has to be placed in a broader context before it's strands and stages can be described.

I believe individuals are manifestations of a universal life force. In some religions this life force is called God. Many religions - in fact, most of them - idealize God into a distinct, separate substance. He exists outside of and separate from his creation, and can be pointed to as the divine being. I do not believe in such a distinction. God is the sum total of His individual, spiritual manifestations; the individual spiritual manifestations are facets of the sum total, God.

Through the life cycle individual expressions of God emerge, realize their purpose, and are then subsumed. By 'subsumed' I mean the life force of a dying entity is conceived instantaneously in new life forms. My view is not analogous to 'reincarnation'. I do not believe the individual spirit retains any psychic memory of who or what it once was. The life force manifests in completely new, completely distinct beings that express God in their own unique ways.

There is no such thing as a God, distinct from his individual manifestations; nor is there any such thing as a living entity separate from God. And yet, the notion of God is the culminating achievement of evolution. In fact, the life cycle is God's way of becoming 'real' and 'self-aware'. Without the life cycle, and individual expressions of God's will there can be no God.

One of the most important logical consequences of my particular spiritual outlook is the denial of a personal 'life after death'. When I die my spirit re-manifests in ways I cannot be aware of, and in entities that will have no personal recollection of me. The life force is eternal, omniscient and ubiquitous; I exist for a time, have limited knowledge and am located in space. If I survive at all, it is only as a being that has made an impression - for good or ill - on the world I once inhabited: that is to say, as a memory in consciousness world that continues on after I am gone.