The God Principle

 

 

 

 

(this image is placed under the GFDL License)

 

The car sped ahead and Emma listened to what Aliyah had to say about her discovery in the desert. She seemed to say that a consistent reflection of human lives was painted all around them in various phenomena, and that they could be analyzed by a simple system of correspondences: that the earth-wind-water-fire system was an analogy for the body-mind-emotion-spirit system.

 

‘Hon, that’s all very well, but it stretches my imagination too much. Perhaps there is some truth about the blasted weather, but anyone can take anything and then associate it with something else, find some common ground. Poets and dreamers do it all the time,” Emma countered.

 

“That’s true, Emma. But do you think that such common ground exists because there might be some deep relationships there? Poets might be recognizing them intuitively. Newton is said to have discovered the law of gravitation when he saw a falling apple. So there is valid common ground between a falling apple and the earth moving around the sun, or for that matter, with the tides or even day and night.”

 

“Well, that’s scientific stuff. But what you are saying is hardly so. I mean, why should there be any connection between the air and the mind at all? That’s silly, if not atrocious!”

 

“I know what you mean. But any theory rests on unproven postulates. As long as conclusions from a theory are consistent, meaning they don’t contradict one another, and they can explain as well as predict, then that theory must be given due consideration.”

 

“So what does your newfangled notion explain or predict? The postulates are practically preposterous.” Emma laughed at her own alliteration.

 

Aliyah sighed. “You raise a valid point, Emma. I just don’t know. From what I see there seems to be some sort of connection. I only wonder what it could be.”

 

Darkness fell rapidly and Emma turned on the car’s headlights. A flash of lightning suddenly lit up the sky, followed by a deep clap of thunder. The sky was soon dark with storm clouds. Emma shivered.

 

“Nice day for an outing. I hate thunderstorms,” she grimaced. “Why did you have to pick this day for a trip? We could be struck by lightning or get blown over by the wind. I can feel it; the wind is really getting strong. I should’ve checked the weather report before we started.”

 

Within moments, the rain pattered down, soon turning into a downpour. With the wipers on at full blast, Emma peered ahead, trying to keep the car steady and on the road. The sky lit up again and again with flashes of light, followed by deafening roars of thunder.

 

“Now tell me what this storm means, if you can,” yelled Emma over all the commotion in the air. She appeared a little frightened.

 

“Well, it does sound a little like you, doesn’t it?” Aliyah teased as she gazed up into the sky through the window. Lightning seemed to be flashing inside the clouds, and between them, lighting up the sky. And once in a while, a bolt of lightning speared down from the sky and hit the earth. Another natural phenomenon from the elements. What does it correspond to in our lives?, she wondered as she mulled it over.

 

Lightning was a release of electrical energy between oppositely charged areas of a cloud or between clouds. And often it involved the ground as well. Oppositely charged clouds! Clouds were large aggregations of water drops and ice crystals condensed around minute particles of dust. The body-emotions analogy was obvious in the dust-water system of a thundercloud. Clouds, then, corresponded to the emotional natures of individuals, groups of people, or even nations. Oppositely charged clouds or areas of a cloud pointed to emotional polarities between groups, or even within a single individual.

 

And the role of ice was particularly striking, for it was the ice, the frozen form of water, that primarily caused the charge buildup in the clouds through friction, setting up polarities. Likewise it was the coldness or freezing of noble emotions, and rubbing one another the wrong way that created emotional charges between people. Then lightning occurred, a release of the pent-up charge. Likewise, the pent-up emotional charge was often released between people in conflict and aggression, even war.

 

And just as the lightning also hit the earth and destroyed what it touched, so did the conflict between human beings spew destruction on mother earth. The lightning heated up its path in the air to an extreme temperature, causing an explosion of hot air perceived as thunder. This reminded Aliyah of verbal assaults and war cries, the booming of cannons, the roars of missiles and the massive explosions of bombs accompanied by flashes of light as they released their destructive energy. The turbulent thunderclouds even held an analogy of mankind at war with itself!

 

“Really?” Emma questioned, listening to Aliyah’s description of a thundercloud. “So what makes them different from a normal cloud?”

 

“What is a normal cloud? There are many kinds, but I guess you are referring to all that are not thunderclouds. Well, there are the cirrus clouds, stratus clouds and many others, each having their own peculiarities.”

 

“And how are they different?”

 

“The main difference seems to be that they are not overloaded with ice and water, and do not generate the huge amounts of static electricity charges that a thundercloud generates. So obviously they correspond to the gentle and nobler side of our emotions. And they do appear white, don’t they? Like angels arrayed in white, high up in the sky…whereas the thunderclouds with their anvils look dark and dangerous. I guess the analogy is obvious. But the interesting point is that this correspondence seems to be not just in appearances, but also in the internal systems, the mechanisms that make the clouds behave as they do.”

 

Emma fell silent. It seemed that Aliyah had a point there. She would have expected a peripheral similarity between thunderclouds and human nature, but it seemed that the analogy went a little deeper, into the systems that formed thunderclouds.

 

“So what about all this wind and rain? There’s even hail falling down on us. How could that relate to thunderclouds, or to us?”

 

“Emma, this whole storm, including the clouds, lighting, wind and rain, is but a single system. What you see as a thundercloud up there is only the visible part of this system. Imagine that huge streams of warm, moist air are rising upwards and into the thundercloud, whereas cold air streams are coming down. There is a huge air circulation within the cloud. The two opposing factions of hot and cold moisture-laden winds blow into each other and create all kinds of phenomena, including storms, tornadoes, lightning, hail, and so on. You might compare these to a warfront where armies with opposing ideals and emotions meet and fight.”

 

“Hmm… why do you say that?”

 

“Well, the strong moisture-laden winds correspond to emotionally charged thoughts that make us aggressive. These are the ones that are capable of wreaking all kinds of havoc. So you can see that the internal systems of the storm do seem to carry some reflection of our emotional natures.”

 

Emma said nothing and pondered what Aliyah had said. Then she found a problem.

 

“But thunderclouds nourish us, bring us rain,” she objected.

 

(continued here)