The story so far: 

I had this fantasy: <fantasy> that there was a time when human conscience, the human collective unconscious, spirituality, was a cloud. Amorphous, substanceless, particulate. It was like the cloud of gas that formed our solar system, which then coalesced and spun and started to heat up and burn; spinning, orbiting clumps which avoided becoming part of the sun became planets. It was like the universe after the Big Bang, just extremely hot gas which would in time through the processes of physics, astrophysics, general relativity and quantum mechanics would become the universe as we see today. 

On this planet, Earth, God created life. God IS life. God is not a conscious entity. God is everything that is and isn't through multiple veils and dimensions that no thing in the universe can conceive. God, on this planet, took a form of the primordial human collective unconscious. It was just a cloud, and remained a cloud through billions of years of evolution of life on this planet, but as lifeforms became more animate, the cloud started to form clumps, and it was in the earliest form of humans, with the spark of conscience and primitive analytical and abstract understanding of the world, that the human collective unconscious came into concrete, separate existences. 

The human collective unconscious is in us all, it is God, it is what makes us all the same despite millennia of evolutionary difference and social, cultural, and political distinction. What is in me is also in you on a sublime level, we as humans share a cross-section of consciousness. If you believe in reincarnation, the cycle of birth and death, the law of cause and effect (karma), then Tibetan Buddhism suggests it is fact that every living being at one point was your family member. Start with one average family, and consider the possibility that time is not linear, through generations and generations through history past and future hence, at any given moment in history, every living being at one point was or "will be" your family member. 

That's too heavy for me. I can't conceive it and have no direct feeling or experience or insight into it, but I can't refute it and have no reason to doubt it, and at worst it's a good sentiment, it's a good thing to work with. And the value of "family member" to me in this life is only nominal, so I'm sure I'm missing the profundity anyway. Bringing it down a notch, it's all good and fine if every living being should be treated as one would treat a family member, but families tend not to get along. 

But in the vast amorphous pool of humanity out there who should be treated as family members, there are clumps. People who resonate – friends, loves, companions, teachers, mentors, guides, etc. The people that gravitate towards each other, people who have a magnetic bond, those are the ones that have met each other in multiple lifetimes with multiple relationships between them. Maybe there were promises made to always look for each other in subsequent lifetimes. If time is not linear, it's not always the easiest thing to be reborn in the same historic period, but when they are, they will somehow find each other, as parent-child, siblings, friends, lovers, mentors, etc., etc. 

In 2017, I will be 48. </fantasy>

Northern Exposure Quote of the Day: "It's just a theory." - Dr. Sigmund Freud.