Jellyfish
Image Courtesy of Jim Burklo
Jellyfish are worth the trip to the aquarium, just by themselves. In a dark corner of the building, they glow in their glass tanks, lit from below. They pulse their wisps of translucent flesh around gulps of invisible food, and wave their delicate tendrils to the slow beat of some strange, silent music.
They are the silent heartbeats of the sea. They float in the depths, on seemingly aimless trajectories. Perhaps I and the rest of the people in the aquarium are so transfixed by the jellyfish because, in some mysterious way, they also dangle in our dreams and hover in the ocean of the human unconscious.
They made me wonder. I look over the surface of the ocean and see nothing of them. Just as I wonder about jellyfish, and many other things, but see nothing of the process by which I wonder. Billions of neurons pulse in my brain, and I can’t see them. Their tendrils reach out to each other in a delicate tangle that I cannot sense as they enable me to think these thoughts. In that salty sea between my ears, strange things float and move. Who, least of all myself, knows what I’ll think – or write – next?
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That which caused my jaw to drop in front of the jellyfish tank at the aquarium, that which boggles me when I think about how I think, is that to which Meister Eckhard, the 14th century German mystical priest, referred when he wrote: “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.”
Considering jellies and my neurons that consider them, I am ushered into a prayerful state of self-reflective consciousness.
"Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own…” (St Paul 1 Corinthians 6:19) Through our worshipful awe, whether at a church, a temple, or an aquarium, God knows God. Our wonderment is the dark sanctuary in which the divine becomes ecstatically aware of itself.