An amazing story.

There are amazing stories and then there are amazing stories !

We stand looking up into the night sky and we see our Galaxy which is made up of millions of stars. We know that our Galaxy is but one of an estimated  '400 billion' galaxy's in the observable universe. We know that the stuff which makes us, the atoms, are the atoms that were around shortly after the Big Bang, 13 billion light years ago and had formed the stars and the supernova in those early seconds. Looking at our right hand and then at our left hand we can surmise that the atoms in the right hand came from an exploding supernova billions of years ago and that the atoms in your left hand came from another exploding supernova, also spewing out its atomic materiel which coalesced into the heavier elements that became the mix for life here on earth.

Now there's a story ! It competes with Genesis without resorting to the homily of Adam and Eve to set out our human existence. We came from stuff and when we die our stuff is combined with other stuff to create other stuff and so ad infinitum. It makes the baby Jesus and the effort of God to save us all seem a bit of a lost cause, unless of course you think of the body and its constituent eternal atoms as purely the stage scenery for the larger act or play, that of the human pathos of living. Living involves the atoms which in themselves are immortal but the combinations and clusters of atoms which make up the "we" are continually adjusting to circumstance and through time they run out of options and need to be re composted for something else to start to grow. 

But what of the "we". That pattern of electrical impulses that make up our memory and the identification of the "we". 

Up to the point of the electrical impulse in the brain 'we' are the stuff which can be identified as part of the Big Bang but is what constitutes our thoughts made up of atoms or something else and does this 'something else' live on outside the stuff. 

Of course it relays on the 'stuff' to do 'its stuff' so to speak for without life there can be no 'thought' but is 'thought' of a different dimension, does it escape the conformity of a process which started 13 billion light years ago ?