A dewdrop

Please consider for a moment that you are gazing at some dewdrops, hanging, glistening, on a few blades of grass. The morning frost is there.

I believe that you, looking at one of these dewdrops in the cold weather, feel some relatedness between yourself and the dewdrop. It is beautiful, yes. But what you feel goes beyond that, I think. You feel related to it.

You may tell me, for example, that you “respond” to the dewdrops, enjoy them, find them beautiful. But I want to insist that if goes further, that you experience an actual relatedness, between you and the dewdrops, as if your eternal soul, your existence, and the drops, are entangled, related to each other.

I do not mean to say that it is your daily self, exactly, that is related to the drops. It is more, I suggest, as if your eternal self, the eternal part of you, is related to the drops. Almost as if it exists as a presence in the drops. You feel something like that.

But of course, since there is no basis for asserting something so fantastic in a scientific discussion, when I try to pursue it, or establish it, you may pull back hastily, and say, “No, I am not sure I really experience anything like that”. A cautious reader might even, at this moment, pull back, and say to me, “If you are trying to drag me into that kind of thing, I will go back over the discussion, and deny that I feel any real relatedness”.

And yet, I believe you do feel it. I believe if you allow yourself an impetuous reaction, if you are not too careful, you may find in yourself some version of the experience I describe, that you do feel — whether it is true or not — some thread connecting you to the dewdrop, a feeling, no matter how uncertain, that you and the dewdrop are related, that the drop and your relationship with the drop, shed light on your existence.

(Pages 50-51)