In my recent travels in the West, hiking through its mountains, I often had occasion to think about the author Herman Hesse.  Hesse's Siddhartha, author Hermann Hesse, a German novelist whose works were highly popular in the soul-searching years of the Sixties and Seventies, recounts the journey of the prince who would later be the Buddha.  As he tells the story, Siddhartha, a young prince of immense wealth and privilege, grew increasingly dissatisfied with his life.  Is there anything else, he wondered, to existence besides material abundance?

    So one day Siddhartha left the palace for the open road.  As he did, he encountered, in succession, an elderly man, a sick man, and a dead man.  He had never seen aging; he had never experienced sickness; he had never known of death.  These sights shattered all of the categories he had established for understanding the world.

    After many months of wandering, the prince arrives at a river, a peaceful, flowing river.  He is struck by the river's steadiness, its rhythms and quiescence, the way it seemed to flow unhindered, unbidden, ever and always free.  And always remaining the same.  

     So should be, Siddhartha concluded, life:  a single and continuous present, never beginning, yet never really ending, either.  We live into existence as a river.  It's all we need.  In the river, we see truth:  everything is one.

     Some physicists insist that time itself does not exist, that life is simply a series of events with no larger purpose or connecting force between them.  Like, I guess, a river.

    However, if a river is all that life is, we'll never really know it:  once we do, we don't.  We need form, we need boundaries.  In themselves, events do not constitute meaning. 

    And we all want meaning.

    Maybe we really do need a God.