When you read about the puzzling neurological anomalies that can occur in humans, especially after brain trauma, it makes you wonder if we really are some miraculous kind of soft machine or supercomputer that contains all the code for every conceivable ability, experience, or trait, and that sometimes, after a stroke or a good head-smacking, things get knocked around and out of whack so that we start running some rogue piece of programming that wasn’t part of our factory settings, or start glitching, or accessing software that’s been behind a firewall because we weren’t approved users yet. Like the English-speaking kid in Atlanta who got a concussion playing soccer and woke up speaking fluent Spanish. Or the guy who didn’t start drawing until after a brain hemorrhage and now sells his digital images to video game developers. Or the 10-year-old who got hit in the head with a baseball and after a few days of headaches turned into a human calculator/hard drive. I know this is not a fairytale and trauma is suffering and many of these cases arise in the context of terrible accidents. I know doctors and scientists have studied these phenomena and have hypotheses for what causes them and names for them like acquired savant syndrome. But that doesn’t cancel out what the these select souls could prepare us to understand about ourselves. Like the possibility that we still know as little about our own being, our true selves, as we do about things like ball lightning, or Stonehenge, or dark matter, or how animals can migrate back to the exact (within 6 feet) location of their birth. In other words, we don’t know all that much. I don’t think this is discouraging at all. I think it’s fearsome but breathtaking. Stupefying but stupendous. Through our willing submission to this mystery, we might begin to grasp the lever of our near-infinite potential. Think about how the unraveling of your total DNA would stretch from here to the sun and back 61 times. Or how you have no less than 30 trillion cells in your body (including red blood cells but not including bacteria). Or how the actual, solid matter of all 7 billion humans on earth could fit into the volume of a sugar cube (since 99.9999999% of matter is the empty space between atomic elements). Is it mere hubris to think that within these incomprehensible numbers lies something even more incomprehensible? That we ourselves are infinite and eternal. Subject to every imaginable pain and joy. That we are like the gods. That we are part of God. That when something scares us or beats us down or holds us back, it still doesn’t touch our luminous core. That when a part of us is imprisoned, another part is released, when a part of us short circuits, another is rewired, and when a part (or even all) of us dies, another part of us is born. While we may be diminished for a time, ultimately, we expand again. Maybe the promise of our holiest oracles is not merely a prescription narcotic for our fragile psyches, but the very truth, a raw diamond mistaken for a pebble, a message so unimaginably hopeful we can’t help but recoil and turn away, even the affirmation of the Light saying all is possible, and nothing is lost.