Searching for answers

How big are we? How and where do we fit in this cosmic picture? As we toil about fixated on ticker tapes, fretting over whether the stock market will go up or down tomorrow, whether 2008 will be the first recession in the United States in almost two decades, or who will be elected the next President of the United States, I cannot help but wonder what difference does it all make at the end of our lives?

Consider that a human is a speck of a creature amongst six billion other humans. A human is even a smaller speck amongst billions of other critters on this planet. Our planet is a speck amongst billions of other planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. And our Galaxy is a speck amongst billions of other Galaxies. Mankind and all our efforts is a speck in a speck in a speck. A speck cubed (speck3). The interesting thing is that all of this is somehow interconnected and in someway, it is all talking to itself. Which makes me wonder, how is it doing that?

And how big is this speck3 we call home, relative to just our galaxy?  Consider that the Milky Way is 27,000 light years in length – the distance light travels in 27,000 years.

How far is that? To put a light year into perspective, consider that light travels around the earth about eight times in one second. One day has 86,400 seconds, so a beam of light laps the earth about 700,000 times in a day. That means this pure little blob of energy that we call photons, would travel around the earth 250 million times in a year, the distance of one light year. To put the length of the galaxy into perspective and how big we are in this domain, multiply 250 million by the length of the Milky Way Galaxy in light years, 27,000, and we have the answer: the distance across the Milky Way Galaxy is approximately equivalent to circling our earth 6,800 billion times.

That is a one big galaxy, but it is just one of billions in the entire universe. Yet our frame of reference is only within our speck3 – inside of this is all of mankind’s history and efforts. All the wars ever fought, all the hatred ever sown, all the industries ever created, all the products envisioned and designed, all the children ever born, every living organism we know, all reside in a speck3 from a divine point of view.

Consider the long list of quintessential questions that we seek to answer; who am I, why am I here, where did I come from, where am I going, who and what is God, where might this Source live, what is the plan, what might be the universal laws by which this supreme Source influences life?

The universe is a very different beast if one ever stops long enough to contemplate it. It knows no time, has no boundaries, and certainly no 401k retirement plans. Before the galaxies existed and before our solar system and planet were formed, there was only energy. From the point of view of the divine, there is no such thing as destruction or death, there is only energy and energy does not die. It is neither created nor destroyed, merely transformed.

To this divine Source, perhaps the primary law may be nothing more complex than the perpetuation of evolution. Perhaps the entire universe is a closed, regenerative system devoid of time, constantly absorbing and reusing itself for the primary law. Consider that this Source, is the collective sum of all living and non-living, that reality is both physical and non-physical, that DNA is the secret language to allow electrical impulses - information and thoughts – a common means by which to communicate. Nobel laureates tell us that all matter is pure energy, all overlapping, interlocked, connected and yet separated. Maybe the sole purpose of it all is to evolve to a higher state, and that we too are pure energy, and we call this a soul, and we are a living ingredient of this divine Source and the Source is a living ingredient in us. It’s just not something we can see or touch, but we can feel it, and we can communicate with it, and it can communicate with us, at a cellular level.

This is a bit too much to absorb. On second thought, it’s far easier to track my 401k accounts on MSN Money every day. At least that is something tangible and it’s very important to be able to grasp hold of something tangible. It also does not require a great deal of feeling or even thought, and it certainly does not require communicating at a cellular level. Who would want to do that when you can use a cell phone? Now hold on a second, if we combine these last points, I might be onto something here. Maybe, just maybe, the Source has a cell phone? I wonder what his number is? Maybe Morgan Freeman knows, he’s God right?

Download full article here