A TO Z _ Bathing in MYSTERY and WEP post

 

"We are bathing in mystery and confusion 

on many subjects, 

and I think that 

will always be our destiny. 

The universe will always 

be much richer 

than our ability to understand it.” 

- Carl Sagan

Ghost of Carl Sagan here

We are an infinitesimal part of the universe becoming aware of itself.

The "me" that you and I are took 13.7 billion years to develop ... 

as science now believes.

Yet, science, like time and space, is fluid ... 

so who knows what science will believe next decade or next century?

We are an indication of what hydrogen atoms can do, of how to co-exist with the unknown.

The quest for answers of how to do so birthed folklore, myth, and superstition.

We seem to be always on the verge of finding answers to how we came  to be.

But like the horizon, 

those answers always tease us by being just out of reach eternally.

But that quest has taken us so far and will take us farther if only we find the courage to continue.

That first photo of the earth taken from the moon ...

firstly, it gave us the sense that we are afloat in the vast sea of space

and second, the realization that the future of this tiny world depends solely upon us.

We must cut off the moorings to common sense to get farther.

We navigate the world by our common-sense perception, 

but that perception has blinded us to reality again and again. 

We have mistaken our sensorial intuitions for facts of the universe.

 For millennia, we held wrong beliefs about Earth’s shape, motion, and position, 

because it feels flat and static beneath our feet, and central to the order of the cosmos. 

We have mistrusted processes and phenomena 

beyond the boundaries of what we can touch and feel with our limited senses.

From the development of life, 

which unfolds on scales of time too vast to be visible within a human lifetime, 

to quantum mechanics, 

which operates on subatomic scales imperceptible and almost inconceivable to the human observer.

 We have to be very careful not to impose our hopes and desires on the cosmos,

 but instead, in the scientific tradition and with the most open mind possible,

 see what the cosmos is saying to us.

And that means trusting our curiosity to ask WHAT IF? 

as often as possible and being brave enough to follow where that question leads.