• Whether we search above or scourge things below, our human limitations are humongous! And yet we like to live happily ever after with our love ones!
• Discovering and inventing things is exhilarating! But it is meant to highlight our finiteness and to recognize a greater power who holds the infinite!
• The generation today no matter how informed and connected will ironically realize that “the more we know, the more we realize how much we do not know!”
• Let us be more spiritual. There are those who have gone ahead of us and seem to have found the way to peace and forever.

The Stars Above…

We all miss the beaches during this pandemic. There is the saline breeze, the incessant pounding of the waves, the grains scrubbing our foot, and the sun rays tanning our skin and producing Vitamin D for our immune system.

But we miss most of all the moonless view at night while our backs are laid against a contour-shaping sand. The sight is charming and daunting – the careessing twinkling like a massage to all our brain cells. How many stars are there? Is there even an end to the universe and its wonders?

There is none. Scientists posit that the universe is still expanding and they estimate that there are at least 1×10²⁴ of those glitters. And the nearest star, our sun, is but an old one. So crushing. It makes one so small not even in the magnitude of 1 is to 1×10²⁴. Even our average-sized sun already has a diameter that can engulf 1,300,000 earth-size planets inside.

And The Cells and Atoms Below.

A high schooler would see how tiny amoebas or protozoans are. If not, a cheap microscope purchase in the internet will do the trick. Amoebas average size is about 250-750 µm (1,000,000th of a meter). A particular one, Amoeba proteus, “has a 290 billion base pairs (one base pair is equal to one DNA code), making it 100 times larger than the human genome (which is 3 billion)!!!” 

We need supercomputers to sequence human genome. We need even greater power to sequence an amoeba’s! Any human brain at best can only appreciate that there are hundreds of thousands of genes in a chromosome where they reside. Fully grasping the dynamics of that is exponentially infinitesimal.

Now all living and non-living things consist of atoms – far smaller elements versus a cell. There are about 10¹⁴ atoms in a typical human cell. If we hardly understand how all cells work, how much more the atoms?

The God Particle

Then there is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. What is it? It is a 27 kilometer particle accelerator meant to discover the so-called dark matter or God particle. What on earth is that? Discovering Zeus in the flesh? Naah…

Opposite the hugeness of the universe, the basic element of matter, the atom, is nothing but a 99.99999999% empty space. This is because the electrons, protons, and neutrons inside are so miniscule. And the moving electrons are occupying space extremely away from the protons and neutrons in the middle.

We will have a compressed big ball inside a stadium if we collapse the distance in between the atoms of the earth! In other words, we are truly made of… nothing! Or we will be reduced to nothing when the restlessness of waves and energies stop!

Then there is the “nothing in nothing”. Physicists are confident that 80% of matter is not accounted for when they studied the movements of large objects in space like galaxies. The missing part is called dark matter because it does not emit light or energy. It is not easily detected that hopefully the LHC will help unfold.

In other words, that is another huge “reality” which we know nothing about either microscopically or macroscopically. And the LHC has been trying to discover that since September 2008!

The Limitations of Science…

We will all die without even denting the required knowledge that will put sense into our lives. The mysteries around us are so enormous whether about the atoms below or the galactic energies above. And yet we are curious beings and we have an incessant desire to grasp and comprehend.

We also boast about our discoveries and yet history is peppered with collateral damages! It is eerie that we even invent new things. It is so exhilarating to create and yet we do not care to acknowledge that we will never understand how all things interact and end.

And Historical Damages.

For instance, we bathe in the massive usage of fossil fuels in the 20th century. Now we are cursing carbon’s effect on the environment and rushing to replace all mode of transport with electric vehicles! Truth is, with this replacement, do we even fully understand how much energy is used to mine and create the elements of a photovoltaic cell? And how about the pollution that wasted solar panels cause? Or the efficiency of energy storage for that matter?

And plastics. Ah, the wonder of the past century. Now we are scampering to remove all single usage of this and yet oblivious to the massive fishing industry that is causing more pollution of our oceans? Do we stop eating fish altogether in the same way that we stop eating meat because it causes the most massive destruction of our forest and lands? Probably not but we should at least admit the limits of our “science” and find a more sustainable way to eat meat or fish.

Spirituality by Definition

Transcending science does not mean invalidating pure sciences. We simply recognize our pitfalls and limitations as humans. Then we look to the sages and scriptures for matters that are wrenching our souls and are beyond the reach of our extremely limited minds.

There are myriad realities that are so hard to explain if not viewed spiritually. For instance, one man and an entire nation unconscionably killed 6 million Jews! Or the other ethnic cleansing that equally resulted to millions either killed or displaced in Bosnia, Rwanda, or Sudan?

How do we explain that less than 1% of the entire population are hoarding wealth equivalent to the property of the bottom 50%? And how do we ignore food wastage in the West and yet people in Sub-Saharan African regions are hardly fed?

How do we explain that while millions lost their businesses and hundreds of millions displaced from their jobs during the 2020 pandemic, the pharmaceuticals and the technology companies doubled, tripled or even quadrupled their income? Can even the best tenets of capitalism explain that without touching the spiritual concept of man’s greed and shortsightedness?

The Fault in our Stars…

The humbling reality is that we have innumerable limits on our understanding of the physical realm or the unseen worlds of energies, stars, and well, angels and spirits? And all of us, whether we care to admit or not, we try to understand life through our faith on the theories of scientists or the wisdom of sages who seem to have transcended our limitations?

Astrology used to occupy a high respect amongst the developed world during the hippie days. But now, it is taking a strong appeal amongst millennials even if they realize that it is whimsically pedaled pseudoscience! They curiously (should we say desperately?) listen to the dispensed divine guidance on their affairs based on the positioning of heavenly bodies (aka their zodiac).

Puzzling and ironic. This generation is supposed to be the most informed and yet has tendency to cling even to the most preposterous view of things. Flat-Earthers still do exist and devoutly insist that the earth is like a pancake!

And Desire to Reach the Stars!

These are probably the reasons we all need to be more spiritual now. We have become like Aristotle who concluded that the more we know the more we realize we do not know. And we look to the sages, scriptures, and the stars who may have understood and seen things better than we do.

Science for instance, can never explain death and resurrection, however foolish and extremely spiritual that may sound. Jesus is a well-established historical figure. He died apparently on the cross like a criminal, laid in a tomb for days, and rose from the grave on the 3rd day! There is no way we can replicate resurrection in the lab! And yet we desire to be forgiven, avoid punishment, and live peacefully forever.

So let us accept our precariousness and be more spiritual. Bible, Koran, Bhagavad Gita, Nostradamus, Aristotle, Confucius, Gandhi, Origen, Lao Tze, Augustine, anyone?

(Source: Featured Image: Stefan Keller from Pixabay)