The reality

The reality is not only what you have here in front of you. The reality is very much larger. The cosmic horizon is 46 billion light-years away. This is as far as the light has traveled since the Big Bang. No one knows what’s beyond that edge. Maybe there are tons of universes out there.

If you look at the stars at night, you’ll look back in time. The stars you see can have gone out thousands of years ago, but you’re not aware of it. The twinkling lights you see have traveled for thousands and thousands of years before it reaches your eyes. If our sun would explode, it would take eight minutes before we would notice it.

Moreover, if someone in another galaxy were looking at our planet through a powerful telescope, he would see what was happening here thousands of years ago. What’s happening here right now can only be seen in that galaxy after thousands of years.

The now is irrelevant from the cosmic point of view. Everything is irrelevant from the cosmic point of view. We’re stuck here, in this time. If there are other civilizations out there, we will never be able to get in contact with them because of the distance and the time difference.

Some people believe that there is no reality outside their own mind. Philosophers call this idea solipsism. What’s this idea good for? Is it useful? I don’t think so.

Others believe that there are highly advanced civilizations out there which can travel faster than the speed of light or that angels and other strange beings can sneak in to our dimension through mysterious loopholes. It may well be so. I don’t know. However, is it meaningful to speculate about such beings if you have never met them? In what sense do such speculations improve your life situation?

To ponder space and time is maybe fun but it’s not particularly important. We need food and shelter. We need love and friendship. Such things are important. We don’t need war, greed, environmental disasters and injustice. We spend too much time and energy on unimportant or idiotic things and too little time on what really matters. This has to be changed. We need to wake up.

The world is unimaginable huge and life is unimaginable complex. The mistake most religious and spiritual people make is that they believe that they know what everything is all about. They know it all, but they arrive at different conclusions.

Many scientists have similar problems. They believe that they on the whole understand what‘s going on, but they don’t. What they know is just a small fraction of the totality. They look at life as if they were on the outside looking in, but they’re not. No one knows what life is all about. Life’s an incomprehensible mystery.