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 unaware of it. The twinkling lights you see have traveled for thousands of years before reaching your eyes. If our sun would explode, it would take eight minutes before we would notice it.
Moreover, if someone in another galaxy looked at our planet through a powerful telescope, he would see what was happening 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 at this time. If there are other civilizations out there, we will never be able to contact them because of the distance and the time difference.
Some people believe that there is no reality outside their own minds. Philosophers call this idea solipsism. What’s this idea good for? Is it useful? I don’t think so.
Others believe that highly advanced civilizations can travel faster than the speed of light or that angels and other strange beings can sneak into 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?
Pondering space and time may be fun, but it’s not particularly important. We need food and shelter, love and friendship. Such things are important. We don’t need war, greed, environmental disasters, or 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 unimaginably huge, and life is unimaginably complex. Most religious and spiritual people make the mistake of believing that they know what everything is about. They know it all, but they arrive at different conclusions.
Many scientists have similar problems. They believe they understand what‘s happening, but they don’t. What they know is just a tiny 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.
