Scope III: The Meaning of Life

By the word of the LORD were the heavens made,
their starry host by the breath of his mouth.

- Psalm 33

Our minds often anaesthetise us from the affects of contemplating vastness. The result of this is that matters of vastness or infinity – like time, space and God – can never be truly grasped in their fullness because of our own finite state. Regardless of our huge ability as an evolved species, we nevertheless, naturally, render everything comparatively small – whether wittingly or unwittingly – because of our essentially limited scope of understanding. But in the rare moments that we do actually experience the brief sensation of wonderment and awe that comes with the touch of numinosity (and the painful awareness of eternity and vastness that it brings), our minds, with a shudder and a surge of loneliness and insignificance, close themselves off to our smallness and return, expanded and yet shrivelled, to their parochial concerns and environments.

Although they represent the sum of our understanding of things which are largely beyond us, our equations, our theories, our myths, legends, writings and unique forms of creativity – in the overall scope of existence – still only account for a fool’s grasp of the totality of things. We are less than microbes on the galactic scale; and our own Milky Way Galaxy, though incomprehensibly vast to us with its span of 100,000 light years, is in reality but a microbe on the universal scale. Whatever we know, or think we know, about the Universe, about God and about the dimensions of space and time, is, in harsh reality, only a flawed and exceptionally limited understanding compared to whatever such truths really are.

Yet, despite the disadvantages of our lowliness, against all the odds we still have a phenomenal grasp of many magnificent things; and we should never be put off by our lack of real understanding regarding the totality of existence. Neither should we cease searching for the Truth just because we will most likely never see it in its entirety. Those glimpses of Truth that we perceive – those cryptic bundles of data, sensation and symbolism that we find in astronomy, physics, mathematics, religion, theology, music, literature, philosophy, art, poetry and all other aesthetic, scientific and intellectual pursuits that the divine sparks of our souls emit – should not be seen as inconsequential just because we ourselves are so microscopic. Holistically, all of these higher pursuits form a larger, unified picture of reality.

The Truth that all of our virtuous, heroic pursuits reveal in togetherness, in whatever form they manifest, are far bigger than we are; and together, the combined result of our efforts reveal many fragmentary clues about the nature of the entirety of existence. In good time, as long as we don’t destroy ourselves first, we will, as a species, have put an interesting, if imperfect, picture together.

By moving closer towards such things in our minds and our souls we turn our back on the void – that pit of hopelessness, fecklessness and nothingness – and tread in the direction of eternity. By heightening our perception to the mysteries of God, the Universe and Eternity – for all are one – we merge ourselves with the spirit and gradual revelation of Its  purpose. By following the multitudinous routes of discovery available to us as a sub-divine species – as we all surely must – we raise ourselves closer, if only a mote closer, to fulfilling our ultimate human purpose:– to understand and compliment the plan of God through the keys and symbols he has granted us the perception, knowledge and awareness to hold, use and unravel.