Spending 40 consecutive nights in an old growth forest. That is the plan. Opening myself to whatever happens in those long dark hours as I lie awake, thinking, searching, absorbing, being. Hoping to experience the essential, and perhaps the transcendent. For a fuller explanation of the plan, as well as its logistical details, please see Seeking the Essential- Part 1.
Lying awake beneath the stars. The vast night sky arches above me, darkly clear on a cool night. Clear, but for one small cloud that has drifted over the moon, allowing the countless stars to shine more brightly. I gaze at those stars, attempting to visualize each in turn. Each as one physically stunning entity, massive and complex with billions of years of history all its own. Wholly unique in its formation and existence, in its continuing evolution. Billions of stars exist in each galaxy, trillions in the observable galaxies, but beyond that we don’t know. We have no idea. Because we have no idea how big the universe is. No idea whatsoever. Despite our great scientific and technological advances, including the most excellent James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the size of the (ever-expanding) universe remains a mystery.
These aren’t new thoughts. I’ve been lying beneath the night sky, gazing at the stars, since I was a little kid. Gazing in wonder. And here is the interesting thing. Usually information and facts dull wonder. The more data known about a thing, the less wondrous it becomes. But not in this case. Not those stars, not this universe. The more learned about them, the more wondrous they become. Perhaps because the more we know, the more the mystery intensifies. Every one thing learned only serves to reveal how much remains beyond our comprehension. (Don’t even get me started on dark matter and dark energy.)
And we are also now finding that things long assumed to be true, postulated using data and math and reason, aren’t in fact accurate. For instance, the amount of time that passed after the Big Bang before universes began to form. Information revealed by the JWST is blasting our assumptions, that being just one of the newly revealed errors. (They apparently started to form much earlier than theorized.) So even when we think we know, scientifically, we could very well be wrong.
The universe has been expanding since the Big Bang, which happened about 13.8 billion years ago. It continues to expand to this very day, and will continue to do so, perhaps forever. Time as infinity. But what is it expanding into? We have no idea. We have no idea what lies beyond the boundaries of the universe. If anything. We can’t even begin to conceptualize, not really. A few hypotheses exist, but they all essentially fall in the realm of SWAGs. And yet so many people think that we humans are so superior, the most significant entities in existence. Nothing could possibly exist that is greater than us. As conflict continually erupts in various places around the world. As has been happening since humans evolved. 100,000 years or more have passed, but we still haven’t figured out how to live peacefully. And yet we are supposedly the pinnacle of existence.
It all began with the Big Bang. So we are told. At that moment, an infinitesimal instant before that big bang occurred, there existed a nearly infinitely dense and nearly infinitely small core of matter and energy. Then, boom! This core exploded, as it were, beginning its expansion, which continues through this day and beyond. What few people realize? Every last bit of matter and every last bit of energy that exist in this universe today existed in that tiny core. (If I tell you that you are made of stardust, I am being quite literal.) Every last thing in existence, in this world and beyond into the vast cosmos, existed 13.8 billion years ago (in one form or another).
But there exists a problem. Or rather an unanswered question. Consider two of the most basic and fundamental rules of the physical world: conservation of matter and conservation of energy. As just mentioned, neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed. Ever. So the question then becomes, how did that nearly infinitely small and nearly infinitely dense core come into existence? What caused its genesis? What, if anything, existed before it? Concurrent with it? From what was the substance of that core drawn? Because nothing can spontaneously spring into existence from naught, not within the physical realm, nor by the physical realm. The fundamental laws of the physical universe are immutable.
If you were expecting answers to these questions, I apologize. I don’t have any. Nor does anyone else.
And that is why I’ve been thinking about these things for decades. (In much greater detail about the astrophysics, but I won’t bore you further with information, endlessly fascinating though it is. And I won’t foist a single equation upon you.) Thinking about them, because answers don’t exist. It is the greatest mystery in this universe. And if that doesn’t engender a little wonder in a person, then nothing else ever will.
This all leads me to thinking about a book I read years ago, The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins presents many pieces of what he considers evidence that no god exists. That no god can exist. Given the passage of time, I don’t remember many details as I lie there, but two assertions in particular still stick with me. First, Dawkins asserts that no god exists because the vast majority of scientists, nearly every single one of them, are disbelievers. They, and he, are disbelievers, he says, in part because they accept as fact the evolution of humans from lower primates. I have two comments about this contention. Many believers also believe in evolution. A creation story can be fully valid in its essence without being taken literally. And many scientists are indeed believers. Always have been, and always will be. They likely don’t admit their beliefs to Dawkins, given that he will openly ridicule them, as he does in his book. And then there is the greater absurdity of his argument, that the views of some scientists in the 21st century provide some sort of empirical proof against a higher power. Amusing hubris.
Second, and this one is also kind of amusing, Dawkins says a higher power can’t exist because given the number of people in existence, past, present, and future, all continually thinking thoughts and doing things, no god could possibly assimilate all of that information. Why? Because he couldn’t possibly possess the required processing power. Hmmm… As if god were simply a human-like entity with superpowers, like Zeus. Or a data-churning entity like a mainframe. So I disagree completely with Dawkins. Whatever higher power exists, it is something so beyond human comprehension, something so much greater and vaster and encompassing, so intrinsically enmeshed with every last thing in existence, that we as people, here on this earth, have no way to conceptualize. Not for one instant. We may catch the faintest glimpse now and again, experience the slightest brush with the eternal, but those brief encounters only serve to highlight that in this life we comprehend essentially nothing.
Mysteries of multiple kinds exist in this universe and beyond. They are not mutually exclusive. They are one and the same.
Twelve square feet of forest floor. The approximate area I occupy while gazing starward. Twelve square feet of dark earth and disintegrating leaves, small stones and moss and insects, tawny pine needles and so many microscopic organisms. An entire ecosystem, existing here with me. We exist together in silence, the world dark around us. In silence, though not really. In forests like this the flora communicate with each other. Messages transmit through the air, along conduits beneath the ground, an entire interlocking conveyance system. Only recently have scientists really begun to understand the mechanisms. For so many millennia this communication was occurring all around us, but we had no idea. We don’t hear what we cannot hear, see what we cannot see, especially when making assumptions about what is possible and what isn’t. Blinding ourselves. Closing ourselves against greater possibilities, failing to perceive what is right there before us. What might we perceive if we stripped away every assumption, every preconceived notion, and truly observed this cosmos around us?
My newsletters are free to everyone, and will continue to be free. I am thrilled beyond words that you are reading them. However, if you wish to support my writing—the means by which I make my living—please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. For fewer than 14 cents per day (14 cents!) you can support my ongoing explorations and meditations. To me this seems a radical gesture. Even in this world of nameless and faceless billions, all jumbled together in digital mayhem, one person can still choose to support another person’s creative endeavor. How beautifully personal is that?
Previous 40-Night Newsletters: