. . . and Other Things We’ll Never Understand

Counting as fast as you can, at ten counts per second, for twenty-four hours a day and for twelve months, would only get you to less than one third of a billion. A billion is a big number.

The universe is estimated to be about 16 billion years old. Carbon dating pegs the earth at about 4.5 billion. From a mass of fiery elements that slowly cooled, (the earth is still very hot inside) have come condensation (water), plants, and finally animals, and although science has yet to discover how fire can create life, science will; it's only a matter of time. Science will also be able to create life from basic elements in a test tube someday; they are close to that now, at the dismay of many religious doctrines! Then we can sit back and say, "Good, but we still don't know much."

Humankind has walked the earth for only a fraction of the earth's four and a half billion years. We've been around for between 100,000 to 4 million years depending on which source you access. In other words, if the age of the earth was calculated as one year, humankind has been around for literally only hours, not much time at all, but long enough for a bunch of mutations to get us where we are.

Just as our ancestors didn't understand the stars, probably thinking that they were Gods, we don't understand much either, not at all; not yet, But someday we will, at least from a scientific standpoint. However, I'm afraid that there are things we will never understand.

We will never understand, fundamentally, why, or how, or when . . . or what happened. We will never understand what's in the other room across the hall from our universe, or behind it, or in front of it, or what happens when we cut the smallest particle we can distinguish . . . in half. Or where we go when we die.

Regardless of what our religions and good books tell us, if we are painfully honest with ourselves, we will never really know.

This seems to be a problem, this unknowing, an itch we can't scratch, a little part of our existence that we can't control. And that is very troubling. We like to have things explained to us in black and white, in a little box, so that we can get a neat handle on whatever it is we question. Then we can dominate it. But there are things that we will never get a handle on. . . . Never.

The reason we will never know some things is that these things are not knowable. They are at a completely different level of reality, a plane from which our organic minds and physical awareness can't respond. We have no footing to make comparisons; you might even say that reality is an alien concept. We have no essence with which to compare things; we are ants crawling across a page of Shakespeare with no capacity to understand, no way to expand our limited, organic, carbon based intelligence because it is far too elementary (made of elements). n n If we assume for a moment that what I theorize may be true, that is that we will never know, the immediate reaction might be that this not knowing is a problem. But it is not; it's the one who must know that is the problem.

Knowing anything in its essence is impossible. We can know the past and project our future based on the past, but we cannot know that curtain of reality subtly separating the past and the future because in that split moment lies ete
ity, a concept that is beyond our limited perceptions. The unborn, unchanging, beginningless, deathless; these are not knowable; these are beyond our power of perception as well. We can't even imagine forever, or timelessness. We don't know God, or if there is a God. We don't know Ultimate Reality.

To remain in that curtain of reality between the past and the future which occurs every moment, we must lose ourselves. We can't take ourselves along for the ride. We can never know this place, but we can be there, and when we are there, our entire existence changes.

This is one of those things we can never know, but we don't have to. If we find that crease beyond the universe - between the past and future where time stands still, then the one that has always insisted on knowing disappears, and in place of that is nothingness, from the standpoint of our organic, carbon-based intellect.

And this nothingness somehow becomes everything. What we have questioned in the past becomes inconsequential because we suddenly find ourselves absorbed in the immensity of that which will never be known. And there, believe it or not, is where we find our true freedom.