I Don't Think You Realize How Big the Universe Is

Two friends are walking through a meadow looking up at the sky and across at the hills beyond. They glance at the blossom of meadow flowers scattered joyfully around them. They watch a brown cow chewing its selection of grass. They hear the sheep in the distance on the slopes nearby. A crow caws in the distance, and a butterfly darts ahead of them through the tall grass.

Says one to the other, "I repeat! I do not think that you realize how big the universe actually is."

She repeats, "That is a statement that I know to be true. You have no idea how big the universe actually is. Well, perhaps, you think that you do, but you really don't. How do I know?"

Continuing she says, "I know that you have no idea how big the universe is because you are a human being thinking with a human brain. Let me tell you that the human brain cannot conceive of the actual size of the universe."

She pauses and looks at her friend who in the silence takes a deep breath and smiles crazily. They hear the crow and look towards the tall forest. They breath deeply and the girl sighs. She takes a deep breath and says, "You don't believe me do you. Ah! You are afraid to admit that you do not grasp what I am getting at. Or, is it that you have never really tried to imagine how big the universe actually is. Let me ask. What is the worst headache that you ever had? Well multiply that by a billion billion times and see if you can imagine the pain."

The young boy again smiles at his friend. He has other things on his mind, but all she can say is, "The fact is that we as humans can in no way imagine the scale of things around us let alone the scales that are involved in the universe. What is truly amazing then is that we have the arrogance to believe that we can use what we think of as powerful machines to tell us what we are made up of. We presently have no idea."

The girl is rather beautiful and the young man knows it. He is willing to tolerate a lot, but this rudeness of his friend is annoying. She won't stop and says, "The fact is that human beings are so ignorant of reality that they do not even know that they are ignorant. Such is bliss as they say. We are in bliss and it is because we are so terribly stupid."

"Who are you calling stupid?" he asks.

"Oops," she says, followed with, " You are terribly smart, you ass ...."

"Can I be honest?" she asks.

"Yes! Well, perhaps," the boy replies trying to be nice.

"No!" the girl says, and adds, "You are fooling yourself. You think that there are things that you can know, but you are fooling yourself. You live with the illusion, delusion, or whatever you wish to call it that you can know. That is a stupid thing to think. The reality is that you are not equiped to know. You think that you are, but your reality is that you are not. What's more, you may never be."

"I don't believe you," he replies. Smiling the boy says with complete confidence, "There are some things, I know, and I know how big the universe actually is. I really do."

"No, you don't," she responds, "You never did, and you never will. You are too stupid to and you always will be too stupid to. The scale of the universe is the scale of what we know to be too big to comprehend. We fool ourselves into thinking that we do understand, but we don't and we never will. For millions of years we will fool ourselves into thinking we can comprehend the scale of the universe, but we never can. It is impossible for us to really understand. We are confined to our part of the universe, that which we can grasp and understand, but that is all. We are complete ass.... when it comes to understanding the scale of the universe. Believe me! That is the truth and we deceive ourselves if we think otherwise."

"Suppose that you are right," the boy replies, "What then?"

"Then we begin to understand something about who we are and how remarkable we are. We begin to understand how remarkable our world really is. We begin to have awe and wonder. We begin to have respect and we begin to understand how truly lucky we are just to even take one breath in our universe."

The Challenge of Our Inner Vision

We might be forgiven, if we did not know better. I have often heard the comment that so-and-so believes such-and-such, or even worse that so-and-so believed such-and-such. Who really knows what they believe when, or what someone else believed when.

History shows that it is best to keep your true beliefs well hidden, and most, perhaps, all people do. The consequences of revealing to the public what you truly believe are enormous. The results are greater than what most people can endure. So it is that many people hide away their true beliefs well within their brain.

You would think that this would be enough to save them from condemnation by others. The reality is very different. One of the truly revolutionary ideas of Jesus of Nasareth and the simple message of Christian teaching was that it did not matter that you believed something that was not part of the existing creed of what you were supposed to believe. The historical Christ took it upon himself to announce that you need not believe in all the mumbo jumbo of what the church of the time was trying to tell you. He was a revolutionary in the art of inner vision and freedom from guilt.

Jesus proclaimed that all you had to have was faith in yourself and that the love you nurtured for yourself would transend all other beliefs and habits. Once you loved yourself, he declared, it is possible to love others. He realized that creating an inner vision of love for oneself rather than fear for what others thought or might do, would transform the way people conducted their daily lives. The results would bring about a world that had respect and purpose. Jesus the man saw that it was possible to create a world in which there was joy and happiness. Jesus the man never said that he was special, but that he had a message of love and a method of building self respect that would lead to joy and happiness, an inner and outer vision, a challenge for the whole community.

So that is how the sermon on the mount stated that all you had to do to be loved was to love yourself, have respect for yourself. Then, with the love that you have for yourself, do unto others what you would do for yourself. What challenges us always is this inner vision that we have of ourselves.

It is very difficult to love another person, if you don't have enough love to respect yourself. Once you lose personal self respect, you lose almost everything that gives joy. If you do not experience joy, then you need to think about your inner vision and how you may change the way you regard or treat yourself. To repair a poor self image, you can follow a simple rule.

The rule that will repair and heal your self image is that of doing something for another person that respects that other person's integrity and self image. By taking that step of helping another person regain their dignity or build their self image, you heal your own self image. This is because to consider another first requires that you change to a giver rather than a taker. The self image of a giver is always higher than that of a taker. This is the challenge of our inner vision.