Pondering Infinity

For at least the last month, whenever I've gotten high I've caught glimpses of infinity.  And every time, it feels like it's going to break my brain.  I'm starting to think it's just stretching it, allowing it to open up to greater possibilities and a greater scope of awareness.  So what does infinity feel like?  Here are a few glimpses:

Infinity can be glimpsed by realizing:

  • Just how vast and infinite our universe is in terms of space and time:
    • There are billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone and billions of galaxies that we are currently able to see
    •  The Big Bang is estimated to have occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.  The earth formed 4.6 billion years ago.  Dinosaurs lived 246-66 million years ago.
    •  The Old Kingdom of Egypt (2700-2200 BCE) is about as distant from the New Kingdom (1570-1069 BCE) as the year 1 CE from the present day.  When King Tutankhamun looked back at the Old Kingdom it was 2,400 years before his birth (circa 1341 BCE).
  • How complex our universe is, its fractal nature from its smallest to its largest parts:
    • There are about 28-36 trillion cells in the human body.  There are 100 trillion atoms in each cell (organized into about 40 million proteins, all interacting with each other to keep the cell alive).
    • There are as many atoms in a teaspoon of water as there are teaspoons of water in all the oceans of the Earth
    • The coast of California is 840 miles long, but due to its fractal nature, as you zoom in and measure with more and more precisions, it would get longer and longer, approaching infinity.
    • 8.1 billion humans live on the Earth.  A single human is similar in scale to a single atom compared to a cell or a cell compared to the human body.
    • There are millions of different species on earth.  Humans make up only 0.01% of the biomass on Earth.  (Plants account for 82.4% and bacteria for 12.8%)
    • Is it possible that with billions of galaxies, each having billions of stars, all the combined life on Earth is similar in scale to a single cell in our body compared to the body as a whole
  • If the world were to split into a multiverse of every possibility, just how many universes there could be:
    • Imagine every subatomic particle at the quantum dynamical level having a probability field describing the positions it may occupy.  The possibilities for a single subatomic particle are infinite.  Multiply these by every subatomic particle in the universe, and the possibilities are mind-boggling.

Sometimes I catch glimpses of what it would feel like to be in someone else's body, to have lived their life and have had their experiences.  It's a completely different view of the world with a completely different way of thinking and experiencing.  If we were to expand our minds to understand just the diversity of life on this planet, we'd have to increase this by at least 8 billion times (117 billion if we want to include every human who has ever lived on the Earth).  And what about other planets or extraterrestrial species?

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have God's perspective and to see every planet, every life, every cell, and every atom in the universe.  That's the thought that can blow your mind.  Even if we just imagine ourselves... for those who believe that we live multiple lives on Earth and that these are all part of some underlying soul or larger Self, trying to comprehend all of the moments and thoughts of all the lives we may have lived at the same time is another mind-expanding way to feel infinity - and perhaps to feel a part of your true self as well.

Sometimes I imagine a random string of 1's and 0's.  If this were a computer program and we enumerate all infinite possibilities one-by-one, we eventually would come to a program that describes every atom and every moment in the universe.  Is it possible that our entire universe is just one number chosen out of the infinite random possibilities?  This is akin to the Library of Babel containing books with every possible combination of letters.  A copy of every book that has ever existed would be somewhere in this library, as well as a book for every individual, describing every moment of their life in detail, as well as a book describing every moment in the universe.

These kinds of thoughts stretch, expand, and sometimes hurt my head.  They are amazing.  They are enjoyable.  I wonder if they are instructive or helpful to my spiritual development.  When I think about how big the universe actually is and how small the part is that I see out of all the infinite expanse of possibilities, I think I know why even the most enlightened guru attests that he his spiritual liberation has only allowed him to glimpse the tiniest piece of a toe on the foot of God.

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