Have you ever wanted to return to a universe you've never seen?

June 12, 2011 10:10 PM

Did you ever feel trapped on this planet? Like there's a whole universe of stuff you could know and explore, be a part of, know, but your perspective is always going to be pathetically limited and it's this huge tragedy and trivial everyday awareness at the same time? How do you deal with it other than ignoring it and 'growing up' or 'settling', like with a partner you love but aren't in love with?

To give context: I was reading bits of 'Paradise Lost' and just as a mental experiment, tried to imagine that Milton's god was real. I gave it a shot. I figured, what if I reach out to the universe and suddenly feel something I never felt before, out there. But of course I didn't. Hell, I'd love to know if Milton himself 'felt' his God existing like that, like how you know someone's watching you (I imagine).

Instead, as usual, I felt the vastness of the universe stretching out beyond my fingertips. Like here I was on my bed, but I'm a tiny speck on the planet that's revolving around one sun out of billions, in a out-of-the-way section of the galaxy that revolves around a cluster of galaxies somewhere in a quadrant of clumped-up stars that are moving away from each other at speeds slightly slower than they are moving away from other clumps.....

I felt exactly like a small child in an empty house that, for a second, tries to check if mommy is still inside, and calls out loudly, but all they get in return is silence and echoes.

I've always struggled with feeling like that. I guess science fiction at an impressionable age didn't help. It's worse because I/we can't wander. Maybe that wouldn't help anyway-- if the universe is empty besides us. Maybe it'd be worse if I 'wandered' but only found more emptiness and barren worlds. Like wandering a house, it makes sense to stay in the one heated/lit room, right. But if you can't leave that room, it's locked from the outside, wouldn't you keep thinking, 'if only I could go outside my room, this feeling would change, and at least I'd know where I am'?

I just 'know' the universe isn't barren. Just like I 'know' that Milton's God doesn't exist. Instead of feeling safe here, sometimes (when I stop ignoring the feeling, and.or life slows down enough for me to remember it) I just feel this horrible bittersweetness, this awful pain at knowing that more than 99% of what is knowable about the universe is something I could never see or touch. It's not a lust for knowledge. I'm okay not knowing random things about insects, say, or economics. It's just that thinking that, I feel lonely.

It's not facts I'm missing, I feel like. It's whole words of possibility. Like (and this is weird for an introvert who hates parties), I feel sure the universe has a loud, warm party going on somewhere, and I'm never going to make it, never going to meet anyone. Stuck here, where the music is always country. That sort of thing.

I'm mostly okay with it. I've grown up enough to say I love the Earth so much that it's enough. Maybe this is why some people are religious? It allows them to feel they're 'plugged in' to some cosmic truth, are in on the secret, are part of the party? If I believed, maybe I'd feel that the party is here on Earth. In many ways, of course, it is, inevitably. In many ways, it's not, I'm sure. Certain not if 'Earth' just means humans. I don't know what kind of fun whales are having, even. There are still many mysteries here... but it's not the same.

I don't know if any of you have watched/read an anime called 'Please Save My Earth', but it's that kind of nostalgic feeling Mokuren must have had before she'd ever seen Earth. This kind of 'wanting to return to somewhere you've never been' feeling. Like being lost in the woods outside your house, and for a second you imagine the woods go on forever, and around the next tree you may see a river you'd never seen before, and it stretches into the sky. What if?

So what do you do?

posted by reenka to Religion & Philosophy