The Universe is Vast

I remember when I was living in my apartment in Virginia I had a poster on the wall that I got from the Smithsonian store at National Airport. It was a poster entitled “The Known Universe.” This poster had an image of the solar system with the sun and the nine planets in orbit. This image had a box around it and then a line connected to the box that went to a dot in the Milky Way Galaxy. That dot was where our solar system was in relation to the rest of the star groups in the Milky Way Galaxy. In the vastness of the Milky Way our solar system is just a dot in the swirling mass of stars and gas. Then there was a box around the Milky Way and a line that brought this box into a dot inside an area known as a star system. This system had a box around it and a line that brought it into another dot in an area at the top of the poster that stretched the whole length of the poster underneath the title, “The Known Universe.” This was all that “we” know because these stars and galaxies are all that the Hubble Telescope can see and detect.

When I think about this poster I am supremely humbled. I remember thinking how could we give so much importance to our problems and issues and even to ourselves when this universe is so vast. We are such a minute part of this gargantuan universe that whatever we do on this planet, in our country, in our community, in our home is in the grand scheme of things so insignificant. I am reminded of the Buddhist saying that 100 years from now everyone will be gone. Well it takes more than 70,000 years to get to the next star Proxima Centauri, let alone the next galaxy. How can we measure time when we are not even there to look at the watch?

When we realize our own minuteness we come to the understanding that it is our collective selves and our unity with the cosmos that gives us significance. Only when we align with The All, the source of all things, can we have an identity with the universe. It is our connection to the universal that gives us significance.

So let go, and let God, surrender your ego to the universal Spirit. Let the Cosmos think, feel, speak, act, love and breathe through you. Be at one with the divinity within you and you will have all the power of this vast universe behind everything you undertake.

Author: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt

 

 This is not the original image I saw but it represents the same concept