(Non)sense
Trying to make sense of the world?
The world, to our amazement some days, and to our frustration on others, does not make any sense.
The price of onions does not make sense (to either the farmer or the consumer). Many world leaders these days don’t make sense (depending on where you live, you know exactly who I am talking about ;)). What sort of a world would choose such leaders? What are they leading the world to?
The senseless violence around us does not make sense. But then isn’t peace just the flip side of the same coin and therefore equally nonsensical … but for the fact that we are more at peace with it?
Here we are on a world, where “nature abhors a vacuum” on the third rock from the sun, floating around in a vacuum (that nature apparently does not abhor as much), going around in circles or ellipses …
We do not know for certain how the universe was created. If we protest that this is not true and we know there was a big bang (which is the current mainstream theory), then perhaps we can at least agree that we definitely do not know why. Did someone light a firecracker in another reality to get a big-bang?
Neither do we know whether and how the universe will end: will it collapse on itself, expand forever or do something unexpectedly amazing? We do not know whether it is bounded or infinite. If it’s finite, what lies outside it? If it isn’t, can something really be infinite? Like those Russian dolls?
Who created everything? Or did it just happen? If there is a creator, who created the creator? Or did that just happen?
So how does it matter whether we are living in a hologram or inside someone else’s computer simulation … that does not change any of those questions … who made the hologram? Why? Computer simulation? Who made the computer? Who programmed it? Why? In what universe … and then is that universe infinite or infinitely embedded in ever larger universes?
These may be true … but even if they are, don’t they all sound fantastic?
We don’t know the first thing about the first thing and yet we are all the know-it-alls shouting from the roof tops that we are right and everyone else is wrong … or sitting somewhere depressed at why everyone else is shouting when it is so clearly apparent that we are right.
And then there is life … the conscious … and the unconscious … and everything in between. Matter and spirit ….
Not to mention everything else that we have created … not just buildings and cars and computers but families, societies, countries, economies … some tangibles and some intangibles ….
The only bit of unadulterated nature we come across on most days is the gravity holding us down
… and that is only because we haven’t quite figured a way to harness it yet.
If we are lucky, the air we breathe is filtered and air-conditioned. If not, it is laden with smoke and all sorts of pollutants — at least in the cities. The light, should we be lucky enough to have access to windows, passes through windows of various tints and shades. The ground is paved over or cemented for the most part.
And we are so full of ourselves that a beaver-dam is natural but anything we make is man-made.
Yet we sit around, trying to put things in order, both in our minds, as well as physically, in the world around us. Trying to make sense of the nonsense. Believing in the stories we tell ourselves. Often forgetting that how we have structured the world for our comprehension is not really how the world is … that there is nothing surprising about having math in art and art in chemistry …. because those are just tags … to help us organize our knowledge …
Perhaps there is one truth. Perhaps there are a zillion. We limit our perception of beauty by trying to define the parameters for perfection, forgetting that if something exists, it is perfect. And given that in an infinite universe, there are infinite possibilities, pretty much everything kinda exists … even the stuff that doesn’t.
Are we now going to pick and choose bits and pieces of the universe and say “Ah! This one looks right” and “Oh! This one shouldn't be here” … not that it hasn’t been attempted a zillion times before or will not be done a zillion times after …
Trying to make sense, trying to keep sane. Keeping a linear hold on time: Past, present and future. Trying not to be overwhelmed by a universe full of noise by filtering out most of it and focussing on one little bit at a time. All of it leading to the one certainty other than gravity — death — equally nonsensical in its finality and total sensory deprivation. Is that forever?
Not to get into the nuances and limitations of language … and what gets lost in every attempt at communication.
Trying to make sense of the nonsense. Doesn’t matter what you make of it. There’s no right and wrong here. Everything is as it should be. Irrespective of whether our views converge or diverge, life goes on.
Perhaps the only way things will make sense is when we strop trying to make sense of it and accept it for the nonsense that it is.
Gravity keeps us grounded. All the rest is nonsense.
Not quite pithy enough so here’s a second take:
Gravity keeps us grounded. All the rest is Levity.
