Contemplating the Boundless
What happens when we think deeply about infinite Nature?
I am beside myself every time I try to wrap my brain around the whole of existence. The natural world in which I find myself, and the universe at large, seems to be more than my all-too-human brain can fathom. And yet I sense a greater reality beyond all that which I can perceive. Where does this sense come from?
Death confounds us all. What do we really know about ourselves, our finite existence in this world? We tell ourselves stories. We invent elaborate worldviews to explain the unexplainable — some secular, others religious — but what do we really know about the world we inhabit? What do we really know about the fundamental reality that underlies everything that is?
The Boundless
Borrowing from the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander, Milton Munitz calls that fundamental reality The Boundless. In his book, Cosmic Understanding, he reports what Anaximander once said about this reality:
It is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some different, boundless nature, from which all the heavens arise and the kosmoi within them.
The “kosmoi” is the cosmos, I presume — the physical universe as we know it, as opposed to something meta-physical. Munitz…
