Human cosmology #2*

It annoys me, it gnaws at me with aggravation, that photons travel at, well, the speed of photons – the speed of light – the top speed of the universe as Einstein would have it, as if they were cursed or blessed with rabid energy without appeal. It’s absurd to me that these tiniest of massless particle-waves (that is to say, minim mysterioso**) work so damned hard as their nature, their root existence. Other things stop, start, slow down, stumble, peter out, rest. Does a photon, in the relative vacuum of space or air or water or Jell-O, ever weary, lose energy, get the stuffing knocked out of it, die? Why in the hell not? Huffington Post headline, July 2013: “Photons Last At Least One Quintillian Years, New Study of Light Particles Suggests.” (A quintillian is a billion times a billion.) How utterly convenient that photons are just what we need, and travel as fast as we need them to, in order to see. Outside of that, what could possibly be the purpose for all that mindless drive?

Photons are my symbol for the incomprehensibility of the universe: Lord Nobody’s joke on human consciousness. Pure, relentless energy that never dies? I thank God that I don’t take them as the role model for my life: I have practically no energy and find the idea of chronic, or even predominant, movement (“progress,” success, struggle) laughable in a caustic way. I don’t even have racing thoughts. Like many spiritual people, meditators and the dysthymic, I value the idea and fact of stillness – a quiet, or empty, or perceiving, or just emotively sensing mind, gazing out from a mountain top or at a starry night. But inside that mind there is plenty of movement: electrons, fluids, blind busy nature. I wouldn’t want any photons in there, little bastards!

I think we are most fooled when we believe we are different from the momentum sludge of the cosmos. Even a professional deep thinker like Sam Harris, who has argued intricately against free will, wants the possibility that consciousness is a separate existent that may survive death. He’s an atheist, but that is his substitute for God. What if we – our thoughts, beauty, loves – are just the same celestial wheel of All, turning inexorably? As meaningful as a facial expression molded in clay? Though not a pleasant thought, that seems it would put an upward limit on the power of our passions, our direst screams, our deepest needs, where soul would revert to molecules. As light speed is supposedly the upward limit in nature.

This is why we need, ultimately, more feeling than awareness. We just want to feel love, in the end, not sense its limits.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_27.html.

** I made that up.