Most people in our society believe that reality is the physical world they see in front of them. They may call themselves Christians or Muslims or Jews, or whatever, but they consider this to be religion – which is to say, a state of mind. Not only do most people in this society not believe in a higher reality, but they do not consider for a moment that we live on the teeniest naked and vulnerable mote of a planet in the midst of a cosmos so vast, so ancient, so complex, so mystifying, and so violent as to be inconceivable. This is the mundane physical world – the reality most of us believe in.
A few years ago, several fragments of a comet collided with a nearby planet. Each fragment exploded on impact. Several of the explosions were larger than this entire planet that we live on.
At about 7:00 a.m. on June 30, 1908, a fragment of a comet entered our atmosphere and exploded about five miles above the ground over a remote region of Siberia. The explosion destroyed over 1200 square miles of forest – an area four times the size of New York City. The force of the blast has been estimated at 15 or 20 megatons – over a thousand times the force of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
On June 6, 2002, a small asteroid exploded over the Mediterranean Sea between Libya and Crete. The force of the blast has been estimated at 26 kilotons – about twice the size of the Hiroshima blast.
On October 8, 2008, a small asteroid exploded over northern Sudan. About a year later, another small asteroid exploded just off the southern coast of one of the large islands of Indonesia.
NASA estimates that there are over 100,000 asteroids, whose orbits cross Earth’s orbit, that are large enough to destroy a large city if they collide with the Earth.
These are tiny things, compared to the possible effects of a nearby exploding star – such as Alpha Orionis (Betelgeuse) – which has been contracting at an accelerating rate since the mid 1990s, or to a gamma ray burst (which could burn away the entire atmosphere in seconds) from an exploding blue giant star. These are events that could happen at any moment.
This is the physical world – the mundane reality that we live in. Believing that there is an even more vast, complex and mystifying higher reality is clearly out of the question. Or is it?
18-Dhu al-Hijjah-1432
November 14, 2011
Which Way Is Up? 