Some say the universe will expand forever and attain a cold death. Others theorize that if there’s enough dark matter in the universe, it will re-collapse into a Big Crunch, maybe to pulse out again in another Big Bang. Some cosmologists believe that this cycle of exploding and collapsing universes is endless. Those ancient cosmologists, the Hindu sages, thought the same thing.

Perhaps we’ll never know. If the universe is spatially infinite, then maybe knowledge is limitless, too. If the cosmos goes on forever, or if it pulses in and out eternally, then maybe our understanding of it in a physical sense will also remain forever incomplete. Physically, we humans aren’t limitless. Therefore, to attempt a complete human understanding of that which is physically or temporally endless may be a fruitless endeavor. The horizon of the cosmos will always recede before us, and we will remain the hunters of its secrets, explorers always tempted toward the obsession that ultimate truth lies just over the next horizon. It would be as if, knowing that numbers themselves are without limit, we would attempt to understand them and to reach their ultimate limit by continuing to count them.

This is the mistake we make when we attempt to quantify the truth, to put it in a jar by measuring it. A quantitative understanding of that which is physically limitless may always exceed our ability to understand it, because we can’t really measure the infinite.

To be human is to be only partly aware. Yet to be human is also to have the potential for a more complete awareness. If full awareness is ever attained, it won’t be due to any measure we make of spacetime or of any other variable which may be translated into numbers. It will simply be because we finally come to know that awareness can’t be measured.

To be aware that awareness is all there is, is all there is.

© 2023 by Michael C. Just