Amazing Earth

Whenever I think about our amazing Earth and just life in general, which is often, my mind is blown so exhaustively that it feels like I’m on drugs. It all seems like a big joke, in a good way, or a game. I just want to go over a few things today and talk about how truly amazing everything around us is.

I’ve touched on the subject before in these posts:
Aliens
Your Life Is an Unbelievable Coincidence
People and the World

Think of it: all 7 billion of us are hanging out on a self-sufficient rock with trillions of other organisms in empty space in a massive universe.

It’s so easy to get lost in our lives and tied up in our everyday affairs without having a full appreciation for everything around us. Everything seems so important, but in the grand scheme of things, it really isn’t. We’re each one of around 7 billion humans on our sphere of rock and water orbiting our star. Our star is one of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.

Take a second to try to understand what that means and how truly small and insignificant we are in those terms.

This image should give you some perspective (click to enlarge):

Amazing. When we look up at the stars and galaxies on a clear night we start to get a sense for how small we are, but I don’t think there’s really a way to understand how truly small we are.

On the other hand, our individual lives and our unique environments are supremely important and filled with wonder and amazement if you just think about it that way. Remember, reality is subjective, and it’s fun to switch your subjective reality around to different viewpoints to get a sense for the cohesive whole and where we as individuals fit into it all.

On our relatively small rock floating in space, we have astounding beauty.

Everything works so well together, and we’re all closely connected. For example, a particularly odorous flatulence exits my body into the room and three different people inhale the gas into their noses, causing them to cough, frown, perhaps curse, and likely experience significant distress.

My decision to eat two gigantic burritos the day before affected not only myself, but the restaurant owner, all the people with whom I interacted as a result of the decision, the three unfortunate souls who experienced the aftermath, all of the people with whom they interacted after the inhalation, and many more.

Let me use a different example.

Water evaporates from the ocean’s surface under the heat of the sun, rises up into the sky and condenses, forming fluffy white clouds. When the clouds condense enough, water droplets form and surrender to the force of gravity, falling to Earth’s surface and sinking underground where it’s pulled in by tree roots. The tree, on a cellular level, moves each water molecule up and throughout the entire tree, providing sustenance and allowing it to survive and fulfill one of its main purposes, which is to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide and water into breathable oxygen so all of us can breathe. The plankton in the ocean fulfill this purpose as well.

This oxygen is breathed and sustains us and all the rest of the animals so we can feed off of and use the trees and plankton and other animals to survive and fulfill our own purposes. Our purposes are often at odds with the purposes of other people, animals, and plants, but we all feed each other and serve each other.

Viewed as a whole, our planet is a living, breathing organism similarly to how we are living, breathing organisms. All of our cells work together so the organs can function, and all of our organs work together so our bodies can function and survive. Our bodies provide our consciousnesses with a temporary machine with which we can navigate this physical world for a while.

Maybe Earth as a whole has a single consciousness like we do and it interacts with the consciousnesses of other planets in the universe not unlike the way in which we communicate with other humans. Maybe we humans are actually just cells.

Look around you at the world. When you drive down the street in your car with your smartphone in your pocket and your coffee in the cup holder on the roads and bridges built by bulldozers and huge machines, you’re using the technology created by millions of different humans. In that way you’re connected to them all. Isn’t that amazing? We rely on and take for granted most of the things we use in our everyday lives. And we still think we’re separate from others. Ha!

Everything in our bodies works so unbelievably flawlessly to create physical life, to provide the lens we use to look upon our world.

As you read this with your eyes that work without your conscious control, taking in a trillion bits of information every second (I heard this number in the past but don’t feel like researching to see if it’s accurate – suffice to say, it’s a lot of information) and allowing our brains to form the images we see. In so doing, you are connecting quite directly with my mind and my personality. You’re receiving the thoughts I have put on this digital page and you might be thousands of miles from me, never having met me or known I existed before this moment.

By the way, Hi. I’m Chaki and I’m writing this from Connecticut in the USA. It’s getting cold here in New England, I’m bracing myself for the winter, and I’m going to this movie in an hour with my girlfriend and some friends. Shoot me an email or comment below and let me know what you’re doing right now, even if you’re reading this a year after I posted it.

(edit: the movie was amazing and I’ve just added it to my life goal list: hike the John Muir Trail, all 219 miles.)

My point is: don’t you see it? What an amazing, amazing world we live in. The more I learn about the world and the more I experience, the more I’m in awe. If I’m lucky enough to live another twenty years, at the rate I’m going, I’ll be walking around in the woods having a constant mindgasm.

Just for today, go about your life, wherever you may be, whatever you may be doing, and try to notice the beauty and the absolute harmony in everything around you. If you do, your day will be a little brighter. After a while, since there’s so much to see, so much to think about, it all just turns into a feeling. That feeling is joy.