Many people spend a lot of time wondering about what may be going on in ‘outer space’… The Terra-forming of Mars… The progress of Interstellar probes and telescopes… And whether there are aliens ‘out there’, and if so where are they? And so on…
We don’t spend so much time thinking about ‘inner space’… But, being largely made up (as we are) of combinations of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen (about 99% of our body) along with a few heavier elements, minerals an so on… it is interesting (I think) to be reminded that these ingredients are truly ancient, many have been around since the dawn of time, i.e. the ‘big bang’, or were created in super-heated chaos of the early Universe and we are just the current particular collation and combination of particles: each of us appearing to be a ‘solid physical body’ but each atom is actually mostly ‘space’ (in fact 99.9999999% space!)… So we are really not all that we may seem to be …or think we are!:
“…While most of the cells in your body regenerate every seven to 15 years, many of the particles that make up those cells have actually existed for millions of millennia. The hydrogen atoms in you were produced in the big bang, and the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms were made in burning stars. The very heavy elements in you were made in exploding stars.
The size of an atom is governed by the average location of its electrons. Nuclei are around 100,000 times smaller than the atoms they’re housed in. If the nucleus were the size of a peanut, the atom would be about the size of a baseball stadium. If we lost all the dead space inside our atoms, we would each be able to fit into a particle of lead dust, and the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube…”(source: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-particle-physics-of-you )
It seems to me that the concept that a merest sprinkling of cosmic matter, conformed in a particular way, can create the ‘illusion’ of a solid physical body …about which many today seem so narcissistically and pointlessly obsessed… yet which is over 99% ‘space’ is, in and of itself, a miracle! I also think that we should probably take much greater care that, through our thoughts, beliefs, deeds and actions, we fill our ‘inner space’ only with positive things and loving potential…
Some suggest that we need to allow God to ‘fill the space’ in our heart… yet it is clear that there is far more room than our heart alone for the Divine to inhabit! And whether you happen to have a spiritual philosophy or not… what is the worth, or purpose, of consciousness if we do not use it to fill our ‘inner space’ meaningfully?
