Gaining Perspective

Though at the end of my last post I promised to talk about turkeys, I'm still waiting on an especially promising book on that topic to arrive via interlibrary loan, so that subject will have to wait until next time. (Fear not! I promise an abundance of turkey-related facts, lore, and musings very, very soon.)

For this outing, I wanted to talk about the topic of perspective. How do we look at ourselves in the grand scheme of things, relative to the vastness of space? I started ruminating on this topic lately due to the time of year: around this time of year there was a Core 9 lecture I'd give (since 2011) about Comparative Religions and I never could seem to find space to include an example about potential common ground between religious and non-religious worldviews. I thought one of the more promising avenues was by exploring how both a theistic worldview and a more dominantly scientific worldview can both tend to portray humans as quite minuscule in relation to the cosmos all around. There are three examples that I think demonstrate this tendency the best.

The first is from the Hindu Bhagavata Purana, an enormous collection of stories reinforcing devotion to the many forms of the god Vishnu, including one of his more playful forms, Krishna. (If you are interested in getting a translation of these stories, you can find one here and also here). In the most famous series of stories involving Krishna, the god incarnates among humans in order to destroy a demon. He is born miraculously to a human mother (Yashoda) and from the time of his birth carries a number of miraculous (not to mention mischievous) activities. In one example, as a toddler he places a clump of dirt in his mouth and Yashoda quickly steps in to dig it out. When she pries open his mouth, she instead sees the entire span of the universe and beyond, the creation and destruction of galaxies, swirls of constellations, and so on.

Here is an image from a series of Indian comics:

Here is an artist's depiction of mother and child together, with her vision in the background behind them:

Scholar of Indian religions Wendy Doniger has written about how this and other narrative in Hinduism accomplish the blending of the "microscopic and telescopic" views of human existence. On the one hand, what could be more mundane than a parent stooping to pick something of a child's mouth? At the other end, what could be more grand than the swirl of stars? To blend these views, the microscope and the telescope, is the special province of myth and it leaves poor Yashoda's mind blown. Krishna, even as a baby, sees her distress and removes the vision from her eyes.

Out of the Jewish theistic tradition, we have Job's encounter with Yahweh. For those very few of you who do not know poor Job's plight, he has lost his livelihood, his home, his family, and his health as the result of a wager between God and Satan (who in the original text is not the figure of ultimate evil he becomes in Christian tradition, but rather an agent of testing who works for God). Job has the opportunity to question God, who appears (as is often the case in the Hebrew texts) as a raging storm. Here is William Blake's interpretation of that encounter:

God's reply to Job puts the poor beseeching human in his place: "Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it? Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid the cornerstone, while the morning stars sang in chorus and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" (Job 38: 4-7). [As an aside, the reference to "sons of God" is probably a sign of the influence of the cultural context of the Hebrew narratives. Mesopotamian religions as a whole conceived of councils of gods with one lead god. This is also visible in God's relationship with Satan in this same text.] Like Yashoda, Job's mind reels as God goes on for chapter after chapter, reiterating again and again how big the universe is and how little Job is. Put in his place, Job meekly slinks away.

Moving out of the realm of religious writings, forty years ago last month, NASA launched the space probe Voyager 1, which has become the first human-made spacecraft to reach interstellar space. (You can still check its mission status, if you're interested, along with its successor, Voyager 2.) In popular culture, the later consequences of the probe's journey were fodder for the plot of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. As the probe was leaving the solar system in early 1990, its cameras were turned around to look back towards earth and take one last image of what our planet looks like from four billion -- that's billion -- miles away. This is what that looks like:

Can you see us? We're that tiny bluish-white speck toward the lower right corner. The image has become known as the "Pale Blue Dot" photo and was the inspiration for Carl Sagan's book of the same name. In that book, Sagan reflects on the image in this way: 

                    Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone
                    you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human
                    being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and                     
                    suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic
                    doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator
                    and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple
                    in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer,
                    every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every
                    "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived
                    there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Besides demonstrating how a single human -- along with his/her thoughts, dreams, aspirations, joys, pains, etc., etc. -- is swallowed up next to the expanse of everything that is, the three examples also employ similar imagery. It's dirt in Krishna's mouth that reveals the cosmic wonder to Yashoda. Job, as he grovels before God, says that he "repents in dust and ashes." For Sagan, our entire species is a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." On this point, we could add the observation of Kurt Vonnegut (another Secular Humanist) in Cat's Cradle humans are "mud that got to sit up and look
around." No doubt this goes to show that humans are but specks in the scope of all time and space, and would do well to remember that when tempted towards thoughts of grandeur. If you think that you're tiny and small compared to all that exists, you're right. We should all gain a healthy dose of humility from the perspective each example offers.

On the other hand, each story uses the seemingly lowliest of the low -- the very soil and ground beneath our feet -- to transport us to contemplation of the highest of the high. Doniger would refer to this as the flip of lenses between microscope/telescope and this metaphor may provide us with an affirming interpretation of the message behind these tales. Let us remember what we learned in my last post from Wendell Berry: every particle of dirt, as the source of life, is sacred. If we are but specks of "dirt," even metaphorically, can't the same be said of each and every one of us? Being small does not mean being insignificant.

When Yashoda looked in Krishna's mouth, she did not choose to see the cosmos in a speck of dirt, but by taking to heart that story's lesson, along with the lessons of Job and the Pale Blue Dot, whenever we look at even the tiniest grain of dirt, dust, or mud, we can use our newly-gained insight to view it as just as majestic and grand as the burgeoning of galaxies, the death-throes of stars, the trembling of the universe itself. Each of us is nothing. Each of us is everything. We are specks of dust. We are giants.

Next time (unless something else intervenes), there will be turkeys! Until then, take care.