Do you remember as a child looking up at the sky, a sky full of stars, and being in “awe”, feeling like you were a tiny part of an immensity you needed to understand?
Kids notice things most of us in our busy lives don’t. Kids love planets, and the stars, they look up at the world and wonder - “What’s out there?” It is truly something we need to keep alive in us, as we age and the physical world crowds in, and we become so damn sure of ourselves and everything.
Last week I visited the Grand Canyon. I’m on a kind of “Farewell Tour” and needed to see this place, just stand there and take it in. It was like I was that boy again, looking at the sky filled with stars and wondering how my small piece in it, fits. I get these moments of metanoia, and spiritual uplifting when faced with the immensity of things. I’ve learned to keep the “wonder” inside me, alive.
The spiritual value of the Grand Canyon or any immense place, is inside us but we do need to be there with that image of immensity. You can’t find it in a film, or a book or on Tik-Tok, or by description and word of mouth. Standing there, before it, it makes you feel small, a flash in time, a piece of dust tossed in the wind of everything.
We stand on the edge of nothingness, when we stand lost in an immense forest, are at the edge of an erupting volcano, at the edge of a huge waterfall, or are high in the sky looking down from an airplane. Immensity takes us close to our nothingness. It’s an important reminder for us all, how “nothing” we are. It is an ancient, base, archetypical feeling, and piece of wisdom.
"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time?”
- Fredrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, The Parable Of The Madman
Our modern world, our technology, and our ceaseless quest to tame nature and the forces she expels - it is but the wish to control, and make the world predictable, concrete, factual, and known. Yet, the mystery stands there before us, no matter how hard we work to make a predictable and safe world through science and progress.
I admire much that technology provides us. Take GPS. I remember spending hours driving around to find a house of a friend I had journeyed to visit. No phone. No Waze. Just driving around lost. But at the same time, I miss that feeling of “being lost” and the possibilities it offered. We lose something when we tame aspects of life. We need to learn to use technology better or be conquered and enslaved by it.
“Art is both the taking and giving of beauty; the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.” -Ansel Adams.
Less and less, we stand before the immense things of the world and acknowledge the sacred forces at work, the miraculousness of everything we belong a part of. And that “dispiriting” is profound and a negative for our modern world. We have lost something, making our world smaller and smaller when in fact it is immense and we, but a fleck off its back.
“Nothingness is what we want to talk about when we discuss the spiritual.” Alan Watts
I had a wonderful guide for my trip to the Grand Canyon. Earl, from Sweetours. He’s been doing the tour for 30 years and knew so much about the people and the place. He described in detail how the canyon was formed over millennia. How great folds of earth uplifted and rivers shifted and how wind and water eroded stone over time. But what he couldn’t explain or communicate through all his modern born, facts of science was the feeling of being lost, swept up into the belly of the universe - the feeling that this immense canyon can give you IF you let it and allow your spiritual self, a deep, ancient, unmodern self, be released.
We need to let go more, say we don’t truly know - despite all the science and facts. We are here for a moment, we are nothing. There is so much strength in that acknowledgment yet so many look away.
This week, next month, look up at the immensity always there before us, the sky, the stars, the heavens. You don’t have to travel to the Grand Canyon and pay $110 bucks for a tour. You just need to look up and be willing to release the ego inside you and submit to your “nothingness”. Then at that moment of Tat Tvam Asi, “Thou Art That” - you will be rewarded with strength, wisdom, and peace. For in being “nothing”, in the river of life, you are also everything. Everything that is creating such things as the Grand Canyon as we erode on through time and space.
Awe And Grandeur