One night I was sitting in my backyard looking up at the night sky which had obligingly decked herself up very liberally with stars. The Milky Way cut a hazy swathe through these bright glittering jewels and it seemed as though the night was a black, sequined veil spread across the sky.
But as I kept looking up at this fabulous fabric, a shift started taking place in my mind. The tapestry on the sky started to get hazy and dissolve and each star stood out in solitary splendour as I realised that even though stars appear next to each other, they might be millions of light years away in actual space, and so the sky which seemed two-dimensional until then now seemed to stretch out to infinity, and all of a sudden in a flash of insight and a rush of joy, I realised that I was looking up at the universe.
The whole universe was out there, swirling galaxies and twirling supernovas, stars dying and collapsing and new ones being born, hurtling meteors and slow-moving planets. Suddenly the placid, calm night sky became a crackling cauldron of movement, creation and destruction. And then all thoughts dissolved in my mind and I was left gaping in a state of awe and wonder. After that the sky was no longer the limit because there is no sky and no limit, just the limitless Universe.
Today
3 years ago
Yes, my dear, and how insignificant our existence appears in front of this vastness. Yet our world keeps revolving around this very insignificant existence. The joys, the happiness, the pains, the miseries are all tied up with our infinitesimal existence, this individuality which we find so hard to get rid off. That night in your backyard you forgot your individuality for a while and the limitlessness of it all engulfed you. That was expansion. Behind the apparent calm is so much of activity and underlying this activity is so much of calm. Both are true. Both coexist. Time loses its essence when you realise that the star you see may not be existing at the moment for the light we see left it many light years ago. The existence is true and so is non-existence!
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