Hubble Trouble.

The unimaginable vastness of the phenomena photographed by the Hubble Telescope make me crazy. What is the point of this tiny life here when the Trifid Nebula exists out there 9000 light miles away spinning out new stars? A gigantic mindless process as far as we can understand. Belief in God wouldn’t help - why would a deity create this tiny planet with its struggling blobs of consciousness amidst the scarifying immensity of this universe and the next? Makes no sense (no sense that satisfies MY understanding of the word 'sense' anyway.) I allow that our consciousness is limited by our experience; even our imagination is limited by the data fed into it: what is known, what is possible, and what, by extrapolation, is impossible but just about conceivable.

I can imagine an entity like ‘Q’ from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I can imagine beings of consciousness who are gaseous and don’t need the life support system we need here on Earth. I can, with some difficulty, understand Steiner’s teachings on the beginnings of life as we know it, with insubstantial beings of consciousness (the First Hierarchy) forming the planets and the first vestiges of human life from gas (which isn’t yet quite even gas) by their will. Of course his cosmology still begs the questions - where did these beings come from? Neither does it explain why they should take on all the hard work of making the planet on which we now live and the rest of our solar system - in fact it doesn’t answer any questions at all it just creates more...

Nevertheless I find all that cosy compared with the Hubble photographs. Those ideas pre-existed in someone else's head and he translated them into words which are handed to me as concepts, however extreme, ideas I can take or leave. I can find words for them. I can debate them. They remain (for me if not for Steiner) ideas, safely differentiated from from actuality.

Those photographs are reality. I haven’t words for them, only inarticulate gasps and grunts. They send me back into the Stone Age.