There is an old story about four blind men who each examined an elephant. The story points out that while each one shared their description accurately, they still didn't know what the whole elephant "looked" like. Of course what you know that they didn't is that the elephant was bigger than they imagined.
We would do well to keep this in mind as we seek to better understand the All. For in this case, the elephant is not only bigger than we imagine, but its bigger than we CAN imagine.
The All, God, the Universal Mind, All-That-Is whatever you care to call it; we are still attempting to understand something by examining but a small part of it. This is not to say we shouldn't try to understand all we are capable of, only that if we presume we can know all about it, we are leaving the path of understanding.
In the back of our mind we must keep the realization that we can perceive but small slices of the full range of vibration. We take one small slice and we call that range of vibration light. We take another and call it heat and on and on we label the slices. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that all ranges of vibration are not manifest without any gaps in frequency. So with our limited senses, we have gaps where we do not perceive whatever is going on in those ranges of vibration.
Ok, so every few years someone will invent a gadget to perceive a previously uncharted slice. But the report of reason tells us that there is no evidence to imply that upper and lower limits we perceive are actual finite limits. On the contrary, we may have every reason to expect that as we discover more, we will stretch the boundaries of what might be discovered. When has this not been the case?
There was a time when an element was the smallest unit of measure man could conceive of. Then man discovered molecules and then atoms and then sub-atomic particles, etc. The more we look the more we find that each thing we examine is a collection of smaller things while at the same time, being but a part of a bigger thing.
Let us not become discouraged by the fact that we can never understand the fullness of the All, but let us be ever mindful that …
Not only is the Elephant bigger than we imagine; it is bigger than we can imagine.
May we ever grow in understanding of all the things we are made of and all the things we are part of.
- RJ
