June solstice perspective

Colleagues and scholars from coast to coast, across Bass Strait and all the ships at sea.

The June solstice will occur tomorrow morning at 2.39 AM Sydney time. 

It's a wonderful celestial event that provides a perfect opportunity to stop, pause and reflect, and gain important perspective by reminding ourselves of our place in space and in time.

There are more stars in our Universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of all the world. 

Yet, there are more atoms in one grain of sand than there are stars in our Universe. 

And yet, there might well be more universes in the Cosmos of multiverses than there are atoms in ALL the grains of sand on ALL the beaches of ALL the world.

Our Universe came into being 13.7 billion years ago. The Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. 

Life has existed on Earth for 4 billion years, humans have existed for 200,000 years, or about 0.005% of the time that life has been on Earth and about 0.0015% of the time that the Universe has existed.

In the vastness of space, our planet is merely a micro-speck of dust; and in the immensity of time, humans have existed for barely a nano-second; yet we behave - still shackled by a pre-Copernican smugness - as if we are the centre of the Universe and have been, and always will be, around for all time.

Such profound ignorance about our true insignificance and sheer arrogance about our imagined supremacy, if left unchecked, will inevitably overwhelm all our enlightenment and eventually lead to our disappearance.

Only when the collective consciousness of the human species finally comes to this realisation, will our species truly be at one and reach its full potential - a potential with immeasurable scope.

Perspective is the tonic that can awaken that consciousness: a veritable elixir of life, expertly prepared in the apothecary of wisdom using only the purest ingredients of unadulterated truth.

If you are interested in reading further, you can find a comprehensive exploration of this topic in this piece "Perspective, truth and baklava" here