As near as I can tell the world is just a big mystery that mankind will forever be trying to solve. Or more likely, will kill ourselves trying to solve.
We unearth the relics of ancient civilizations because we want to understand our past.
To the stars we look for our future.
And meanwhile we meddle with everything in-between because we want to understand everything there is to know, thereby hoping to ultimately rule our own destiny.
But increasingly I have come to believe that such is the nature of knowing that a neither single man nor the collective mankind could ever possibly know everything there is to know.
For knowing is like an onion, and peeling back one layer only reveals another, and then another, and then another…ad infinitum.
(It’s a REALLY big onion.)
Unfortunately I think we might know just enough to be dangerous.
And that all our reasons for even wanting to know are wrong.
Oh…maybe not all of them, but most of the ones that count anyway.
So what is there really to know?
And what’s the big mystery about life?
Maybe it’s not how much you know, but WHAT you know…whether you know the important stuff, or whether you’re spending your life chasing after knowledge that ultimately in the face of eternity will prove utterly useless.
Because once you know the important stuff all knowledge from that point on seems to simply falls into line, building upon itself as a structure built upon a sound and solid foundation.
I think it’s our own sense of mortality that makes us pursue knowledge recklessly and relentlessly and with abandon.
I don’t really know all that much though.