One of the truths of our universe that can be somewhat difficult to imagine fully is the reality of the expanding universe. One of the implications of the “red shift” found in the early 1900’s by astronomers was that the universe is expanding away from a common origin, an act that is pregnant with implications of the teleological kind. Yet it is not the physical universe that I would like to talk about. What I would like to talk about instead is the mental universe, which is also at least theoretically an expanding universe as well, and one that I tend to find more relevant to my personal life and that of others around me on a regular basis. After all, most of us live on this planet, and only a few people have ever escaped its near environs, and so the implications of interstellar travel are not as relevant to our daily lives as the universe within us [1].
The expanding mental universe of our lives can most obviously be seen in developmental matters. Most of us can look at children and recognize the difference between our understanding as adults and our understanding as babies or small children. Yet children are capable of startling powers of observation, which is evidence that as we advance in age, our gain in sophistication often results in a loss of ability to see what is clearly evident because we have trained ourselves not to notice things (or people) and not to be troubled by their problems or sensitive to their needs and concerns. On the other hand, children often lack the ability to articulate and understand in depth the world around them, even if their powers of observation and judgment and their openness to the world around them are often very highly developed.
This suggests that the expansion of our mental universes is not necessarily a straightforward or a deterministic process. At times our mental universe may expand in some areas but not in others. At other times, we may think our universe is expanding from knowledge, but if that knowledge is incorrect, it may lead us to jettison the truth and replace it with error, thereby shrinking one’s actual understanding while giving the illusion of an expanding mental universe. Additionally, one can be satisfied with one’s state of education and cease to look out for new knowledge or understanding in the belief that one knows everything one needs to know already. These sorts of problems can arrest the expanding mental universe that that we can obtain if we continue to be open to knowledge and learning even after we are no longer formal students. I tend to be a voracious and critical reader of books, so perhaps I am a little biased in my beliefs of the worth of increasing knowledge and how that curiosity and openness tends to keep you feeling younger than you are.
So, how do we keep our mental universe expanding, if we want to, at least? Being open to the world around us is one way to expand our universe, as it presents us with people with different perspectives that causes us to expand our understanding and be more understanding of where others are coming from. Likewise, reading books often provokes us to read more books, and be interested in many areas of life and knowledge, and such learning and education, and an awareness of the fact that we do not know everything we want to know, or may even need to know, helps keep us humble and child-like, which allows our universe to expand and not become rigid and closed. Such a life may be a bit exhausting, and we may want to stay within our comfort zones, but knowing that there is a lot of ground we can expand into makes our lives more rich and more fun. Who wants to be stuck in the same place of life forever, without ever having expanded one’s knowledge and insight or one’s ability to understand and relate to others? Certainly not I.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/reading-berlinksi-in-cambridge/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/on-causality-and-responsibility/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/terrain-studies/
Edge Induced Cohesion 