Adam Blatner

Imagine first a proton, the tiniest of eensy-beensy almost nothing; then imagine that enough of these put together end up building the most humungous, inconceivably big bright star—a thousand times bigger and brighter than our own sun. I know, the human imagination stretches even to imagine the sun’s brightness, much less closer-up or a brighter star.

Now, imagine that what builds that star is the slightest, weakest energy—gravity—so weak that it takes literally millions of years—and that’s inconceivable, too—for these eensy-teensy protons to draw together, and the more there are, the more they pull in. As they pull in, they heat up from the energy of all that gravity—so weak, but when there is sufficient aggregation, so massive, so strong, and they generate a pressure of all of them combined that heats that mass to hot burning fusion reactions and burn up that star till it collapses while giving out more energy than the whole galaxy. This collapse and rebounding explosion then blows off most of the more complicated elements into space and collapse into a black hole. Whew!’

Occasionally I’ll offer you other mind-stretchers. Do it with adequate warm-up, contemplating various more obvious phenomena and wondering how it all works. Stretch your mind up, down, sideways, and not only do this while not getting vertigo. Later we’ll help you develop a theology that fits these paradoxes and inconceivable distances, strengths, powers, sizes, dimensionalities, etc. It’s playful: There are no right answers that anyone could say. Rather, the answer, such as it is, must be created by your mind. If a “higher” being offered you its perspective, it would probably just bounce off as (seemingly) silly.