Soul of an Atheist - Grasping the Big Picture

November 14th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Cosmology, Grasp, Knowledge, Love, Sense, Synaesthesia, Up |

If I was to sum up the aim of this writing in one sentence, I would say that it was about grasping the big picture. The picture we want, or I would say need, to grasp is very large indeed, and can only be seen from some elevated position high above the plane of usual human grasping, and we should recognise the ambition of our aim at the outset. Imagine a picture of everything. Got that? If you have then you can close the book now and join your friends on Mount Olympus, or Heaven, or wherever it is you Gods hang out. For the rest of us who are still mortal any attempt to grasp the big picture seems like a hopelessly hubristic endeavor. We are the barely conscious products of chemical reactions taking place in a film of moisture on a ball of rock. How in God’s names could we hope to understand things we can’t even see, or touch, or even think about properly? How could we hope to grasp the big picture if can’t even put a sentence together accurately, for goodness sake? Grasp the big picture? Surely we don’t ‘grasp’ a picture, we ’see’ it. When we ’see’ something we look at it from a safe distance and let the light of our objective knowledge bounce off it into our brains. ‘Grasping’, on the other hand, suggests taking hold of something, pulling it close to us, maybe pressing is against our bodies and feeling its contours merging with our own. There is something of love in this grasp, and of understanding, and compassion, and the intimate sharing of a single sense of being. Grasping the Big Picture? Surely this is nonsense? But this is exactly how it should be. No one sense is what we must use to contemplate the immensity and the complexity of Everything. The big picture is too big to hold with our eyes alone, and if we are to take it in then we must become synaesthetes and allow the familiar segregated play of our senses to spill over into each other, to cross the lines on the playground that usually keep them apart, allowing us to feel with our eyes and see with our hands.

We may say that this is impossible, and only those with some bizarre quirk of neurology are capable of such grasping. But if only we could remember back, and maybe we can, we would remember when this was first nature to us, before the second nature of common sense turned us into an I, and a You, and a He or She, or into an It.