Dear Pneuma,

The questions we ask like "What is at the end of the Universe?", "If God created everything, what created God?", or "What is the basic unit of reality?" often come to a place of no answer.  When we reach that far, or look that deep, our minds are stunned.  They sit and spin their wheels at an incomprehensible paradox.  It seems to me that we have invested in technology, our hope to surmount those kinds of barriers by building things that can look closer, reach farther, and think faster than we have ever been able to do ourselves,  yet we still don't know what is at the bottom.

Instead, we are finding a vast unknown, and despite everything we do "know," everything our beautiful minds can comprehend, manipulate and ideate; despite all the ways in which our scientific methods have "proven" the natures of things, we still cannot fathom the fullness of reality.  We cannot even be sure that there is a reality.

At our core, or at our outermost boundaries, there is something completely inexplicable.  What I mean, is that, at some point, we realize there is other.  We cannot escape it.  Even if I agree with those that believe all reality is an integrated whole, for we deluded bits of reality that think we are individuals, the integrated whole is still something other that we do not know; in fact, we can neither know it as itself while separate from it, nor know it as itself unless we are separate from it.  Either we are in it, separate, and know it is, but not what it is, or we are it and cannot see or name ourself.

Left here in this place of paradox, then, this place of self because of an unknown other, being and not-being, boundary and boundlessness, part and whole, we have to exert will and choose a place of belief if we want to function at all.   This is the foundation.  This is the ground.  This is the "Big Bang."  This negotiated relationship of self to other is realism, pragmatism, humanism, creationism, deism, nihilism, and quantum mechanics.  This is the something that we place in the nothing we know is there because it is not everything else, and we have a BELIEF.

I spent a large portion of my adult life trying to ignore that nothing place I kept finding because I believed that BELIEF was not enough.  One afternoon, I realized BELIEF is really the only choice we have.  I do not know whether to pity or envy those who do not know their experience of reality is built on nothing less than the beliefs they embrace.

Love Always,

Cobalt Dreams