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Within a month of opening day, I received a letter from an Ivy League professor of psychology whose expertise was in things that make people feel insignificant…He wanted to administer a before-and-after questionnaire to visitors, assessing the depth of their depression after viewing the show. Passport to the Universe, he wrote, elicited the most dramatic feelings of smallness and insignificance he had ever experienced.
How could that be? Every time I see the space show , I feel alive and spirited and connected. I also feel large, knowing that the goings-on within the three-pound human brain are what enabled us to figure out our place in the universe.
Allow me to suggest that it’s the professor, not I, who has misread nature. His ego was unjustifiably big to begin with, inflated by delusions of significance and fed by cultural assumptions that human beings are more important than everything else in the universe.
In all fairness to the fellow, powerful forces in society leave most of us susceptible. As was I, until the day I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon, than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who–or what–is actually in charge.
From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly four billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth. (en) |
