Our Awareness of the Ocean

I love the ocean.

I could sit on a beach, listening, watching, and pondering the ocean for days on end.

In fact I don't think a lifetime of contemplating the ocean is enough to comprehend it all.

The ocean has brought forth life on our earth, and it certainly has destroyed life.

The ocean covers over 70% of our planet, and is (at this point) the only known place where liquid water exists in our solar system.

We are just beginning to truly understand the ocean, but even when we know all we think we can know, it is most likely that some new way of observing the ocean will continue to provide more information, more insight, and more "something,", beyond anything we can imagine.

For example, the ocean existed for billions of years before there was any awareness of its blueness. It took the invention of eyes, able to distinguish color before any creatures could grasp the blue essence of the ocean.

The blueness was nothing new for the ocean itself but it took something new (eyes) to bring the blueness into awareness, or even (in some respects) into existence.

Similarly, for billions of years there was no creature able to taste the saltiness of the ocean, smell its distinctive aroma, or hear the roar of its waves. While the ocean existed in all its many facets, it took the inventions of observation and experience to bring these facets of the ocean alive.

We often hold the idea that our specific senses and abilities are all there is, or that what we observe is all there is to observe but I think we are mistaken.

What we think is the ocean, is really just a reflection of what we, as humans are able to observe and experience.

Certainly, and without a doubt there is much more to the ocean than what we humans comprehend.

Clearly there are other life forms whose experience of the ocean is most dissimilar to ours. They may not comprehend the blueness of the ocean but they may very well, and most probably are aware of many things we can't imagine.

And so it is with life.

The universe is more than what we can measure, observe, experience.

It is only as we invent and create new ways to observe and experience something beyond what we are currently capable of experiencing, that the totality of what exists will come into awareness.

Today, as I sit on the beach and contemplate the ocean, I wonder what is yet to be discovered in its depths. I wonder what new awareness will come forth. I wonder what will yet come into existence as new ways of experiencing the ocean emerge in various life forms.

And I become brilliantly aware that my miniscule awareness of the ocean, and all of life is just a tiny reflection of what exists.

The ocean.... it is a wonder.