In 1989 I wrote a book called “The Way of the Tiger“. Its subtitle was, “Gentle Wisdom for Turbulent Times”.  Almost 30 years later, times are more turbulent than ever, making it even more challenging to remain inspired and peaceful within. How do we accomplish this amidst the confusion, noise and pace of daily life?

Duane Alan Hahn has written that, “Some people have a hard time understanding how God can exist. They don’t seem to have a problem believing that everything started with an explosion from a tiny point at the center of the universe. But, where did that tiny point come from? It takes as much faith to believe that the universe came from nothing as it does to believe that an intelligent eternal being created it.”  Whatever your belief system though, it still comes down to the same thing: at one point in time, everything was one, and the contemporary illusion that our world consists of separateness is the problem not the solution.

Understanding the universe is beyond the average mind – perhaps we will never understand it. Let me show you what I mean:

The observable universe extends a distance of about 13.7 billion light years. A light year is 6 trillion miles. Light travels at 670,000,000 mph (which would enable you to travel eight times around Earth in one second). The sun is 93 million miles from Earth, the equivalent of eight minutes of a light-year (which means we don’t really see the sun now, but rather as it was eight minutes ago).

Earth rotates at 1000 mph, and travels through space around the sun at 66,000 mph (at this speed you would travel from San Francisco to Washington DC in three minutes).

It takes our Sun approximately 225 million years to make the trip around our Galaxy. This is sometimes called our “galactic year”. Twenty galactic years have passed since the Sun and the Earth were formed; we have, therefore, been around the Galaxy 20 times. But paradoxically, in all of recorded human history, we have barely moved in our long path around the Milky Way.

The Milky Way Galaxy, in which our sun and all the stars we see at night reside, spans 100,000 light-years from one end to the other. Putting that into perspective, the total of recorded human history is a mere 5,000 years. So light from a star at one end of our galaxy takes 20 times longer than all of recorded history to get to the other end.

The Milky Way Galaxy is moving at 1.3 million miles per hour (2.1 million km/hr), in the general direction of the part of the sky that is defined by the constellations of Leo and Virgo. Although the reasons for this motion are not fully understood, astronomers believe that we are being pulled there by a huge concentration of matter in this direction. Some people call it The Great Attractor, and it is likely not due to one group of galaxies but many. The extra gravity in this direction pulls the Milky Way (and many neighbor galaxies) in that direction.

Moving beyond our galaxy, it’s just over two million light years to our nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. The light we currently see from that galaxy left there about the same time the ancestors of modern humans were first discovering stone tools.

So we live in a universe, which is expanding at incomprehensible speeds, so large, that our minds cannot grasp the numbers, and even more confounding, beyond our own universe, it is believed there are an infinite number more.

What does all this mean?

If we look at any of the widely practiced faiths of the world, there are numerous, and equally incomprehensible, explanations for how we all came to be, what we are doing at the present time, and what awaits us in the afterlife. A review of any of the sacred texts will quickly convince one that the explanations they offer require just as large a leap of faith as any of the “scientific” versions.

So science and faith both require us to consider life as a mystery which we can neither validate nor understand.

And so the conclusion that we might come to is that the purpose of our lives, and  how we each live them,  is to love and be loved, and to be inspiring and inspired, to recognize that the oneness that existed at the beginning of time is the same oneness that exists today, and the separateness we so strongly embrace today is but a tiny blip of a misunderstanding in the span of human history, which we will discard in due course.

From this place of acceptance we can build great organizations, families, relationships, cities, countries – and  most important, our inner lives.

So how should we live our lives?  Well, I am not going to tell you how you should do it, but I know what I must do.  I will be loving and inspiring, and make a difference in my small corner of this vast Universe. I will help others to build great organizations that benefit the whole. What will you do? What gentle wisdom do you offer for these turbulent times?