Francisco Miraval
I recently received a message telling me that some of my commentaries are too ambiguous. That is correct because, after all, life itself is ambiguous. Contrary to the tests at school where only one answer is acceptable, in life truth and falsehood, certitude and ignorance, appear together.
We live in a world when the most solemn vow always include an element of deception, where the highest possible level of altruism is still clearly narcissistic, and where those who know don’t teach, those who teach don’t known, those who can say don’t, and those who shouldn’t talk cant’ stop talking.
Those contradictions, paradoxes, and ambivalences are part of everyday life. Let me share a couple of examples to explain what I mean.
Just a few days ago, NASA announced that in a matter of only ten years or so we should be able to establish contact with non-terrestrial intelligent beings, of whom so far we know nothing except that they are not from this earth and that they (possible) live in of the thousands of exoplanets discovered during the past few years.
And just last week NASA published images of the galaxy EGS-zs8-1, located at 13,1 billion light-years from Earth, further away than any other galaxy. In other words, EGS-zs8-1 was formed just 700 million years after the Big Bang, a short time in the cosmic scale.
We see, then, that the amazing technological and scientific progress –based on growing and intense international cooperation– is taking us to the very limits of our universe and is inviting us to prepare ourselves for our upcoming meeting with our galactic neighbors. No doubt, we will see deep changes in our world and in our beliefs in the next few years.
However, none of those new discoveries, none of those efforts, not even our knowledge of the most remote places in the cosmos are helping us to explore and understand one of the most mysterious regions of the universe, the human mind and heart. We simply don’t know what is being created there.
I am amazed to know that we can detect galaxies at unthinkable distances from Earth and that sooner than expected I make meet in person our cosmic cousins. But I am also amazed about how little we understand, much less stop, the evil inside all of us.
Precisely at the same time that NASA was making the above mentioned announcements, a 25-year-old immigrant in Omaha, Nebraska, killed her mother, threw his 5-year-old brother into a river, and threw his 11-month-old brother into a dumpster. And no galactic image, no search for extraterrestrial intelligence, no cosmic photograph detected or prevented such a tragedy.
That’s how we, humans, are. We can achieve wonderful things and simultaneously be totally evil. It is not a matter of choosing one side or the other because they both go together. They are as inseparable as life and death, love and rejections, passion and indifference.
I write with ambiguity because life only offers ambiguity, but not “final answers.”