“And so I have often said , – The shell must be cracked apart, if what is in it is to come out; for if you want the kernel you must break the shell. (Meister Eckhart in his German Sermon “Hanc Dicit Dominus.” 

Many  thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin were not fearful of breaking the shell to get at the kernel. In all probability what’s inside, if creative enough, will emerge by itself.

As Fr Teilhard has said a number of times. – “In all things there is a Within, coextensive with their Without.”

“Deep within ourselves we can discern, as through a rent an “interior” at the heart of things; and this glimpse is sufficient to force upon us the conviction that this “interior” exists and has always existed everywhere in nature…the stuff of the universe has an inner face that is in its very structure.” (Fr Teilhard.)

I find that very helpful in thinking about the immensity of the Cosmos in relation to ourselves.

Fr Teilhard de Chardin was an outsider, not a heretic as some posters on this forum would have us believe. Many of the most creative thinkers have been outsiders. One of the classic outsiders was Charles Darwin whose “Origin of Species” caused an uproar in Victorian Britain. Yet to-day we have learned not only to live with his researches but also to accommodate them within the wider Christian perspective.

With the advent of powerful radio telescopes and even more  complicated means such as the Hubble space craft we know that our universe is immense.

This high-resolution image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field  includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, are some of the most distant galaxies to have been imaged by an optical telescope.

It was upon the “Physics” of the Universe that Fr Teilhard built up his mysticism. He envisioned the whole of evolution being reduced to a process of union with God, becoming in its totality, loving and lovable in the innermost and most ultimate of its developments.

Fr Teilhard died long before the Hubble Telescope began to explore the deepest reaches of outerspace, but his vision is as real for to-day as it was in the last century.

He writes – “I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the ALL which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old  as the beginning of thought. The Cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars. And since then we find evidence of it in all the experience of the great and unbounded: in art, in poetry, in religion. Though it we react to the world “as a whole” as with our eyes to light. “

My cat likes to go out at night. I look out of my bedroom window and there he is sitting on the lawn looking up at the stars. I go out, and on  seeing me he springs up into my arms and cuddles up against me.