We are the Universe, in human form

There are about 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms in your body...

The heaviest element within us is oxygen, which accounts for about 65% of our body mass. Oxygen atoms exist mostly as water molecules, in combination with the lighter (and more ancient) element hydrogen, whose origins stretch back to the Big Bang.

About 50-70% of our biology is made up of water. Every time you eat, drink or breathe in air you are absorbing atoms that will become "you."

We also release atoms daily, in fact about 98% of the atoms in our body are replaced each year. That means that "you" are quite literally a completely different person every New Year.

We exchange our atoms with the air, with the clouds, rivers, trees, flowers, insects and animals. We also take in energy every day, photons captured by plant leaves (through photosynthesis) as they stream to the Earth from the sun. We are 100% solar powered.

What Van Gogh expressed in his paintings was profoundly close to the vision of our bodies and Universe as discovered by modern science. Nature is an interconnected evolving mosaic, an ever-changing work of cosmic living art where atoms and energy circulate in new patterns endlessly.

Paradoxically, while our bodies renew themselves constantly, at the deepest level we are ancient cosmic beings. Every atom of "you" is billions of years old, formed either in the Big Bang (over 13 billion years ago) or in stars that burst as supernovas approximately 5 to 12 billion years back, before our planet and solar system formed.

While oxygen (created in super nova explosions billions of years ago) accounts for most of our body mass it is actually hydrogen atoms (from the Big Bang) that are most plentiful, accounting for over half of the number of atoms in your body.

In a very deep sense we are the Universe, in human form. 
Something worth contemplating and celebrating?


Christopher
in, Creative Systems Thinking

"You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.” 
~Eckhart Tolle 

"We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree... Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of Nature, a unique action of the total Universe." 
~Alan Watts