When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."

Even if we limit ourselves to "creation" as we know it now, without straying into sci-fi territory as Douglas Adams was doing in the above quote from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we are still faced with the realisation that we are, on the whole, insignificant.

I read somewhere that psychoses happen where the human mind is forced to reconcile as true two facts that are completely incompatible. If so, then we have at the basis of human existence the incredible difficulty of reconciling the importance of our own existence, as perceived by ourselves, and the insignificance of our own existence, as evidenced by the world around us.

If even the great and the good (and the evil), like Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin, Lincoln and Einstein are just so much dust in the ground now (or ashes, or icy and inert), then what possible importance do we have in this life.

And yet, our minds scream out, it cannot be so! Since we are forced to perceive existence through the senses of one individual, that one individual has to be the most important person in the world, for as long as the world holds any interest to us.

It is our ego, as the psychoanalysts define it, which is jumping up and down and screaming. You can't blame it, can you.

I like to look at the statue of the emperor Hadrian and his wife in the British Museum and reflect on this. Here, clearly, was an incredibly powerful man, full of confidence and availed of everything the world had to offer. Now there is nothing.

Edward, the Black Prince, was obviously irked by this. His epitaph in Canterbury Cathedral describes how once he had everything a man could want. In his death he speaks to you like this:

Who so thou be that passeth by
Where these corps entombed lie
Understand what I shall say
As at this time speake I may
Such as thou art sometime was I
Such as I am such shalt thou be.

In other words, "don't think to yourself that just because I'm dead and you're alive, you're more important than me!"

How much of our behaviour, I wonder, is driven by the need to try to make ourselves more important, to bring together the two conflicting views presented of our own existence?

It's quite insulting, don't you think, to have to accept that we are that darned unimportant.

Richard