I have this feeling often. It moves me to awe and to humility. I think that it is something that resonates among all religious people. I'd like to provide a sampling of how it gets expressed in a number of different religious traditions, beginning with my own.
Job 42:3
"Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know."
Job 11:7-9
“Can you discover the depths of God? Can you discover the limits of the Almighty? They are high as the heavens, what can you do? Deeper than Sheol, what can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
Isaiah 40:28
“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and His understanding no one can fathom.”
The Zohar
“There is a mystery within the mystery that none can know, for the light of Ein Sof is hidden, concealed even from the most exalted beings.”
Jewish Hymn, Yigdal
"Acclaim and praise the living God who exists beyond the boundaries of time. Most singular of all, concealed and yet also without bound. He has no body — nor even the appearance of a body, it is impossible to measure his holiness"
Romans 11:33-34
"Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?"
Christian hymn, The Love of God
"Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky."
Surah Al-Kahf (18:109)
“Say, ‘If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord, the sea would be exhausted before the words of my Lord were exhausted, even if We brought the like of it as a supplement.’”
Tao Te Ching Chapter 1
"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things."
Tao Te Ching Chapter 25
“Something mysteriously formed,
Born before heaven and Earth.
In the silence and the void,
Standing alone and unchanging,
Ever present and in motion.
Perhaps it is the mother of ten thousand things.
I do not know its name
Call it Tao.
For lack of a better word, I call it great.”
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 13, Verse 15
“He exists outside and within all living beings, the moving and the non-moving. He is incomprehensible because He is subtle; thus, He is far away, yet also near at hand.”
The Vedas, Atharvaveda 10.8.32
“The soul of the universe, who has no beginning or end, who is in all and above all—this is the Supreme Being, unfathomable and limitless.”
The Heart Sutra
“Therefore, know that the Bodhisattva who relies on Prajñāpāramitā, the wisdom beyond wisdom, does not dwell in notions.”
Lakota Oral Tradition
“The mysteries of Wakan Tanka are beyond human understanding. You cannot measure the Great Spirit; you can only feel it.”
I can model physical existence, as well as mental and spiritual existence, all the way to infinity, with a simple model. We live in space-time where space and time work together, like two people tethered in a three legged race. Like in a three legged race, the team is limited by the weakest member, while both; team, can only reach their maximum speed, when they learn to coordinate as a team.
Photons, for example, have frequency and wavelength, which are measures of time and space, tethered to form a wave. In terms of physical reality, that creates limits, such as the speed of light, and the laws of physics. The forces of nature are limited to the speed of light; full speed three legged race.
Say we could take a knife, and cut the tethers of space-time, to form independent space and independent time. Like in the tree legged race, without the tether, both members of the team now have more capability, with either space or time, able to outrun the tethered team called space-time. They do not have to coordinate any longer. For example, if one could move in space apart from time, then the concept of speed does not exist, since speed is based on space and time tether as V=d/t, with the division sign the tether. Without the tether, distance would not be limited or tethered by time and one could become omnipresent, which is a classic attribute of God.
As far as consciousness, our imaginations are not limited to just thinking about physical reality within space-time. Science works hard to factor out all those other things, of the imagination, that are fiction and/or are not connected to physical reality. All the extras, that consciousness can also think of, are connected to untethered space and untethered time, since tangible reality is based on tethered space-time and can be quantify by science. While those things not tethered, exist as untethered thought.
Innovation, for example, that has not yet reached fruition, but which can be in the future, is about an appearance in time, not yet attached to space. It remains where space and time are not yet attached, moving forward in time, but not yet a part of space-time. It may appear in several places at once, like the development of rockets, but not part of universal space-time; common knowledge. The wisdom of Einstein where the laws of physics are same in all space-time references, is about movement in time; laws of physics need time to propagate, but not tethered to any single space within space-time; omnipresence moving forward in time independent of space.
This model has two separate realms, superimposed; space -time and separated space and time, with separated space and time, by virtue of it being more inclusive and expansive than space-time; fact plus fiction, is more complex and is the drive behind the 2nd law, where entropy within space-time has to increase; space-time has to get more complex, with all aspects of space-time evolving back to their source; independent space and time.
Independent space and time, allows for all the options describe by the term infinite. This is a useful physics tool with lots of applications in the quantum state, such as quantum entanglement where two particles appear to become untethered in space but can synchronize in time, at what appear to be faster than the speed of light; independent space and time superimposed on space-time.
