¶ Universe (1)
Index Entry
That most comprehensive question was, 'What do you mean by the word ‘Universe’?" If you cannot answer, you had best abandon use of the word ‘Universe’ for it will have no meaning. My intuitively adopted rules for self questioning and answering were that the answer must be made exclusively from man’s experience patterns. I learned many years later that the Nobel physicist Percival Bridgman had identified this same rule adopted by Einstein as ‘operational procedure’, subsequently a much abused phrase. My answer (or discard of the word ‘Universe’ as a communication tool) was operationally inherent: ‘Universe is the aggregate of all consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or relayed to others) experience of man.’ If my finite answer holds against all specific experience challenges as being comprehensively anticipatory and adequate, the Universe is finite, and all its components definable. Each life as we know it is definitive, i.e., consists of a plurality of terminable, ergo definite, experiences, beginning with each awakening and terminating with each surrender to sleep (no man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went earlier to sleep, or that"
