Most of us don’t regularly deal with numbers larger than a few thousand. The majority of us:
- Make up to a few thousand dollars per month.
- Know at least a few dozen to a few hundred people.
- Travel in the order of a few hundred to a few thousand miles for vacation.
I regularly work with numbers in the hundreds of millions to trillions. For example, tens of millions of years, billions of dollars (my customers, anyway), terabytes of data, and 80 billion neurons. But even then, I’m not really dealing directly with that scale of number. Fifty million years ago is referred to in units of “mya”, as in “50 mya”. And trillion bytes is condensed to a unit of 1, a terabyte. So I still don’t genuinely directly experience such scale.
So, when we hear even just of millions of dollars and millions of lives, we really don’t know what that really means. Dr. Evil (Austin Powers movie) wasn’t exactly wrong to think a million dollars would still be a lot of money.
This Bodhi Day lesson is to understand that our ability to see reality is deeply hindered by our inability to genuinely appreciate the scale of reality—both ways, bigger and smaller.
Think about the diagrams of our solar system that we studied in school and still see today on modern media. All the planets are drawn on a single image. Those solar system posters we grow up with are the classic example of how we don’t have a real sense of scale. The planets neatly lined up, comfortably spaced, each large enough to admire. But those images are lying to us in a very specific way. They must lie. If they didn’t, nothing would fit on the page. When you actually force scale to be honest, intuition breaks almost immediately—and that break is precisely the point.
Imagine shrinking the Sun down to the size of a basketball. At that scale, the planets become almost insultingly small, and the distances become absurdly large relative to them. Earth—the place that contains every human story ever told—shrinks to the size of a peppercorn more than 80 feet away. Jupiter finally becomes visible as something tangible, roughly the size of a ping-pong ball, but it sits farther away than a football field. Pluto, meanwhile, is smaller than a poppy seed and well over a half a mile away.
Using a basketball-sized Sun as the base, the solar system looks roughly like this:
| Body | Distance from Sun | Comparable Size |
|---|---|---|
| Mercury | ~33 ft | Grain of sand |
| Venus | ~61 ft | Peppercorn |
| Earth | ~85 ft | Peppercorn (slightly larger) |
| Mars | ~129 ft | Grain of sand |
| Jupiter | ~440 ft | Ping-pong ball |
| Saturn | ~807 ft | Large marble |
| Uranus | ~1,623 ft | Small marble |
| Neptune | ~2,543 ft | Small marble |
| Pluto | ~3,339 ft (0.63 miles) | Poppy seed |
When I’m out on my walk around my neighborhood, at least a half mile away from home, I notice a pebble on the ground and imagine it as Neptune compared to a basketball a half mile away at my home.
What this reveals is not just the vastness of space, but how misleading relative size can be when distance is collapsed. Our mental models quietly assume proximity where there is none. We internalize a solar system that feels dense and orderly, when in reality it is sparse to the point of near-nothingness.
Now, let’s flip the problem. Instead, let’s start with Pluto as a single pixel on a modern computer monitor. To draw the solar system accurately out to Pluto’s orbit from the Sun at that resolution, you’d need an image almost five million pixels wide. On a modern monitor with normal pixel density, that’s a screen roughly half a mile across. Earth would be a smudge of about five pixels. The Sun would finally be noticeable—but still dwarfed by the surrounding void. Even our best screens are fundamentally too small to tell the truth about scale without scrolling for minutes.
This same perceptual shortcut shows up everywhere else we rely on diagrams for understanding. Neurons are another perfect example. We’re taught them as tidy cartoon objects: a round soma (perhaps even a few dozen of them), a few branching dendrites, a long axon. But a real neuron is less like a bead with wires and more like a maple tree fused to a root system—dendrites spreading and interweaving like underground roots, an axon stretching like a trunk across long distances, synaptic terminals branching into dense canopies. The simplified drawings aren’t really wrong—but they quietly flatten complexity, proportion, and reach.
This Bodhi Day lesson shows that our intuition is trained on images optimized for teaching, not truth. Those images are useful—but they come with a hidden cost. They teach relationships while obscuring scale. And unless we periodically recalibrate—by forcing ourselves to confront what things really look like when scale is honored—we end up carrying a distorted sense of size, distance, and structure into everything else we try to reason about.
Reality is bigger and smaller than we can adequately imagine. We can’t imagine a Universe that actually is composed of many more than four dimensions of spacetime. Really, we can’t even adequately imagine 4D space—just one more spacial dimension. Not to mention there are operational numbers (people actually dealing in those scales) well beyond trillions (it makes a trillion comparatively like virtually zero).
Our brains evolved to prosper within Life on Earth, not life as a some “high dimensional being” or such—for example, the Eternal Fishnu. However, similar to how physicists sidestep their own inability to imagine multi-dimensional spaces by letting math deal with it, we non-mathy mortals need to rely on faith that the Universe is much more wonderous than we can imagine. Faith is just a part of being in a bodily form that doesn’t appear to be an almighty, all-knowing entity.
The Lunar Bodhi Day
The Lunar Bodhi Day for the Chinese Year 4723 (the Chinese calendar is a lunar calendar) is two days away. Monday, January 26, 2026 is the 8th day of the 12th lunar month. Please see the blogs I posted for the “secular” Bodhi Day celebrated this past Dec 8: My special prep message for 2025, meditation for this Bodhi Day, my message posted on Bodhi Day, and the Bodhi Day treats of rice and milk and red rice.
Remember, the Lunar Bodhi Day is different every year, so check on the home page for the latest dates.
Faith and Patience,
Reverend Dukkha Hanamoku
Bodhi Day 