One handy way of twisting your brain into a salty pretzel is to casually reflect on “the known Universe” and what exactly it could mean if we were to reach out for that implied outer edge in thought and try probing it where it is no longer “known”.
We know, hypothetically, that the Universe is infinite. Both our pathetic instruments say so, and, more importantly, various higher-order entities with a lot of frequent Wanderer miles say so. Still, the finite brain has a hard time making sense of something infinite.
I feel that by far one of the most apt analogies for the Universe is an old one: that it is nothing more than a dream. Enlightened beings, both incarnated and not, insist that the Universe is not real; the only thing that’s real is the Supreme Consciousness (Supreme Spirit, to be more precise), for it’s the only thing that’s uncreated and eternal. The Creation is a projection of the Creator’s Mind — and this contains the key to understanding a few things about it.
Our own dreams, more often than not, feel quite real — kind of like our real real life. We prefer to conveniently ignore the parallels as, taken to their logical conclusion, these parallels would force us to face the fact that we are nothing more than dream characters.
Which is… exactly what we are.
When you dream of yourself as a younger version of yourself going on a hike with his buddies, neither the you-as-the-young-guy nor the buddies have any real existence, even though all of them may feel quite real within the dream. When you awaken, all the characters that your deep mind projected as independent entities cease their seemingly independent existence and get absorbed back into their true source – the mind itself. Only this mind was ever real, of course.
A similar train of thought is very much applicable to the Creation. When we recognize ourselves or, more precisely, our separate, individual selves to be unreal, that’s when we receive the grace known as enlightenment and understand that the “I” we thought ourselves to be never really existed, and our true nature is the dreaming mind — in this case the Consciousness of God. The little self, as it’s sometimes known in the East, was always just a projection of a minuscule part of that Dreaming Mind — a part to which we clung with all our might as it was the only thing that gave us a sense of identity and thus validated our very existence.
What does all this have to do with the edge of the Universe?
The Creation was projected when the Creator conceived a desire: a desire to know Himself. And therein lies the answer to its infinity, for if the Universe itself was created in response to a desire to know something new, then what lies beyond the limits of our perception must also respond to a desire to know those mysterious regions.
The answer to the question, then, is that the Universe doesn’t have an edge. What would happen if your dreaming hiking self suddenly decided to go to Tokyo? The unconscious would immediately create as much of “Tokyo” (and transportation there) that the perceiving character needs to see to make the experience feel real. And that’s exactly what happens as soon as there is some consciousness close to the perceived “edge” of the observable Universe that tries to probe beyond it: the Creator projects enough new galaxies to make the observer’s point of view incapable of reaching a barrier of any other type than the limits of his own perception, whether aided by instruments or not.
There is thus (probably?) a limit to the actual number of galaxies in existence — although, in all likelihood, a staggeringly high one — just like there is a limit to the number of things a dreaming mind will conjure in a single dream, even though there is no technical limit to the things that it can project in any one dream.
And yet even this inconceivable limit is, of course, meaningless, because — again — none of the galaxies or their inhabitants have an existence of their own and will be inevitably absorbed back into the Dreamer either by the Dreamer deciding to wake up at the end of His dream (the equivalent of our alarm clock), or through the standard process of evolution (the equivalent of our nightmare).*
The moral of the story? The Universe is not infinite. Long live the infinite Universe!
* For those intrepid souls striving after enlightenment, in this also lies a clue why the little self cannot, under normal circumstances, bring about its own enlightenment — no more than a dream character can wake up on its own. Unless– unless it experiences a tremendous surge of emotion that makes it snap out of its dreaming state — perhaps similar to a bhakta’s all-consuming fire of love, devotion, and adoration for her deity. The rest of us have to be content with waiting to be shocked to reality by a representative of the Dreamer — a guru (of course, for some few souls their Higher Self acts upon them directly, without a physical guru as an intermediary).