Determined not to be cowed by my first hike, I started out again this morning, albeit on a safer route. My thoughts turned again to lost - being lost, feeling lost.  We live in what we think is reality, but the Eastern mystics maintain it is an illusion.  Pierce the veil of maya, or the illusion of reality, and you see it for what it is - an illusion.  Or maybe we are living on multiple plains of existence, as proposed by string theory.  We can be lost on many levels and not even know it. The opposite of lost is found.  When we're lost we don't know how to get from where we are to where we want to be. When you're lost in a physical space, you want to find the way out, or home.  But when you're lost mentally, emotionally or spiritually, what do you want to find?  What if you don't know where you want to be?  That's the terror of being lost - what if you're never found, if you can never find out where it is you want to go to. One of the most striking things to me about dark energy is that it is pushing galaxies apart at an accelerated rate.  The universe is in a constant state of expansion.  Taking this to its conclusion, I imagine a time, in the very distant future, when people will look out from this planet and see nothing with the naked eye- no stars or heavenly bodies in the sky.  Will they feel lost in space, moving through a black universe with nothing else visible except images taken by satellites?  Or will they be so centered in themselves that the external reality is unimportant.  I suppose they would have to pierce the veil of maya to arrive at that space.