Boundless or bounded?

Last week talking with my friend Niels about life in general he made the comment '...we just get pushed about...' he was referring to life (or perhaps some greater being) doing the pushing. Yeah, and who are we? That's the question. Is it that we are entirely physical beings who's consciousness is an emergent property of matter and the entirety of our experience is the moment by moment arising of conditions stemming from a vast interconnected web of a basically physical universe generating a complex flux or is this insufficient to capture our nature? Given that we don't and probably will never fully understand the nature of the observable physical universe and that there is likely far more universe which is unobservable it seems that both positions come to the same conclusion- our ground of being is unknowable. What then of the question 'who are we?' We are our life it seems. Boundless and yet bounded we are, and likely as not can't say much more than that we can't really know. All knowing being limited it would seem by it's own apparatus of knowing. Anyway you look at it 'it's turtles all the way down'. In my younger years I saw the story of 'it's turtles all the way down' as an illustration of the foolishness of folk believing in farcical notions of reality. Now I see it more of a warning that any notion of reality is actually only an approximation, a partial explanation and liable to require refinement, and constant modification. This of course is Sunyata - Emptiness. And it is pregnant with possibility. At times seeing reality this way offers the possibility of what might be termed salvation - that life is so much richer and more complex than I can know and that there's the possibility that I might reach such a deep understanding and experience of / insight into this that my entire life might undergo a significant and liberating shift. At other times this seems merely a philosophical observation without any likelihood of such a shift. Overall I suspect that my appreciation of Sunyata has and continues to deepen even if any significant shift may elude me. And perhaps a significant shift might not be such a good thing- I may not have the temperament to accommodate anything radicle. In which case a gentle softening of the more unhelpful aspects of my personality may be enough. As I've said before I'm too given to seeing the entropic aspect of Emptiness rather than the creative. The fear that I'll be pushed around to some suffering that I can neither stand nor control has been with me for as long as I can recall. Softening to see the 'I' in this in wider terms and trusting that it is enough to respond to each moment as fully as possible in the moment without writing the drama of a self trying to control the future isn't always possible. The combination of awareness and surrender doesn't always manifest. Often there's awareness but alone this isn't enough to avoid suffering. This is particularly true where there seems to be trauma. At present I'm reading (or listening to) a book about how we humans 'break'- I may write more about this in a future post. For now I'm just rolling with the being pushed about and wondering who's being pushed.