You Are a Miracle

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that arises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar. . . ."

Billions of years ago, before the sun ignited, before the earth was formed, all the elements that have come together to manifest as your body, that have allowed your consciousness to come forth, were spread out across thousands of light years of space. From this perspective, you are a miracle.

Billions of years from now, the sun will run out of fuel and implode. Earth's atmosphere will be blown off the planet like the flame off a candle. Meanwhile, other stars are forming. Other suns are igniting. Other intelligences are no doubt birthing into consciousness. But as far as we know, we are alone.

The short-sighted and personal perspective that we bring into our lives everyday is what limits us. Moreover, it threatens us. We live in a time of man-made climate change, overpopulation, massive species extinctions, and seemingly constant war, poverty and famine. The very air we breathe is compromised and the oceans are full of plastic but stripped of fish. On multiple fronts we are destroying the ecosystem that has allowed mankind and civilization - as it is - to arise.

Millions of years from now, our survivors (if there are any) will look back at this time in Earth's history and will ask how we could have done this to ourselves and to the Earth. How could we have played Nero as the Earth itself burned?

You are a miracle. Are you the miracle that we need at this moment?

Carl Sagan: "Let Us Find a Worthy Goal"

"The trap door beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?"

"We long to be here for a purpose even though - despite much self-deception - none is evident. The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is better than ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring faith."

"Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Our commonsense intuitions can be mistaken, our preferences do not count. We do not live in a privileged reference frame. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find a worthy goal."

-- Carl Sagan --
(1934-1996)

The Case For A Cosmocentric Religion

“A religion that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by traditional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.”

-- Carl Sagan --

 

In an insightful interview in EnlightenNext magazine, husband-and-wife research team, Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams (coauthors of The View From the Center of the Universe) make a strong case for the need for a new cosmocentric religion that takes into account all that we now know of the universe, from the smallest quark to the dark energy that appears to fuel the cosmos. Such a religion is an imperative, they note, if humanity as a species is to take advantage of the unique circumstances in which we find ourselves at this singular point in the history of the cosmos. 

 

"The experiment of intelligent life is (now) giving the universe its own way of looking at itself," Abrams notes. "All of us together—we and any intelligent aliens that might be out there—we are the consciousness of the universe. We are the way the universe reflects on itself, and without us, the universe is utterly meaningless and will forever be meaningless. A beautiful planet could be here with animals and plants, but the whole thing would be meaningless. Those environmentalists who imagine this planet from their point of view as a pristine beautiful Eden are giving the planet meaning. Without us, no one’s going to be imagining that."  

 

"(W)e’re in an extraordinary position from the point of view of human meaning," says Abrams, "because we’re now at a place where we can satisfy this deep need to understand ourselves as central to the universe. We can make it scientifically rigorous and accurate at the same time. That’s what has never been possible before. That’s what we really need to develop now."

 

"Throughout all of history," she notes, "people have needed to experience their place in the universe because it gave them grounding, made them feel that their lives were real and that they mattered. It was the basis of their various religions. We still are the same kind of people. We really do need meaning. And we need meaning that is grounded in the best picture of reality available to us in our time. Now, for the first time, we have a new picture of reality, and our meaning has to be grounded in that." 

 

"We can experience the entire universe spiritually if we realize that . . . what spiritual means is experiencing our connection to the cosmos," Abrams points out. "That is all it means; it has nothing to do with anything supernatural. The universe itself is so much grander than anyone imagined. If we even attempt to feel that we’re part of it, that is a spiritual action."

 

"Basically," says Primack, "the bottom line is that you never find meaning without looking at the big picture. You can’t understand what a little piece of a picture means until you see the big picture; you see how the little piece fits in. Cosmology is the biggest picture we have. It can help us find meaning by letting us see ourselves as part of a grand story."

 

"The amazing thing," Abrams points out, "is we have this opportunity right when the world is falling apart. There are a lot of people who are scared of these ideas. They’re scared partly because they feel they can’t understand the science. We have to understand how the universe works and make our spirituality as real as possible. The whole idea of trying to spend your life understanding your spiritual connection to the universe but not having any interest in how the universe actually works seems to me absolutely bizarre. We need to be coherent beings. That’s how it’s going to matter."

A New, Kosmocentric Paradigm

In a New-Age Emersonian rant, the narrator of "Cosmopolitical Thoughts on Leaving for Black Rock City, Nevada" (attached) raises recurrent questions about the survivability of humankind as a species (along with the survival of all other species) under our current socio-political paradigms. An advocate of a new "kosmocentric" understanding of life, the narrator of this great video clip offers a glimpse of an alternative to the industrial-productive, money-centered way we live now.

Of course, Black Rock City is the home of the Burning Man Festival, an annual art event and temporary community based on radical self-expression and self-reliance, and leaving for such a destination is bound to focus one's mind on what can be done to advance through change our increasingly sclerotic and seemingly moribund post-modern society. This is accomplished in spades in the attached clip.

"Isn't apocalypse," our narrator asks, "the best-selling plot in today's mass media market?  Everybody knows the old world is coming to an end," he notes, "but because the horror of this reality is too much to take responsibility for the majority of us sit on the couch and pretend it is all just another form of entertainment. Fantasy has replaced forthrightness," he observes, "and imagination has withered to make way for shallow ideological affiliation with merely symbolic causes."

"Of course, symbolism is no mere trifle, and our sense of meaning is precisely what is at stake," he notes. And, thus, he asks:

"How are we to conceive of the human presence on the planet? Are we a cancerous growth or the incarnation of God on Earth? Are we to become once again a spiritual instead of a consumptive and pleasure-driven species? Are we to replace industrial with initiatory cosmology? Is our goal to worship, celebrate, and create, or to use, abuse, and destroy?"

"These are questions of the ultimate meaning of the universe," according to this New-Age Emerson, "and their answers," he points out, "determine how we inhabit the Earth."

Wisdom of the Night Sky

"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these preachers of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --

 * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In the Wide Awe and Wisdom of the Night

In the wide awe and wisdom of the night
I saw the round world rolling on its way,
Beyond significance of depth or height,
Beyond the interchange of dark and day.
I marked the march to which is set no pause,
And that stupendous orbit, round whose rim
The great sphere sweeps, obedient unto laws
That utter the eternal thoughts of Him.

I compassed time, outstripped the starry speed,
And in my still soul apprehended space,
Till, weighing laws which these but blindly heed,
At last I came before Him face to face -
And knew the Universe of no such span
As the august infinitude of man.

-- Sir Charles G. D. Roberts --

Night On The Prairies

Night on the prairies,

The supper is over, the fire on the ground burns low,

The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets

I walk by myself - I stand and look at the stars, which I think now I never realized before.

Now I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death and test propositions.

How plenteous! how spiritual! how resumé!
The same old man and soul - the same old aspirations, and the same content.
I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-day exhibited,
I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.

Now while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me I will measure myself by them,
And now touch'd with the lives of other globes arrived as far along as those of the earth,
Or waiting to arrive, or pass'd on farther than those of the earth,
I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,
Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or wanting to arrive.

O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,
I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.

-- Walt Whitman --

Sheperds and Stars
(from, "The Land")

Shepherds and stars are quiet with the hills,
There is a bond between the men who go
From youth about the business of the earth,
And the earth they serve, their cradle and their grave;
Stars with the seasons alter; only he
Who wakeful follows the pricked revolving sky,
Turns concordant with the earth while others sleep:
To him the dawn is punctual; to him
The quarters of the year no empty name.
A loutish life, but in the midst of dark
Cut to a gash of beauty, as when the hawk
Bears upwards in its talons the striking snake,
High, and yet higher, till those two hang close,
Sculptural on the blue, together twined,
Exalted, deathly silent and alone.

-- V. Sackville-West --

Evolutionary Enlightenment: 'The Path Is Quite Simple'

Andrew Cohen
Editor-in-Chief, EnlightenNext magazine

"The path, in the context of evolutionary enlightenment, is, at least in theory, quite simple," writes spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen in The Huffington Post. "It is a journey from identification with ego to identification with the evolutionary impulse. It is a radical transformation of our relationship to the human experience, from one that is fundamentally negative, narcissistic, compulsive, and rigid to one that is inherently positive, liberated, consciously creative, and perpetually evolving."

"In an evolutionary context," Cohen observes, "the expression of the enlightened or liberated self is perpetual development in time. So if the individual is not developing in a measurable and discernible way, that means that he or she is stagnating in the emotional and psychological prison of unenlightenment that is the individual and collective ego."

It is because of our unquestioned identification with the negative orientation of the ego that most of us find ourselves unable to consistently express the freedom, lightness of being, and ecstatic positivity that is the quality of the evolutionary impulse," he notes, "(a)nd it is because of identification with ego that so few of us are able to spiritually evolve in a truly significant way."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

In the attached video, an introduction to his teachings on "Evolutionary Enlightenment," Cohen observes:

"In evolutionary enlightenment, the goal is not to get out of the universe, the goal is not to escape from the universe, the goal is to get into the process."

"The problem for most of us," he notes, "is that we are not in the (evolutionary) process. We are lost in this small-minded, self-centered, hell-life experience, in which our experience of what it means to be alive is so partial, and so small and so minimal, it's almost impossible to imagine how small it is until you wake up."

"So the goal here," Cohen points out, "is to get out of this small-minded, self-centered hell, (this) partial almost non-existent dream, so that we can begin to wholeheartedly, unself-consciously (and) passionately participate - or you could say co-participate - in the creation of the conscious universe with, and as, the very force that created it. Then your own deepest aspiration - your own deepest heartfelt aspiration and desire - becomes one with the creative principle, with the first cause itself."

"It is," Cohen notes, "a big thing. It's a big moment. It's a profound awakening. You awaken literally, to the cosmic and universal significance of your own emergence at this particular time, and to your inherent potential to participate in the process for the development of consciousness itself."

Tolle: The Universal Essence Beyond Form

"When you live in a world deadened by mental distractions you don't sense the aliveness of the universe anymore. Most people don't inhabit a living reality, but a conceptualized one."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

"God, or your essential nature," says Tolle, "is not some 'thing' . . . not content, not form. The best description through words is to say "not" . . .  what 'It' is 'not.' (T)hen you are left with what it is, which cannot be named but can be known, but cannot be known 'conceptually' because every concept is again a name and a form."

"It can," he points out "be known simply, easily in the silent space of stillness which is in everyone. Underneath the mental noise, no matter how heavy and turbulent the mental-emotional noise may be, no matter how heavy the egoic sense of self is, in everyone - as their essential nature - is the stillness of pure consciousness; your essential nature, the 'essence' - your 'essence' - not separate from the 'essence' of the universe."

Living Sustainably with the Earth, Compassionately with Each Other & Creatively with the Universe Itself

Social scientist and author, Duane Elgin, is an activist who advocates for our establishing a "more sustainable and spiritual culture." Winner of Japan's Goi International Peace Award for his global vision of sustainability, Elgin envisions a renewed culture in which humanity will build upon the fundamental unity that we have with the Earth, each other, and with the universe itself.

"As a species for the last 35,000 years we have been pulling back from nature," he observes, "we've been differentiating ourselves, we have been cultivating our ability to stand apart from nature (and) to know our own power and uniqueness. And we've been doing that as hunter-gatherers, as farmers and then as industrialists for 35,000 years. But now," he points out, "our power is so great that we are on the verge of undermining the ecological foundations (of civilization) for the foreseeable future. "

"So we have to turn then from separation to communion, to connection, to union, to Oneness with the Earth and with the universe. . . .There is," Elgin posits, "only one time in the life of a planet that a species comes to full wakefulness and dominates the life of the entire planet, and begins then to create climate change, species extinction and all the rest, that will forever change the evolutionary direction of the planet. And that," he points out, "is what is happening in our lifetimes, right now."

"We are beginning to see that the world is an integrated living system," says Elgin (in the video below), "not just the human system, but the Earth system of water, air, and earth. So we have to learn how to live sustainably within the Earth system, and we need to learn to live compassionately within the human system, and then . . . we have to learn to live at home within the cosmic system, the universal system - because that's where we come from, and when we die, that's where we go."

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Elgin's viewpoint of seeing and developing our universal sustainability, while utterly necessary, is not in and of itself unique, either to this culture or to this time. The seeming separation from the beauty of all that is has been apparent to mystics and sages for thousands of years.

Says Jalalludin Rumi, the great 13th-century Sufi poet, jurist and teacher:

The universe is a form of divine law,
your reasonable father.

When you feel ungrateful to him,
the shapes of the world seem mean and ugly.

Make peace with that father, the elegant patterning,
and every experience will fill with immediacy.

Because I love this, I am never bored.
Beauty constantly wells up, a noise of springwater
in my ear and in my inner being.

Tree limbs rise and fall like the ecstatic arms
of those who have submitted to the mystical life.

Leaf sounds talk together
like poets making fresh metaphors.
The green felt cover slips,
and we get a flash of the mirror underneath.

Think how it will be when the whole thing
is pulled away! I tell only one one-thousandth
of what I see, because there is doubt everywhere.

The conventional opinion of this poetry is,
it shows great optimism for the future.

But Father Reason says,
No need to announce the future!
This now is it. This. Your deepest need and desire
is satisfied by this moment's energy
here in your hand.

"It may be," says Rumi's masterful translator, Coleman Barks, "that the clarity Rumi calls "reason" is a brilliant lawfulness that ecologists and astronomers examine as the coherence in any system, and that the mystic and the scientist both attend the same layered intelligence: the grand and precise artistry of existence."

[Coleman Barks, "The Essential Rumi," pp. 145-146.]

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Cosmos and Consciousness: A Spiritual Awakening

In discussing Emerson's views on 'religion' in his classic work, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," the great psychologist, William James observed: "The universe has a divine soul of order, which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man. But whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye's brilliancy or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious life like the eye's seeing or the skin's feeling, is a decision that never unmistakably appears in Emerson's pages. It quivers on the boundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world's balance straight."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 33.]

James' famous work can undoubtedly be traced to the influence which the American Transcendentalists had on his view of man, the world, the universe and God. Further on in his introduction into the subject, he observes: "At bottom, the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether?"

"If we accept the whole," he asks, "shall we do so as if stunned into submission?"

James goes on to examine at great length the "religious experience" of a wide variety of individuals who had been "stunned into submission" by their realization of a greater spiritual reality than they had previously known to exist. For my part, however, I can find no such experience greater - although there are many others that vary solely in the details and circumstances - than that described by Edgar Mitchell, founder of The Institute of Noetic Sciences ("IONS"), and more famously, an astronaut on Apollo 14 who had the rarely privileged experience of walking on the moon.

In a recent article in the IONS newsletter, Mitchell describes the nature and import of the profound spiritual awakening he underwent on viewing the Earth as a distant orb in the vastness of space.

"The first thing that came to mind as I looked at Earth," Mitchell recalls, "was its incredible beauty. Even the spectacular photographs do not do it justice. It was a majestic sight, a splendid blue and white jewel suspended against a velvet black sky. How peacefully, how harmoniously, how marvelously it seemed to fit into the evolutionary pattern by which the universe is maintained. In a peak experience, the presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. This knowledge came to me directly – noetically. It was not a matter of discursive reasoning or logical abstraction. It was an experiential cognition. It was knowledge gained through private subjective awareness, but it was – and still is – every bit as real as the objective data upon which, say, the navigational program or the communications system was based. Clearly, the universe had meaning and direction. It was not perceptible by the sensory organs, but it was there nevertheless – an unseen dimension behind the visible creation that gives it an intelligent design and that gives life purpose."

"Next," he recalls, "I thought of our planet’s life-supporting character. That little globe of water, clouds, and land no bigger than my thumb was home, the haven our spacecraft would seek at the end of our voyage. Buckminster Fuller’s description of the planet as “Spaceship Earth” seemed eminently fitting."

"Then my thoughts turned to daily life on the planet," he remembers. "With that, my sense of wonderment gradually turned into something close to anguish because I realized that at the very moment when I was so privileged to view the planet from 240,000 miles in space, people of Earth were fighting wars; committing murder and other crimes; lying, cheating, and struggling for power and status; abusing the environment by polluting the water and air; wasting natural resources and ravaging the land; acting out of lust and greed; and hurting others through intolerance, bigotry, prejudice, and all the things that add up to man’s inhumanity to man. It seemed as though man were totally unconscious of his individual role in – and individual responsibility for – the future of life on the planet."

"It was also painfully apparent," he recalls, "that the millions of people suffering in conditions of poverty, ill health, misery, fear, and near slavery were in that condition from economic exploitation, political domination, religious and ethnic persecution, and a hundred other demons that spring from the human ego. Science, for all its technological feats, had not – more likely could not – deal with these problems stemming from man’s self-centeredness."

"The magnitude of the overall problem seemed staggering," he recalls. "Our condition seemed to be one of deepening crises on an unprecedented scale, crises that were mounting faster than we could solve them. There appeared to be the immediate possibility that warfare might destroy vast segments of civilization with one searing burst of atomic fury. Only a little further off appeared the possibility of intolerable levels of polluted air and of undrinkable water. A more remote but no less real likelihood was the death of large portions of the population from starvation, abetted by improper resources management by an exploding population."

"How had the world," he wondered, "come to such a critical situation – and why? Even more important, what could be done to correct it? How could we restore the necessary harmonious relationship between the environment and ourselves? How could a nuclear Armageddon be avoided? How could life be made livable? How could our potential for a peaceful, creative, fulfilling society be realized? How could the highest development of our objective rationality, epitomized by science, be wedded to the highest development of our subjective intuition, epitomized by religion?"

"These thoughts and questions stayed with me through the mission, splashdown, and parades," he recounts. "They stayed long afterward to the point of haunting me with an overwhelming awareness of how limited a view man has of his own life and the planet’s. Sometimes at night I would lie awake for hours struggling with this enigma, trying to understand it and see it in a sensible perspective. How could human beings, the most intelligent creature on earth, be so utterly stupid and shortsighted as to put themselves in a position of possible global extinction? How had insight become divorced from instinct? Was it possible to find a workable solution?"

"Only when man sees his fundamental unity with the processes of nature and the functioning of the universe," Mitchell observes, "will the old ways of thinking and behaving disappear. Only when man moves from his ego-centered self-image to a new image of universal human will the perennial problems that plague us be susceptible of resolution."

"Humanity must rise from man to mankind," he notes,"from the personal to the transpersonal, from self-consciousness to cosmic consciousness."

"Humanity’s multiple problems," he concludes, "resolve themselves into one fundamental problem: how to change consciousness. How," he asks, "can we raise our awareness to a higher level – a level that will restore the unity of human, the planet, and the universe?"

This, to me, is the existential question of our time. Mitchell's experience, and the view of our place in the cosmos which it stamped upon him, suggests the answer.

"Now," he unequivocally notes, "is the time for us to begin building a single whole of humanity. Now is the time to develop our nonrational abilities into a “subjective technology,” which will begin the wedding of science and religion, reason and intuition, the physical and the spiritual. This union of head and heart, insight and instinct, will ensure that as science comes to comprehend the nonmaterial aspect of reality as well as it knows the material – that is, as science approaches omniscience – our knowledge will become wisdom, our love of power will become the power of love, and the universal human of cosmic consciousness can then emerge."

A Sacred Earth: The Vision of Thomas Berry

"Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

-- Henry David Thoreau --

The Earth is a sacred space within the cosmos . . . and we are violating its sanctity, losing touch with its sacredness - irrevoccably  and permanently -  day by day, month by month, year after relentless year.

Thomas Berry, C.P. (November 9, 1914 – June 1, 2009) was a Catholic priest of the Passionist order, cultural historian and ecotheologian (although cosmologist and geologian — or “Earth scholar” — were his preferred descriptors). Among advocates of deep ecology and "ecospirituality" he is famous for proposing that a deep understanding of the history and functioning of the evolving universe is a necessary inspiration and guide for our own effective functioning as individuals and as a species. He is considered a leader of progressive eco-theology and a wider, expansive collective consciousness within the Catholic Church, in the tradition of the Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin.

[Source: Wikipedia]

The video below, an excerpt from Berry's writings ("The Dream of the Earth"), illustrates the depth of Berry's vision of the Earth as a sacred space in peril.

On Non-Duality, Karma and Consciousness

"All philosophies, all science, all religions, inform us that this world of shapes, forms and names is but a phenomenal or shadow world—a show-world—back of which rests Reality, called by some name of the teacher. But remember this, all philosophy that counts is based upon some form of monism—Oneness—whether the concept be a known or unknown god; an unknown or unknowable principle; a substance; an Energy, or Spirit. There is but One—there can be but One—such is the inevitable conclusion of the highest human reason, intuition or faith."

-- Yogi Ramachakara --
["Lessons in Gnani Yoga," Chap. 1.]

Mars Hill, Athens

One of my favourite passages from the New Testament is Paul's "Sermon on Mars Hill," in which he is asked by the Athenian Stoic and Epicurean philosophers to expound upon what was then a  new philosophy/religion.

"God that made the world and all the things therein," observed Paul, "seeing that he is the Lord of heaven and earth dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all things life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth . . . For in him we live and move and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring." (Acts 17:24-28)

It is among my favourites because (a) it speaks of the omnipresence of a higher order in which everything exists, (b) it brings the reality of this higher order out of religious places and frees it of ritual worship, and (c) it recognizes that all true philosophies, religions and wisdom traditions, alike, speak of the same higher order or Godhead, and that each of these is non-exclusive.

As the Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, observed: "Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web."

[Marcus Aurelius,"Meditations," 4:40]

Physicists have demonstrated the conservation of mass and energy. With each inhalation of the cool morning air and each warm, moist exhalation of carbon dioxide, this is demonstrated. Indeed, every atom of our bodies, save hydrogen, was forged many billions of years ago in the implosion of some unnamed star, and our very bodies are thus a testament to the preservation of mass and energy.

Yet what about consciousness? How can it be that this seeming third aspect of the manifest universe, which along with mass and energy (themselves interchangeable) pervades and precipitates even the smallest sub-particular interaction, alone perishes?

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe"," Einstein noted, "a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical illusion of consciousness."

"This delusion is a kind of prison for us," he observed, "restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"In God," Emerson wrote, "every end is converted into a new means." This, to me, seems inherently true; it has the "ring of truth" to it. It circumscribes the law of karma, in which each moment is seen as an effect produced by a chain of causation stretching back to the very first movement of the universe, and each such effect becoming a further link in this causal chain. Thus, everything that is reaped has been sown, over and over, many times.

If as has been said (and demonstrated, it seems, in science), "Nothing is wasted in God's economy," how can it be that the one perceptual sense underlying all others - that being consciousness itself - is the one and only thing in this 'Great Economy' that perishes? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; but where except back to the Universal consciousness - that which underlies and pervades the manifestation of all mass and energy in the universe's singular field - goes the consciousness, the soul of each being? For has not each individualized consciousness been at all times part and parcel of this Whole?

The Expansive Universe

Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941)

BRINK OF ETERNITY

In desperate hope I go and search for her
in all the corners of my room;
I find her not.

My house is small
and what once has gone from it can never be regained.

But infinite is thy mansion, my lord,
and seeking her I have to come to thy door.

I stand under the golden canopy of thine evening sky
and I lift my eager eyes to thy face.

I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish
---no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears.

Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean,
plunge it into the deepest fullness.
Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch
in the allness of the universe.

-- Rabindranath Tagore --

Who has not gazed in rapt attention at the night sky and not had a sense of his or her own smallness against the background of the stars? Throughout history sages and poets, alike, have wondered at the depths of the heavens, but only now do we know how deep and expansive the depths of the heavens truly are.

For the pantheist, the spiritual but not religious, the agnostic and the non-dualist, alike, the depths of the cosmos may testify to the breadth of the manifest and non-manifest aspects of Unity and Wholeness, or what might be a single, unitary G_d.

Light, one of the few constants in the universe, travels at a mind boggling 186,000 miles per second (or 300,000 kilometres per second). At that speed, it still takes three-quarters of a second for sunlight reflected off the moon to reach our eyes, and a full eight minutes for sunlight to travel the approximately 93,000,000 miles (149,000,000 km) from the Sun itself.

Every star we see when we look up into the sky lies within our galaxy, the Milky Way. And, yet, the closest star system to us, Alpha Centauri, is 4.35 light years away - that's  25 trillion miles, or 40 trillion kilometers away. The Milky Way, itself is a more-or-less average sized galaxy containing approximately 200 billion stars, and stretching across 100,000 light years of space.

There are approximately 80 billion other such galaxies in "the observable universe" - some larger, some smaller than the Milky Way - in which there are anywhere from 30 sextillion to a septillion different star systems (i.e., 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,0000 to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 separate stars), and who knows how many countless worlds.

At the largest scale, as the video clips below illustrate, superclusters of galaxies (each stretching across hundreds of millions of light years) weave themselves into a fabric of knots and threads that can be billions of light years long, with the density of this fabric stretching matter uniformly out throughout the heavens.

And, yet, as incomprehensible as such distances and numbers are to us, it is indisputable that amidst all this "we live and move, and have our being," (Acts 17:28).