One of the most profound and unlikely spiritual experiences I had was sitting back at the planetarium Griffith Observatory watching a show. In the presentation, it was explained that people throughout the ages looked up at the sky looking for answers. It made me feel so connected to all of life that it closed the barriers of time and space. And my fascination with astronomy carried on.
In the documentary The Farthest, they told the stories behind the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space missions. After the main mission of Voyager 1 was completed, it continued in outer space, and at one point they turned the camera to take a photo of the Earth, which is now known as the Pale Blue Dot. From a scientific point of view, that photo gave no new discovery, no new insight. But as a human being seeing that photo, we get to see precisely how small we are in the scale of the universe, and how we are all connected to each other within this very small space that we occupy. Very often, our view of the world is limited: what I want, what would benefit me, what can make me happy. In this pursuit, we separate ourselves from others. We put ourselves in a box, and others in another. The emotional distance we create makes it appear as though we are not like each other. And yet if we take on a broader view, if we remember the Pale Blue Dot, we can see so clearly that we are not so separate, we are not so far from each other relative to how far away we are from the rest of cosmic existence. We are all interconnected, and yet how often we fail to see that. May we take on a broader view, far beyond our selfish tendencies, so that we can recognize we are not that far away from each other.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
March 2020
|