Tag Archives: space

memo to earth species H. sapiens

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Let us find our place:   on our knees in awe, wonderment and humility.

 

Earth, Jupiter and Venus seen from Mars

 
Consider that:

– You can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum.

– As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy.

– 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.”

– The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star.

– Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.

– The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist.

So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it.

This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.
 

 
Source: NASA Lunar Science Institute

Image: Earth, Jupiter and Venus, seen from Mars

Thanks to: love is a place
 

 
I posted this to Facebook a year ago.  It’s been circulating again recently and since many readers of this blog don’t ‘do’ Fb I decided to share it here as well.   It’s a keeper.
 
PS:
Where, in this whirling mix of cosmic biomaterial and activity can a solid, changeless self be found?  If such an entity can’t be found, what KNOWS this?
 

I never knew

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Take off the backpack
Lie down in the long grass.
Pull up the blue sky-blanket.
Rest.

So many years of Dharma practice,
Straight-spine diligence, straining toward
enlightenment.
Today.
This hillside.
Just this.

Lie down in the long grass.
Let the earth take you.
Deer tracks and horse dung
and the eye within the eye,
revolving and luminous.

I never knew this.
Did no one ever tell me?

I remember my Zen master in the interview room,
‘Trust yourself,’ he said. ‘Just be yourself.’

I think his meaning was this:

Take off the backpack,
Lie down in the long grass.
Let the sky take you.
Rest.
Breathe space
into space
into space.

I never knew there was this much light!

~ Helen Dhara Gatling-Austin
October 31, 1998

You may already be familiar with this beautiful poem by Helen Dhara Gatling-Austin. I know it has been posted on many a blog and group over the last couple of decades, but to my mind, it’s one of those classics that never age or fail to inspire. It deserves frequent airings! For this post I sourced it from the Nonduality Highlights archive.

bright naked beingness

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What an odd sort of a night. The body is still somewhat travel-weary so it trotted off to bed early. There’s usually a time of sitting, settling, checking-in with Reality before snuggling under the doona, and last night was no exception. The mind was very bright. Sleep came instantly and went on for some hours.

Then suddenly one was jolted awake by what felt like an electric shock surging through the whole body. The really strange thing was that although I was asleep, something was aware of both the jolt and the waking up. “That was a bit weird,” thinking said.

So – I’m lying there wide awake in the moon-lit night wondering where all the energy now vibrating the body has come from. Feeling like a spring chicken and contemplating getting up to do something … then I hear a shout: “Be Beingness!”

Instantly, with no intention or volition, there was a turning, a converging of the energy we call attention … back. The sensation was physical.

“Back”? No. Backwards? Sort of. As though Aware-ing was falling out the back of the brain and into … space. And the whole of space was singing silence and it was breathing. This was not a dream; I have never felt more fully present.

There were no lights. There was no bliss. There was no center or reference-point. There was only this vast void, breathing.

It continued for some hours before sleep-tide washed in. And in the dawn, when Kookaburras’ cackling chorus rallied the sleeping world, it was still present. It’s here now, as I type and as your ‘I’ reads; it has always been here: bright naked Beingness.

This is what ‘I’ is.

~

wideawake – to the nth

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I seek a shift in common language,
a way to say what is actually meant.
I speak of I, but don’t mean I
as a thing.

I speak of it as that (mystery)
which manifests function and
process.

I speak of I as ‘It’.
But It is no-thing either, yet thought
would instantly turn it into a thing in
time and space.

I as It occupies neither time nor
space, yet – magician that it is –
manifests both in order to
show up for the party.

I as It is never caught napping,
wide-eyed I is the eternal insomniac
wideawake – to the nth

– miriam louisa
echoes from emptiness