When I Consider The Heavens
Scientists say that when the THE formula or equation (THE key that unlocks THE mystery) is invented or discovered it will be true,and beautiful and simple. At the moment it seems that beauty and truth get in each others way a lot, which makes things far from simple.
Charles Darwin said that when he discovered the truth about nature (natural selection) he also lost the sense of nature's beauty. Sad? Yes! Necessary? i don't think so!
Alfred Korzybski felt that human knowledge was limited by the structure of the human nervous system. This is compounded by the nature of human language which is imprecise and switches to different levels of abstraction without notice. But language can be improved by creating a mathematics based language system. How would compassion be expressed in mathematical terms? What about sorrow?
The Buddhist notion of right speech insists that language should not only be true, it should also be kind, beneficial, and used only when necessary.
Science and religion are tools of individuals and societies. Language is a toot also, but it is much more. It is the vehicle by which human beings create and express human culture and transport it across time and space.
In an old New Yorker cartoon a woman and a slightly undersized man are standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. She says, in response to something he had say: "Well, it doesn't make ME feel small."
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Poets and Botanists look at plants differently. Mystics and scientists learn different lessons from nature. Science cannot teach the lessons of poetry any more than poetry can teach the lessons of science. There are also poet-scientists.
Somebody (was it Aldous Huxley in .Heaven and Hell) that focusing on the infinitessimal or the infinite guides mindfulness because each extreme carries us away from the "life-sized" world of daily experience. Meditating on the vein of a leaf or a vein in my arm can transport me out my ordinary clutter into a strange environment where i have no answers and don't know how to pose the questions. There i may sit.. and sit.
When i look at the sky on a clear night from a place away from city lights, i see what appear to be an immense number of stars. Actually, there are only about 2500 which i can see without binoculars or a telescope. But in our galaxy are perhaps 400,000,000,000 (400 billion ) stars. This galaxy is one of 170 billion galaxies containing 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one septillion, or a million million million million) stars.
Lighj from these stars has been moving toward us for over fourteen billion years (and light travel at 5.87 trillion miles per year). Since the universe is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light -- and i would need advanced courses in theoretical physics to figure that one out -- some stars whose light (theoretically) reaches us are now 45.7 billion light years.
Sol is a good sized star, probably larger than most, but approximately 35 percent of stars (350 sextillion) are larger than our sun. Thirty-three that we know of have radii at least 700 times the radius of the sun. A star we named NMI Cygni has a radius1,650 times that of the sun and could hold twenty-three million suns inside it.
Do these numbers make the universe seem more or less awesome? I know that they boggle mind and mind does need to be pretty boggled before it can break free. I have seen pictorial representations of the visible universe. To show the galaxy, the solar system disappears; to show the cludster of galaxies of which the milky way is a part, the milky way disappears; and to show the "visible' universe our whole cluster of galaxies vanishes into a tiny dot.
What, indeed, am i, that i am mindful of me.
Charles Darwin said that when he discovered the truth about nature (natural selection) he also lost the sense of nature's beauty. Sad? Yes! Necessary? i don't think so!
Alfred Korzybski felt that human knowledge was limited by the structure of the human nervous system. This is compounded by the nature of human language which is imprecise and switches to different levels of abstraction without notice. But language can be improved by creating a mathematics based language system. How would compassion be expressed in mathematical terms? What about sorrow?
The Buddhist notion of right speech insists that language should not only be true, it should also be kind, beneficial, and used only when necessary.
Science and religion are tools of individuals and societies. Language is a toot also, but it is much more. It is the vehicle by which human beings create and express human culture and transport it across time and space.
In an old New Yorker cartoon a woman and a slightly undersized man are standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. She says, in response to something he had say: "Well, it doesn't make ME feel small."
/////////////////////////////////////////////
Poets and Botanists look at plants differently. Mystics and scientists learn different lessons from nature. Science cannot teach the lessons of poetry any more than poetry can teach the lessons of science. There are also poet-scientists.
Somebody (was it Aldous Huxley in .Heaven and Hell) that focusing on the infinitessimal or the infinite guides mindfulness because each extreme carries us away from the "life-sized" world of daily experience. Meditating on the vein of a leaf or a vein in my arm can transport me out my ordinary clutter into a strange environment where i have no answers and don't know how to pose the questions. There i may sit.. and sit.
When i look at the sky on a clear night from a place away from city lights, i see what appear to be an immense number of stars. Actually, there are only about 2500 which i can see without binoculars or a telescope. But in our galaxy are perhaps 400,000,000,000 (400 billion ) stars. This galaxy is one of 170 billion galaxies containing 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one septillion, or a million million million million) stars.
Lighj from these stars has been moving toward us for over fourteen billion years (and light travel at 5.87 trillion miles per year). Since the universe is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light -- and i would need advanced courses in theoretical physics to figure that one out -- some stars whose light (theoretically) reaches us are now 45.7 billion light years.
Sol is a good sized star, probably larger than most, but approximately 35 percent of stars (350 sextillion) are larger than our sun. Thirty-three that we know of have radii at least 700 times the radius of the sun. A star we named NMI Cygni has a radius1,650 times that of the sun and could hold twenty-three million suns inside it.
Do these numbers make the universe seem more or less awesome? I know that they boggle mind and mind does need to be pretty boggled before it can break free. I have seen pictorial representations of the visible universe. To show the galaxy, the solar system disappears; to show the cludster of galaxies of which the milky way is a part, the milky way disappears; and to show the "visible' universe our whole cluster of galaxies vanishes into a tiny dot.
What, indeed, am i, that i am mindful of me.