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Ananda
3115 Posts |
 Posted - Dec 15 2011 : 1:35:15 PM
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An astronomer friend was recently telling me some of the fundamental things about astronomy. I did not know, until he told me, that when you see the sun, you're seeing it where it was eight and a half minutes ago, not where it is now. Because it takes a ray of the sun eight and a half minutes to get to us. So you're not seeing it where it is; it's now somewhere else. Stars, too, have been sending light to us for hundreds of thousands of years. So when we're looking at them, they may not be where we're seeing them; they may be somewhere else. He said that, if we imagine a galaxy, a whole universe, this earth of ours would be lost toward the tail end of the Milky Way; not even in the center. And every one of the stars is a sun and some suns are so big that they could contain the sun and the earth and the distance between them. At a conservative estimate, there are one hundred million galaxies! The universe, as we know it, is expanding at the rate of two million miles a second. I was fascinated listening to all of this, and when I came out of the restaurant where we were eating, I looked up there and I had a different feel, a different perspective on life. That's awareness. So you can pick all this up as cold fact (and that's information), or suddenly you get another perspective on life -- what are we, what's this universe, what's human life? When you get that feel, that's what I mean when I speak of awareness.
Anthony De Mello, SJ |
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Divineis
Canada
420 Posts |
Posted - Dec 15 2011 : 1:53:49 PM
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| sweet, yeah, I've met a couple people, that their spirituality is based off the stars and galaxies and universes and such. It's neat stuff :) thanks for sharing |
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Ananda
3115 Posts |
Posted - Dec 15 2011 : 2:24:17 PM
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Hi Divineis |
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Astronomer Friend
