“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” -Albert Einstein
“You will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. without a cloud there will be no water; without water the trees cannot grow; without trees, you cannot make paper. so the cloud is in here. the existence of this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. paper and cloud are so close. let us think of other things, like sunshine. sunshine is very important because the forest cannot grow without sunshine, and we as humans cannot grow without sunshine. so the logger needs sunshine in order to cut the tree, and the tree needs sunshine in this sheet of paper. and if you look more deeply… you see not only the cloud and the sunshine in it, but that everything is here, the wheat that became the bread for the logger to eat, the logger’s father—everything is in this sheet of paper. the presence of this tiny sheet of paper proves the presence of the whole cosmos.”
“Buddha says sammasamadhi is aloneness. The right meditation is to be so utterly alone that you are one with the all. Let me explain it to you. If you are empty your boundaries disappear because emptiness can have no boundaries. Emptiness can only be infinite. Emptiness cannot have any weight, emptiness cannot have any color, emptiness cannot have any name, emptiness cannot have any form. When you are empty, how will you divide yourself from others? – because you don’t have any color, you don’t have any name, you don’t have any form, you don’t have any boundaries. How are you going to make distinctions? When you are empty you are one with all. You have melted into existence, existence has merged with you.”
“I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, our Lord’s living garden.”
“Do you know that yours is not the first generation to yearn for a life full of beauty and freedom? Do you know that all your ancestors felt as you do — and fell victim to trouble and hatred? Do you know also, that your fervent wishes can only find fulfillment if you succeed in attaining love and understanding of men, and animals, and plants, and stars, so that every joy becomes your joy and every pain your pain? Open your eyes, your heart, your hands, and avoid the poison your forebears so greedily sucked in from History. Then will all the earth be your fatherland, and all your work and effort spread forth blessings.”
— Albert Einstein
Entry written in an album at Caputh, Germany, 1932
“When you walk through a forest that has not been tamed and interfered with by man, you will see not only abundant life around you, but you will also encounter fallen trees and decaying trunks, rotting leaves and decomposing matter at every step. Wherever you look, you will find death as well as life.
Upon closer scrutiny, however, you will discover the that decomposing tree trunk and rotting leaves not only give birth to new life, but are full of life themselves. Microorganisms are at work. Molecules are rearranging themselves. So death isn’t to be found anywhere. There is only the metamorphosis of life forms. What can you learn from this?
Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.”
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
The video of this is below.
The Observable Universe
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan
Our little blue dot, the Earth.
To put things into a more tangible perspective, here is some information regarding our Solar System and the Universe.
The distance from the Earth to the Sun is approximately 93,000,000 miles. The Milky Way Galaxy, or which our Solar System is only a very small part, would take 100,000 years to travel across it if we could travel at the speed of light. Considering our galaxy is one of billions floating in the sea of the Universe, the immensity is beyond the scope of the mind to grasp.
If you want to read more, NASA provides more information here.
