Cosmos Series Quotes

A human being weighing 70 kilograms contains among other things: -45 litres of water -Enough chalk to whiten a chicken pen -Enough phosphorus for 2,200 matches -Enough fat to make approximately 70 bars of soap -Enough iron to make a two inch nail -Enough carbon for 9,000 pencil points -A spoonful of magnesium I weigh more than 70 kilograms. And I remember a TV series called Cosmos. Carl Sagan would walk around on a set that was meant to look like space, speaking in large numbers. On one of the shows he sat in front of a tank full of all the substances human beings are made of. He stirred the tank with a stick wondering if he would be able to create life. He didn’t succeed.

Without the billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have self-annihilated, leaving a cosmos made of photons and nothing else—the ultimate let-there-be-light scenario.

Our ancestors said to their mother Earth: 'We are yours'. Modern Humanity said to Nature, 'You are mine'. The Green Man has returned as the living face of the whole earth so that through his mouth we may say to the universe: 'We are one'.

Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: spilled milk, a broken toy, a scraped knee. As adults we know that kids have no clue of what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective. Children do not yet know that the world doesn’t revolve around them. As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Apparently not. Yet evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers. Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.

Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers. Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.

Our concept of truth becomes more universal as we reach higher levels of consciousness and awareness, taking in a wider spectrum of information and possibility. As we adapt a more expanded perspective on our reality, our concept of what is true and meaningful changes--from local to regional, regional to global, beyond global to the galaxy, and then to the cosmos.

Each soul path is a divine unique fingerprint and its existence adds to the beautiful tapestry of the cosmos. "Life is a series of defining moments, cross roads and gateways as each door closes and new ones open. Always and in all ways follow the heartbeat of your own soul which is the pathfilled with light and love.

But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was all banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes. That the universe was filled to its edges with groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos.

To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place.

The cosmos is the ordering of number. Perception is the imaging of form contained in the potential of number. Robert Lawlor

..every time scientists try to observe the quantum world they disturb it. And because at least one quantum of energy must always be involved, there is no way the size of this disturbance can be reduced. Our acts of observing the universe, our attempts to gather knowledge, are no longer strictly objective because in seeking to know the universe we act to disturb it. Science prides itself on objectivity, but now Nature is telling us we never see a pure, pristine and objective quantum world. In every act of observation the observing subject enters into the cosmos and disturbs it in an irreducible way. Science is like photographing a series of close ups with your back to the sun. No matter which way you move, your shadow always falls across the scene you photograph. No matter what you do, you can never efface yourself from the photographed scene.

It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it’s too imprecise. How many billions are “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked—and sure enough, I never said it.

The Hawaiian creation myth relates that the present cosmos is only the last of a series, having arisen in stages from the wreck of the previous universe. In this account, the octopus is the lone survivor of the previous, alien universe.

With only one proton in its nucleus, hydrogen is the lightest and simplest element, made entirely during the big bang. Out of the ninety-four naturally occurring elements, hydrogen lays claim to more than two-thirds of all the atoms in the human body, and more than ninety percent of all atoms in the cosmos, on all scales, right on down to the solar system.

The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their “low contracted prejudices.” And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace, rather than fear, the cosmic perspective.

Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.

She followed him across the desolate, unfurnished room to the very edge of everything it someday promised to become, then went feet forward onto the extended sky...

Most of what humans understand about light is nothing, which is not their fault. Humans aren’t supposed to have it all figured out.

Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way – estimates range from a hundred billion or so to perhaps four hundred billion – and the Milky Way is just one of a hundred and forty billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours. In the 1960s, a professor at Cornell named Frank Drake, excited by such whopping numbers, worked out a famous equation designed to calculate the chances of advanced life existing in the cosmos, based on a series of diminishing probabilities. Under Drake’s equation you divide the number of stars in a selected portion of the universe by the number of stars that are likely to have planetary systems; divide that by the number of planetary systems that could theoretically support life; divide that by the number on which life, having arisen, advances to a state of intelligence; and so on. At each such division, the number shrinks colossally – yet even with the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions.

When you look out in space, you’re looking back into time. The farther across space you look, the further back in time you see. This means the telescopes and instruments we use to study the cosmos are really time machines.

He pulled her into his arms and kissed her like she was his and had been for years. Like he was a man dying and she was his greatest love. He felt like she was. Shylah Cosmos. His only little peony. His delicate flower. Dependable. Long-lived.

For every path that leads to success, there are a million billion paths to failure. The Anchor’s quest is to live her life again and again and again until she finds the one true path. Only then can she shepherd humanity from bloodshed and destruction to peace and harmony.

the dark lady who inspired Shakespeare’s sonnets, the lady of Arosa may remain forever mysterious.” (Unfortunately, because Schrödinger had so many girlfriends and lovers in his life, as well as illegitimate children, it is impossible to determine precisely who served as the muse for this historic equation.) Over the next several months, in a remarkable series of papers, Schrödinger showed that the mysterious rules found by Niels Bohr for the hydrogen atom were simple consequences of his equation. For the first time, physicists had a detailed picture of the interior of the atom, by which one could, in principle, calculate the properties of more complex atoms, even molecules. Within months, the new quantum theory became a steamroller, obliterating many of the most puzzling questions about the atomic world, answering the greatest mysteries that had stumped scientists since the Greeks. The

What is the minimum level of complexity needed to attain the twin features of non-trivial replication and open-ended evolvability? If the complexity threshold is quite low, we might expect life to arise easily and be widespread in the cosmos. If it is very high, then life on Earth may be an exception, a freak product of a series of highly improbable events.

In the intricate and mutable space-time geometry at the black hole, in-falling matter and energy interacted with the virtualities of the vacuum in ways unknown to the flatter cosmos beyond it. Quasi-stable quantum states appeared, linked according to Schrodinger's wave functions and their own entanglement, more and more of them, intricacy compounding until it amounted to a set of codes. The uncertainty principle wrought mutations; variants perished or flourished; forms competed, cooperated, merged, divided, interacted; the patterns multiplied and diversified; at last, along one fork on a branch of the life tree, thought budded. That life was not organic, animal and vegetable and lesser kingdoms, growing, breathing, drinking, eating, breeding, hunting, hiding; it kindled no fires and wielded no tools; from the beginning, it was a kind of oneness. An original unity differentiated itself into countless avatars, like waves on a sea. They arose and lived individually, coalesced when they chose by twos or threes or multitudes, reemerged as other than they had been, gave themselves and their experiences back to the underlying whole. Evolution, history, lives eerily resembled memes in organic minds. Yet quantum life was not a series of shifting abstractions. Like the organic, it was in and of its environment. It acted to alter its quantum states and those around it: action that manifested itself as electronic, photonic, and nuclear events. Its domain was no more shadowy to it than ours is to us. It strove, it failed, it achieved. They were never sure aboardEnvoy whether they could suppose it loved, hated, yearned, mourned, rejoiced. The gap between was too wide for any language to bridge. Nevertheless they were convinced that it knew something they might as well call emotion, and that that included wondering.

From a process-oriented point of view, we can best understand the birth-chart—the map of the heavens drawn for the exact time and place of a person's first breath—if we picture it as a stop-motion snapshot of a moment in the flow of the life of the cosmos. It is, as it were, a slice of celestial space-time as seen from planet Earth. The whole past of celestial motion is behind and implied in the particular planetary, zodiacal, house and aspect pattern appearing at the moment of our birth. And implied in both its totality and each of its parts is dynamic momentum, that is, an inexorable continuation of motion toward a future unfoldment. A birth-chart is thus a celestial statement of where the universe 'is', and therefore what it needs next, at the moment of our birth.

In the first case it emerges that the evidence that might refute a theory can often be unearthed only with the help of an incompatible alternative: the advice (which goes back to Newton and which is still popular today) to use alternatives only when refutations have already discredited the orthodox theory puts the cart before the horse. Also, some of the most important formal properties of a theory are found by contrast, and not by analysis. A scientist who wishes to maximize the empirical content of the views he holds and who wants to understand them as clearly as he possibly can must therefore introduce other views; that is, he must adopt a pluralistic methodology. He must compare ideas with other ideas rather than with 'experience' and he must try to improve rather than discard the views that have failed in the competition. Proceeding in this way he will retain the theories of man and cosmos that are found in Genesis, or in the Pimander, he will elaborate them and use them to measure the success of evolution and other 'modern' views. He may then discover that the theory of evolution is not as good as is generally assumed and that it must be supplemented, or entirely replaced, by an improved version of Genesis. Knowledge so conceived is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others in greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness. Nothing is ever settled, no view can ever be omitted from a comprehensive account. Plutarch or Diogenes Laertius, and not Dirac or von Neumann, are the models for presenting a knowledge of this kind in which the history of a science becomes an inseparable part of the science itself - it is essential for its further development as well as for giving content to the theories it contains at any particular moment. Experts and laymen, professionals and dilettani, truth-freaks and liars - they all are invited to participate in the contest and to make their contribution to the enrichment of our culture. The task of the scientist, however, is no longer 'to search for the truth', or 'to praise god', or 'to synthesize observations', or 'to improve predictions'. These are but side effects of an activity to which his attention is now mainly directed and which is 'to make the weaker case the stronger' as the sophists said, and thereby to sustain the motion of the whole.

The Big Bang is an involution event, signifying a transition from a higher state to a lower state. God splinters from a conscious unity into an unconscious plurality of countless individual cells. This is “the Fall”. It was not Man that fell, it was God. The God Mirror split into myriad shards, and now they all have to be fitted together again, so that God can once again see himself reflected and know exactly who he is. The evolution of the Cosmos is designed to achieve exactly this. At the Big Bang, God totally loses consciousness. We might even say that God dies. It then has to resurrect itself, which equates to completely restoring consciousness.

Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities, each of which is composed of actual and virtual elements. Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images. This cloud is composed of a series of more or less extensive coexisting circuits, along which the virtual images are distributed, and around which they run. These virtuals vary in kind as well as in their degree of proximity from the actual particles by which they are both emitted and absorbed. They are called virtual in so far as their emission and absorption, creation and destruction, occur in a period of time shorter than the shortest continuous period imaginable; it is this very brevity that keeps them subject to a principle of uncertainty or indetermination. The virtuals, encircling the actual, perpetually renew themselves by emitting yet others, with which they are in turn surrounded and which go on in turn to react upon the actual: ‘in the heart of the cloud of the virtual there is a virtual of a yet higher order ... every virtual particle surrounds itself with a virtual cosmos and each in its turn does likewise indefinitely.’ It is the dramatic identity of their dynamics that makes a perception resemble a particle: an actual perception surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images, distributed on increasingly remote, increasingly large, moving circuits, which both make and unmake each other. These are memories of different sorts, but they are still called virtual images in that their speed or brevity subjects them too to a principle of the unconsciousness. It is by virtue of their mutual inextricability that virtual images are able to react upon actual objects. From this perspective, the virtual images delimit a continuum, whether one takes all of the circles together or each individually, a spatium determined in each case by the maximum of time imaginable. The varyingly dense layers of the actual object correspond to these, more or less extensive, circles of virtual images. These layers, whilst themselves virtual, and upon which the actual object becomes itself virtual, constitute the total impetus of the object. The plane of immanence, upon which the dissolution of the actual object itself occurs, is itself constituted when both object and image are virtual. But the process of actualization undergone by the actual is one which has as great an effect on the image as it does on the object. The continuum of virtual images is fragmented and the spatium cut up according to whether the temporal decompositions are regular or irregular. The total impetus of the virtual object splits into forces corresponding to the partial continuum, and the speeds traversing the cut-up spatium. The virtual is never independent of the singularities which cut it up and divide it out on the plane of immanence. As Leibniz has shown, force is as much a virtual in the process of being actualized as the space through which it travels. The plane is therefore divided into a multiplicity of planes according to the cuts in the continuum, and to the divisions of force which mark the actualization of the virtual. But all the planes merge into one following the path which leads to the actual. The plane of immanence includes both the virtual and its actualization simultaneously, without there being any assignable limit between the two. The actual is the complement or the product, the object of actualization, which has nothing but virtual as its subject. Actualization belongs to the virtual. The actualization of the virtual is singularity whereas the actual itself is individuality constituted. The actual falls from the plane like a fruit, whist the actualization relates it back to the plane as if to that which turns the object back into a subject.

In fifth–sixth-century Athens, philosophy appears more and more as a systematic whole, its study guided by a canon of authoritative works, including both Aristotle and Plato. The peak of the philosophical curriculum is no longer metaphysics, but theology, i.e.,a philosophical discourse about the divine principles, whose sources lie first and foremost in the revelations of late paganism and then in Plato’s dialogues, allegorically interpreted as conveying his theological doctrine. […] Both the Platonic Theology and the Elements of Theology begin with the One, the First Principle. Departing from Plotinus, who was convinced that the suprasensible causes were but three – the One-Good, Intellect, and Soul – the two Proclean works expound the procession of multiplicity from the One as the derivation of a series of intermediate principles, first between the One and the intelligible being, then between the intelligible being and the divine Intellect (and intellects), and then between the divine Intellect and the divine Soul (and souls). For Proclus, an entire hierarchy of divine principles lies both outside the visible universe and within it, and the human soul, fallen into the world of coming-to-be and passing away, can return to the First Principle only through the “appropriate mediations.” [...] Philosophy, insofar as it celebrates the truly divine principles of the visible cosmos, is prayer.

According to the [evolutionist explanation of the instinct of animals], instinct is the expression of the heredity of a species, of an accumulation of analogous experiences down the ages. This is how they explain, for example, the fact that a flock of sheep hastily gathers together around the lambs the moment it perceives the shadow of a bird of prey, or that a kitten while playing already employs all the tricks of a hunter, or that birds know how to build their nests. In fact, it is enough to watch animals to see that their instinct has nothing of an automatism about it. The formation of such a mechanism by a purely cumulative . . . process is highly improbable, to say the least. Instinct is a nonreflective modality of the intelligence; it is determined, not by a series of automatic reflexes, but by the “form”—the qualitative determination—of the species. This form is like a filter through which the universal intelligence is manifested. . . The same is also true for man: his intelligence too is determined by the subtle form of his species. This form, however, includes the reflective faculty, which allows of a singularization of the individual such as does not exist among the animals. Man alone is able to objectivize himself. He can say: “I am this or that.” He alone possesses this two-edged faculty. Man, by virtue of his own central position in the cosmos, is able to transcend his specific norm; he can also betray it, and sink lower; "The corruption of the best is corruption at its worst." A normal animal remains true to the form and genius of its species; if its intelligence is not reflective and objectifying, but in some sort existential, it is nonetheless spontaneous; it is assuredly a form of the universal intelligence even if it is not recognized as such by men who, from prejudice or ignorance, identify intelligence with discursive thought exclusively.

Steiner's teachings begin and end with man but in between is humankind, the earth, the cosmos. Architecture is the same: it too begins and ends with individual man, with everything else within it.

In this scenario, the universe as we know it would merely be the latest in a temporal series, some of which may have contained intelligent life and the culture they created, but are now long ago extinguished. In due course, all of our contributions and those of any other life-forms our universe supports would be similarly erased.

when we adopt the biblical perspective of the cosmic temple, it is no longer possible to look at the world (or space) in secular terms. It is not ours to exploit. We do not have natural resources, we have sacred resources. Obviously this view is far removed from a view that sees nature as divine: As sacred space the cosmos is his place. It is therefore not his person. The cosmos is his place, and our privileged place in it is his gift to us. The blessing he granted was that he gave us the permission and the ability to subdue and rule. We are stewards. At the same time we recognize that the most important feature of sacred space is found in what it is by definition: the place of God’s presence. The cosmic-temple idea recognizes that God is here and that all of this is his. It is this theology that becomes the basis for our respect of our world and the ecological sensitivity that we ought to nurture.

Once self-awareness crosses the boundary that creates the dualistic world, returning to its source in pure consciousness, words vanish.

With Cosmos, Sagan sought to counter the fear and distrust of applied science, and to inspire the kind of basic science wonder that Hubble’s lectures and the moon landing once had. The series was enormously successful. For the first time since Hubble, a huge audience was engaged in exploring the grand questions about life, nature, the structure of the universe, and what it might all mean.

At the beginning of his famous TV series, Cosmos, the American astronomer and cosmologist Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”. That is not a statement of science, to be put in the same category as, for example, the scientific statement that gravity obeys an inverse-square law. Sagan’s statement is simply an expression of his atheistic belief. The problem is, many people give to all statements by scientists the authority rightly due to science, simply because they are stated by a scientist.

This Earth is just a space many souls have chosen to have in common. When just one corner becomes lit, darkness has no thrill of air to bend toward its advantage. Angle by angle, we smooth away the chance that darkness may establish.

Barefoot on the shore, I steady myself, alone. Tides sway back and forth as earthly hours trace forward motion on the clock. Reassuring ease refreshes with the smooth, slow bloom of morning twilight, governed with consistent timing by predictable planetary spin.

You’re full of keys and clues, crafty in your use of ordinary tools. You were creating from the moment we got here. Poets are formidable spellcasters—and equally skilled at shattering illusions. You’re made to be free from petty manipulations.

The interstices of time are highly complex. Time is mutable, and one small step for a man sets mankind on a radically different path. "There are billions of paths, twists and fork-turns. Some lead to triumph, and others to doom. The one we have trodden has risked our annihilation as a species.

Tears pooled in his eyes. Light or dark, awake and asleep, the scenes were the same. Busy streets that by dawn would be charred rubble and molten ash. Men with briefcases, waving goodbye to their wives, who would never return. Mothers kissing the foreheads of sleeping children who would never waken. For so it would always be in a universe where the Megaton was Lord.

Every time someone got wounded, bombed or hurt in the news, she could not stop the pervasive sense of guilt that she ought to have stopped it. It haunted her morning, noon and night. For what purpose had she been given this gift? And did anyone else share it? What if it wasn’t a gift, but a curse?

Only emptiness and nothingness can provide space to the world; chance is the uniting force of the Being and the Nonbeing. If we view evolution in this context, evolution, as selection, is no longer a random selection or Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” but the survival of existence itself. Whatever survives is thanks not only through combinations and recombination of some otherwise self-organized dead matter, self-powered peculiarly through an infinite series of accidents, but rather through an infinite series of predetermined chances. Determinism is based more on chance than on determination. A determined chance is not a chance, strictly speaking. This chance is not chaotic and random. The chance is more orderly than a lack of chance. The chance gives rise to a more deterministic world regarding purpose, meaning, and destiny. Destiny is the purpose of determination. But destiny, as all else discussed, is not necessarily determined. What is determined is that there should be existence, purpose, and meaning. From the point of view of purpose and meaning, the best possible existence is the existence responsible for its own becoming through chance.

Each moment is all being, each moment is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.

This isn’t knowledge you can acquire. This is knowledge you must become.

Copernicus, who was a canon in the cathedral of Krakow, celebrated astronomy as “a science more divine than human” and viewed his heliocentric theory as revealing God’s grand scheme for the cosmos. Boyle was a pious Anglican who declared scientists to be on a divinely appointed mission to serve as “priests of the book of nature.” Boyle’s work includes both scientific studies and theological treatises. In his will he left money to fund a series of lectures combating atheism. Newton was virtually a Christian mystic who wrote long commentaries on biblical prophecy from both the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation. Perhaps the greatest scientist of all time, Newton viewed his discoveries as showing the creative genius of God’s handiwork in nature. “This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets,” he wrote, “could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”16 Newton’s God was not a divine watchmaker who wound up the universe and then withdrew from it. Rather, God was an active agent sustaining the heavenly bodies in their positions and solicitous of His special creation, man.

Time couldn’t kill me a century ago, and it won’t in all the centuries ahead. I am the Philosophy that has been there since the birth of human intellect. And I shall live on forever through the inner cosmos of billions of generations, yet to come, while enriching every single soul it touches with its ever-glowing and flourishing purity.

But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes, That the universe was filled to its edges groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos.

God’s creative work is defined as bringing order to this non-ordered existence. This will be carried out in stages through a process. Even as God brought order, there were aspects of non-order that remained. There was still a sea (though its borders had been set); there was still darkness. There was an outside the garden that was less ordered than inside the garden. The order that God brought focused on people in his image to join with him in the continuing process of bringing order, but more importantly on ordering the cosmos as sacred space. Yet, this was just the beginning. This initial ordering would not have eliminated natural disasters, pain or death. We do not have to think of these as part of the ordered world, though they are not beyond God’s control, and often they can be identified with positive results.4 All non-order will not be resolved until new creation. In Revelation 21 we are told that there will be “no longer any sea” (Rev 21:1), no pain or death (Rev 21:4) and no darkness (Rev 21:23-25). There is no temple because God’s presence will pervade all of it (Rev 21:3, 22), not just concentric circles radiating through zones of diminishing sacredness. God will be with humanity and be their God (Rev 21:3). Relationship is conveyed through the imagery of husband and wife (Rev 21:2). This is not a restoration of Eden or the return to a pre-fall condition. New creation is characterized by a level of order that has never before existed.

The Bible and Science “In antiquity and in what is called the Dark Ages, men did not know what they now know about humanity and the cosmos. They did not know the lock but they possessed they key, which is God. Now many have excellent descriptions of the lock, but they have lost the key. The proper solution is union between religion and science. We should be owners of the lock and the key. The fact is that as science advances, it discovers what was said thousands of years ago in the Bible.”—Richard Wurmbrand, Proofs of God’s Existence

There was always a solution. Sometimes you had to leave your mind behind, let the ground give out beneath you until a rope of clues appeared and pulled the answer to you.

The authors, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, have told the part of the story that is most significant to them (the origins of the ordered, functional cosmos) and, arguably, also most theologically significant.

As the first three days addressed major functions in the ordered cosmos, days four through six discuss the functionaries that are provided.4 If this is not a material account, then we do not expect a sequence of material events to be recounted. It is therefore no problem that we had light referred to on day one though sun, moon and stars are not mentioned until now. The focus of the first day was time, not light, and the functions have been treated separately from the functionaries.

Maintaining order made one a participant with God in the ongoing task of sustaining the equilibrium God had established in the cosmos.

In this “home story,” God is not only making a home for people; he is making a home for himself, though he has no need of a home for himself. If God does not rest in this ordered space, the six days are without their guiding purpose. The cosmos is not just a house; it is a home.

In taking from the tree, Adam and Eve were trying to set themselves up as a satellite center of wisdom apart from God. It is a childish sort of response: “I can do it myself!” or “I want to do it my way!” These are not a rejection of authority per se but an insistence on independence. The act is an assertion that “it’s all about me,” and it is one that has characterized humanity (individually and corporately) since this first act. With people as the source and center of wisdom, the result was not order centered on them but disorder. This disorder extended to all people of all time as well as to the cosmos, and life in God’s presence was forfeited.

Esta consideración nos ayuda a comprender con mayor exactitud el paso de los seres humanos ordinarios a través de la larga serie de encarnaciones del plano humano. Una vez justamente en ese plano de existencia, la conciencia del hombre primitivo envuelve gradualmente los atributos del quinto principio. Pero al principio el Ego sigue siendo un centro de actividad del pensamiento que trabaja principalmente con impulsos y deseos de la cuarta etapa de la evolución. Al comienzo, los destellos de la razón humana superior lo iluminan de vez en cuando, pero poco a poco el hombre más intelectual llega a poseerla más plenamente. Los impulsos de la razón humana se afirman cada vez con más fuerza. La mente vigorizada se convierte en la fuerza predominante de la vida. La conciencia se transfiere al quinto principio, oscilando, sin embargo, entre las tendencias de la naturaleza inferior y superior durante largo tiempo - es decir, durante vastos períodos de evolución y muchos cientos de vidas -, y así purificando y exaltando gradualmente al Ego. Todo esto mientras el Ego es una unidad en un aspecto de la materia, y su sexto principio sólo una potencialidad de desarrollo final. En cuanto al séptimo principio, es el verdadero Incognoscible, la suprema causa controladora de todas las cosas, que es la misma para un hombre que para todos los hombres, la misma para la humanidad que para el reino animal, la misma para el plano físico que para el plano astral o devachánico o nirvánico de la existencia. Ningún hombre tiene un séptimo principio, en la concepción superior del sujeto: todos estamos de la misma manera insondable eclipsados por el séptimo principio del cosmos.

We explore the solar system and the rest of the cosmos with our robots, which are basically our eyes and our ears. So it’s great: I get to go explore the cosmos from the comfort of my couch, which I love. I can still eat doughnuts…It’s a much better life.” —DR. AMY MAINZER, ASTROPHYSICIST

The three of them and the five of us, we are as weather is upon the planet. I breathe them and they breathe me. Clouds and breezes, lightning strikes and claps of thunder, we are the land, the air, the motion of existence, confirmed by sound and light and change.

Maybe life is part of a greater series of interconnections, subtlely guided by an underlying transtemporal panpsychic awareness. Stranger still, we may be just scintillating illusions, extrapolated from deeper realities.

She denatured the mystery, squeezed a palpable space between the lines, trapped his mind in flattery. Beautiful it was to watch, you all fell through the crack, went down right with him.

S. Highway 91 to a small cocktail lounge called Cosmos, just past the Algiers and on the opposite side of the Strip.

Sunny thought he could rally satisfaction by wringing the bare facts of his befuddlement out through the tight spinners of the Poet’s mind.

Seriality is ubiquitous in life, nature, and cosmos. It is the umbilical cord that connects thought, feeling, science, and art with the womb of the universe that gave birth to them. ... We thurs arrive at the image of a world mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.

Spirituality involves a special kind of relationship between the individual and the cosmos and is, in its essence, a personal and private affair. By comparison, organized religion is institutionalized group activity that takes place in a designated location, a temple or a church, and involves a system of appointed officials who might or might not have had personal experiences of spiritual realities themselves. Once a religion becomes organized, it often completely loses the connection with its spiritual source and becomes a secular institution that exploits human spiritual needs without satisfying them.

En general, las cosmologías modernas tienden a considerar la aparición de la conciencia como un fenómeno tardío en la evolución cósmica, asociada a la materia orgánica que fue sintetizada en los hornos estelares. La cosmología sāṃkhya, por el contrario, sitúa la conciencia en el origen mismo del universo y, en cierto sentido, fuera del mundo natural, aunque reflejándose en él. El budismo establece una conciencia en continuidad, engarzada por sucesivos renacimientos, cuyos estados más elevados supondrían el cumplimiento o culminación de lo fenoménico. El cosmos budista es un universo de conciencia. Espacio y tiempo son una fermentación de la vida que percibe y siente. El espacio no se distribuye mediante la gravedad de la materia sino en función de sus estados mentales. La serie de los actos conscientes abre los caminos del espacio y dibuja la curvatura del tiempo.

Amidst the vast expanse of the night sky, the dream of landing on the moon beckons us with a silent promise - a promise of transcending the boundaries of Earth, touching the tapestry of the cosmos, and leaving an indelible mark on the canvas of human achievement.

Early on, advocates of big bang cosmology realized that the universe is evolutionary. In the words of one famous cosmologist, George Gamov, “We conclude that the relative abundances of atomic species represent the most ancient archaeological document pertaining to the history of the universe.” In other words, the periodic table is evidence of the evolution of matter, and atoms can testify to the history of the cosmos. But early versions of big bang cosmology held that all the elements of the universe were fused in one fell swoop. As Gamov puts it, “These abundances …” meaning the ratio of the elements (heaps of hydrogen, hardly any gold—that kind of thing), “… must have been established during the earliest stages of expansion, when the temperature of the primordial matter was still sufficiently high to permit nuclear transformations to run through the entire range of chemical elements.” It was a neat idea, but very wrong. Only hydrogen, helium, and a dash of lithium could have formed in the big bang. All of the elements heavier than lithium were made much later, by being fused in evolving and exploding stars. How do we know this? Because at the same time some scholars were working on the big bang theory, others were trying to ditch the big bang altogether. Its association with thermonuclear devices made it seem hasty, and its implied mysterious origins tainted it with creationism. And so, a rival camp of cosmologists developed an alternate theory: the Steady State. The Steady State held that the universe had always existed. And always will. Matter is created out of the vacuum of space itself. Steady State theorists, working against the big bang and its flaws, were obliged to wonder where in the cosmos the chemical elements might have been cooked up, if not in the first few minutes of the universe. Their answer: in the furnaces of the very stars themselves. They found a series of nuclear chain reactions at work in the stars. First, they discovered how fusion had made elements heavier than carbon. Then, they detailed eight fusion reactions through which stars convert light elements into heavy ones, to be recycled into space through stellar winds and supernovae. And so, it’s the inside of stars where the alchemist’s dream comes true. Every gram of gold began billions of years ago, forged out of the inside of an exploding star in a supernova. The gold particles lost into space from the explosion mixed with rocks and dust to form part of the early Earth. They’ve been lying in wait ever since.

Cheering for a team would only make sense if we were cheering for Earth in an interplanetary match, or for our solar system in an interstellar series, or for the Milky Way in an intergalactic cup. But other teams are yet to register for such battles.

Aries: Holly, snapdragon, cactus, jonquil Taurus: Daffodil, clover, lilac, columbine, daisy Gemini: Azalea, honeysuckle, lily of the valley, heather Cancer: Iris, jasmine, water lily, white rose, gardenia Leo: Red rose, poppy, marigold, sunflower, dahlia Virgo: Lavender, myrtle, aster, fern, heather, daylily Libra: Cosmos, gardenia, pink rose, violet, hibiscus Scorpio: Orchid, violet, eucalyptus, foxglove, pinks, wolfsbane

To say “God, the Holy Trinity, exists” is a different kind of claim than saying “Winston Churchill existed.” We are making a claim about the nature of reality, not about one more object that is included in the cosmos.

Our home planet, as Carl Sagan put it, is a “pale blue dot” . . . The “Pale Blue Dot” is a moving soliloquy by Carl Sagan in his 1980 television series Cosmos. The remake of this series, which aired in 2014 and was hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, replayed Sagan’s soliloquy toward the end of the final episode (episode 13, “Unafraid of the Dark”) with stunning graphics to illustrate that the Earth is a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

* Favorite documentary Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series inspired Adam to become a scientist, which is true for many of the top-tier scientists I’ve met and interviewed. [TF: Neil deGrasse Tyson has a revised version of Cosmos that is also spectacular.] “It was a really powerful, friendly way of being introduced to the complexities and wonders that were gripping to me as a kid. I watched it with my dad. It was great bonding for us. The way [Sagan] delivered it was just captivating, and it was really what sealed the deal for me that I wanted to be a scientist.” * Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would say to have no fear. I mean, you’ve got one chance here to do amazing things, and being afraid of being wrong or making a mistake or fumbling is just not how you do something of impact. You just have to be fearless.” As context, Adam said the following earlier in our conversation: “I want to do fundamental breakthroughs, if possible. If you have that mindset, if that’s how you challenge yourself, that that’s what you want to do with your life, with your small amount of time that you have here to make a difference, then the only way to do it is to do the type of research that other people would think of as risky or even foolhardy. That’s just part of the game.

Whatever she called it, I was not a fan. I felt like I was in an elevator when the cable snapped, sending me crashing to the ground faster than my own bodyweight would have accounted for. Rainbow light blazed across the cosmos of my mind and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath—because I’d left my lungs about five miles above me back in the Mausoleum. This continued for the length of a particularly long infomercial rather than a snap of the fingers. It was absolutely the worst.

James Kallas says: Since the cosmos itself is in bondage, depressed under evil forces, the essential content of the word “salvation” is that the world itself will be rescued, or renewed, or set free. Salvation is a cosmic event affecting the whole of creation. … Salvation is not simply the overcoming of my rebellion and the forgiveness of my guilt, but salvation is the liberation of the whole world process of which I am only a small part.20

Christ has in principle freed the cosmos from its demonic oppression and thus freed all inhabitants of the cosmos who will simply submit to this new loving reign.

The Big Bang theory says that billions of years ago, a great explosion created all of space, matter, light, and even time. The clock of the cosmos starting ticking as all the stored energy in the explosion changed into matter. Einstein’s E = mc2 explains it, actually. An enormous eruption of energy flies apart, converting E into mass, or m. The earliest matter was just particles and atoms, but those eventually formed stars, solar systems, and planets.

It was Plato who gave the word cosmos its meaning as world. His Timaeus provided the first description of reality as forming an ordered whole, being both good and beautiful. The cosmos, according to Plato, was created by a divine craftsman who strove to render his work as similar as possible to the perfect model.12 The Good, the supreme principle, exercises power over physical reality and influences the conduct of the human person who, through the Good, turns his or her soul into a coherent whole (ethics) and gives the public sphere the unity it would otherwise be without. The Timaeus describes cosmology required by a particular anthropology. The plan for human life is an imitation of the cosmos. The wise person knows the cosmos and sees in it the mirror of his or her own wisdom. The individual soul was to imitate the regularity of the movements of the soul of the world. Nature has drawn us upright that we might be inspired by what is “cosmic.” In Plato’s world we stand upright to contemplate the stars.

Have you understood yet? Have you truly understood what you are, the mystery of your own existence? You are one node of an infinite mathematical function that goes on forever, solving itself and optimizing itself, and you with it. You, and everyone else, is contributing to the solution of this existential mathematical function. You owe everything to mathematics. Mathematics is all there is. But that means something incredible. You are absolutely essential to the evolution of the cosmos. All of us are. We are all beings (or becomings!) of infinite significance. We are all Gods-in-the-making. What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? We are!

As you practise more and more, your awareness will expand so that what was hidden becomes more and more conscious. Without judgement, you will become aware of your filters, biases, and limitations so that you will come to know yourself, and your experience of things, more directly.

If the series of pilgrimages toward understanding our actual circumstances in the universe, the origin of life, and the laws of nature are not spiritual quests, then I don’t know what could be. I

Cheering for a team would only make sense if we were cheering for Earth in an interplanetary match, or for our solar system in an interstellar series or for the Milky Way in an intergalactic cup. But, other teams are yet to register for such battles.

But if the good news is that the world has been reconciled to God by the cross, the bad news is the world seems not to have noticed.

The cross is not magic. It does not magically dispel the course of evil, or stop global warming, or alter the laws of thermodynamics. The cross is an event in which the difficulty is not dispelled but disclosed, not extinguished but exposed, not crossed out but made visible.

Death is a difficulty, but it is not a punishment for the wrongdoings of our first parents; life is difficult, but it is not a trial through which we must pass to earn an eternal reward. Mortality is not a wounding disability but the enabling condition that lends life its intensity, tenderness, poignancy, and beauty, let us say its wounded glory, the difficult glory, that has tasted the bitter truth.

…that the supreme charge against Christianity is that it has caused the obsession of untold millions of minds with a series of fatuous beliefs which have motivated centuries of human actions perpetrating a body of follies, fanaticisms, cruelties and inhumanities unmatched in all history. And the instructive difference between Christianity and, let us say, Greek philosophy, is now seen in startling clarity, as the difference between surrender of the mind in Christianity to a series of wild and chimerical fancies in no wise based on any correspondence with truth and reality; while Greek philosophy was a system of intellectual propositions based on a complete harmonization with the known realities, the forces and elements of man’s constitution and the laws of the cosmos – ibid

Pues bien, en una primera aproximación, podríamos decir que la teoría de la reencarnación afirma lo siguiente: El ser humano es esencialmente un ser espiritual, un alma que preexiste a su vida físico-corporal, siendo de naturaleza puramente espiritual y residente en ámbitos, dimensiones o planos suprafísicos de la realidad. El cuerpo físico, al igual que otros cuerpos más sutiles que forman parte de su personalidad integral, realiza la función de «vestidura», «vehículo», «instrumento» y órgano de expresión en este mundo. Esto nos sitúa en la cosmología multidimensional propia tanto del hinduismo como de la mayor parte de las tradiciones religiosas y de las distintas enseñanzas esotéricas contemporáneas. El plano físico es solo uno de los niveles existentes dentro de la escalera jerarquizada de planos de existencia. Es por esos planos por los que transita el alma y en ellos reside entre dos encarnaciones. Esas regiones están habitadas por diversos tipos de seres y su existencia permite comprender mejor una amplia serie de fenómenos que van desde el culto a los antepasados hasta las comunicaciones espiritistas, o el reciente movimiento del chanelling. El proceso de la reencarnación forma parte de un inmenso plan cósmico, regido por leyes que escapan todavía al conocimiento de las ciencias actuales. De ahí que en el hinduismo se haya asociado siempre a la ley del karma. Esto significa que nos hallamos en un cosmos regulado éticamente, regido por una justicia suprahumana, por medio de la cual todas las acciones (karma) realizadas, incluidos los pensamientos, los sentimientos y las palabras, como modos de acción sutil, producen unos efectos bien determinados. Tales efectos repercuten no solo en una misma vida, sino también en vidas posteriores. Esto hace que las condiciones en que nos hallamos en cada vida estén directamente relacionadas con nuestro comportamiento ético en existencias anteriores. Existen Jerarquías espirituales encargadas de regular el karma de cada individuo. En todas las tradiciones religiosas hay noticias de ellas. Los «señores del karma», los «ángeles del destino», etc., representan esos «servidores de Dios» que colaboran en el funcionamiento cósmico-ético de nuestro universo. La teoría del karma y la reencarnación, lejos de suponer un determinismo absoluto, según el cual todo lo que nos sucede estaría determinado por acciones anteriores, suele ir unida a una concepción en la que la libertad del ser humano desempeña un papel central. Solo así cobra todo su sentido moral.

The astronomer Carl Sagan began his 1980 television series Cosmos by saying that human beings, though made of the same stuff as the stars, are conscious and are therefore ‘a way for the cosmos to know itself’.