Stellar Life Quotes

Fine, you fun-vampire. I’ll take my scroll over here and play by myself. (Kat) Fun-vampire? What is that? (Sin) That would be you sucking all the fun out of life. (Kat) You have the most interesting terms for things. (Sin) Yes, but notice mine are creative, unlike the so stellarly named Rod of Time. (Kat)

The glow flares bright—bright as the billion-year-old light around us. Bright as a sun. Almost every particle in the universe was once part of a star. First, hydrogen condensing and collapsing, bringing radiance to the void. Furnaces burning bright, then fading, giving all they had left back into the cosmos. Carbon and oxygen. Iron and gold. Vast clouds swirling with their own gravity. Coalescing and disintegrating. Generation to generation. The remnants of stellar alchemy, stirring into life, then consciousness. Crawling from the oceans. Taking to the skies. And from there, back to the stars that birthed them. A perfect circle.

Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose--no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and still more wonderful, between the things of the intellect and material things. Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that the material world, and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light, and an element of thought, disseminated and indivisible dissolving all, that geometric point, the self; reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating--who knows, if only by the identity of the law--the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last is the zodiac.

Star friendship.— We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another again,—perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us! That we have to become estranged is the law above us: by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other! And thus the memory of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path,—let us rise up to this thought! But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility.— Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.

In our every cell, furled at the nucleus, there is a ribbon two yards long and just ten atoms wide. Over a hundred million miles of DNA in very human individual, enough to wrap five million times around our world and make the Midgard serpent blush for shame, make even the Ourobouros worm swallow hard in disbelief. This snake-god, nucleotide, twice twisted, scaled in adenine and cytosine, in thymine and in guanine, is a one-man show, will be the actors, props and setting, be the apple and the garden both. The player bides his time, awaits his entrance to a drum-roll of igniting binaries. This is the only dance in town, this anaconda tango, this slow spiral up through time from witless dirt to paramecium, from blind mechanic organism to awareness. There, below the birthing stars, Life sways and improvises. Every poignant gesture drips with slapstick; pathos; an unbearably affecting bravery. To dare this stage, this huge and overwhelming venue. Squinting through the stellar footlights, hoping there's an audience, that there's someone out there, but dancing anyway. But dancing anyway.

My life wasn’t horrible, but I didn’t see any passionate reason to love it.

Just as an astronomer, alone in an observatory, watches night after night through a telescope the myriads of stars, their mysterious movements, their changeful medley, their extinction and their flaming-up anew, so did Jacob Mendel, seated at his table in the Cafe Gluck, look through his spectacles into the universe of books, a universe that lies above the world of our everyday life, and, like the stellar universe, is full of changing cycles.

Her locks an ancient lady gave Her loving husband's life to save; And men — they honored so the dame — Upon some stars bestowed her name. But to our modern married fair, Who'd give their lords to save their hair, No stellar recognition's given. There are not stars enough in heaven.

An awkward pause fell across the conversation. Daphne was shifting from foot to foot, not at all certain what to say to the duke, when Nigel exhibited stellar timing for the first time in his life, and sat up. “Daphne?” he said, blinking as if he couldn’t see straight. “Daphne, is that you?” “Good God, Miss Bridgerton,” the duke swore, “how hard did you hit him?” “Hard enough to knock him down, but no worse than that, I swear!” Her brow furrowed. “Maybe he is drunk.” “Oh, Daphne,” Nigel moaned. The duke crouched next to him, then reeled back, coughing. “Is he drunk?” Daphne asked. The duke staggered back. “He must have drunk an entire bottle of whiskey just to get up the nerve to propose.” “Who would have thought I could be so terrifying?” Daphne murmured, thinking of all the men who thought of her as a jolly good friend and nothing more. “How wonderful.” Simon stared at her as if she were insane, then muttered, “I’m not even going to question that statement.

Imagine the case of someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens?—and the psychological literature is clear on this point.64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.

You may have heard that "we are made of stardust" (or "star stuff" if you're Sagan), and this is absolutely true if we measure by mass. All the heavier elements in your body—oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, etc.—were produced later, either in the centers of stars or in stellar explosions. But hydrogen, while the lightest, is also the most abundant element in your body by number. So, yes, you hold within you the dust of ancient generations of stars. But you are also, to a very large fraction, built out of by-products of the actual Big Bang. Carl Sagan's larger statement still stands, and to an even larger degree: "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

The woman types everything into her computer, raising her eyebrows slightly at Devon's middle name. "Devon Sky Davenport," she repeats. "Sky? S-k-y?" "Yes," Devon says, addressing the back of the computer monitor rather than the woman's face directly. "S-k-y. As in"---she swallows---"as in, 'the sky's the limit.'" But Devon doesn't volunteer any further explanation, doesn't explain to the women the story behind the name. That, in fact, "the sky's the limit" is how Devon's mom has always defined Devon and her supposed potential in life. Her mom would say it when Devon brought home a flawless report card or when Devon received a stellar postseason evaluation from her coach or when a complete stranger commented on Devon's exceptional manners or after the Last Loser packed his stuff and walked out. "You'll be Somebody for both of us," her mom would say. Not anymore, Mom. Everything's changed. Now, for me, "the sky" isn't anything but flat and gray and too far away to ever reach. She takes a deep breath. If you were here with me, you'd see it for yourself.

When the internal critic puts you down using such comparisons, here's how it operates: First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison ( fame, maybe, or power). Then it acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant. Then it contrasts you unfavorably with someone truly stellar, within that domain. It can take that final step even further, using the unbridgeable gap between you and its target of comparison as evidence for the fundamental injustice of life. That way your motivation to do anything at all can be most effectively undermined.

Her locks an ancient lady gave Her loving husband's life to save; And men — they honored so the dame — Upon some stars bestowed her name. But to our modern married fair, Who'd give their lords to save their hair, No stellar recognition's given. There are not stars enough in heaven.

I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.

To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: Uncommon Prostitues I have nothing to say about prostitues (other than you'd make a terrible prostitute,the profession is much too unclean), I only wanted to type that. Isn't it odd we both have to spend Christmas with our fathers? Speaking of unpleasant matters,have you spoken with Bridge yet? I'm taking the bus to the hospital now.I expect a full breakdown of your Christmas dinner when I return. So far today,I've had a bowl of muesli. How does Mum eat that rubbish? I feel as if I've been gnawing on lumber. To: Etienne St. Clair From: Anna Oliphant Subject: Christmas Dinner MUESLY? It's Christmas,and you're eating CEREAL?? I'm mentally sending you a plate from my house. The turkey is in the oven,the gravy's on the stovetop,and the mashed potatoes and casseroles are being prepared as I type this. Wait. I bet you eat bread pudding and mince pies or something,don't you? Well, I'm mentally sending you bread pudding. Whatever that is. No, I haven't talked to Bridgette.Mom keeps bugging me to answer her calls,but winter break sucks enough already. (WHY is my dad here? SERIOUSLY. MAKE HIM LEAVE. He's wearing this giant white cable-knit sweater,and he looks like a pompous snowman,and he keeps rearranging the stuff on our kitchen cabinets. Mom is about to kill him. WHICH IS WHY SHE SHOULDN'T INVITE HIM OVER FOR HOLIDAYS). Anyway.I'd rather not add to the drama. P.S. I hope your mom is doing better. I'm so sorry you have to spend today in a hospital. I really do wish I could send you both a plate of turkey. To: Anna Oliphant From: Etienne St. Clair Subject: Re: Christmas Dinner YOU feel sorry for ME? I am not the one who has never tasted bread pudding. The hospital was the same. I won't bore you with the details. Though I had to wait an hour to catch the bus back,and it started raining.Now that I'm at the flat, my father has left for the hospital. We're each making stellar work of pretending the other doesn't exist. P.S. Mum says to tell you "Merry Christmas." So Merry Christmas from my mum, but Happy Christmas from me. To: Etienne St. Clair From: Anna Oliphant Subject: SAVE ME Worst.Dinner.Ever.It took less than five minutes for things to explode. My dad tried to force Seany to eat the green bean casserole, and when he wouldn't, Dad accused Mom of not feeding my brother enough vegetables. So she threw down her fork,and said that Dad had no right to tell her how to raise her children. And then he brought out the "I'm their father" crap, and she brought out the "You abandoned them" crap,and meanwhile, the WHOLE TIME my half-dead Nanna is shouting, "WHERE'S THE SALT! I CAN'T TASTE THE CASSEROLE! PASS THE SALT!" And then Granddad complained that Mom's turkey was "a wee dry," and she lost it. I mean,Mom just started screaming. And it freaked Seany out,and he ran to his room crying, and when I checked on him, he was UNWRAPPING A CANDY CANE!! I have no idea where it came from. He knows he can't eat Red Dye #40! So I grabbed it from him,and he cried harder, and Mom ran in and yelled at ME, like I'd given him the stupid thing. Not, "Thank you for saving my only son's life,Anna." And then Dad came in and the fighting resumed,and they didn't even notice that Seany was still sobbing. So I took him outside and fed him cookies,and now he's running aruond in circles,and my grandparents are still at the table, as if we're all going to sit back down and finish our meal. WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY FAMILY? And now Dad is knocking on my door. Great. Can this stupid holiday get any worse??

The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically —and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. «Stairs and contradictory stairs,» he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer−blows of truth. There was a time when I acted as my father's keeper. I was left alone for long hours, cooped up in the little booth which we used as an office. While he was drinking with his cronies I was feeding from the bottle of creative life. My companions were the free spirits, the overlords of the soul. The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propulsion, of bathing the senses in human odors. To become utterly human, the compassionate fiend incarnate, the locksmith of the great door leading beyond and away and forever isolate. Men founder like ships. Children also. There are children who settle to the bottom at the age of nine, carrying with them the secret of their betrayal. There are perfidious monsters who look at you with the bland, innocent eyes of youth; their crimes are unregistered, because we have no names for them.

An astoundingly perfect black void sat where the sun had been, surrounded by a jagged white nimbus of light that nearly brought me to tears. This was the solar corona, the hot outer edges of the sun's atmosphere that drive a flood of particles into space and generate a phenomenon known as a stellar wind, a key property of how our sun and other stars evolve. I had studied this particular aspect of stars for almost my entire life, using a dozen of the best telescopes in the world, but this was the first time I could see a star's wind with my own naked-eye. Around us, the sky was a strangely uniform dome of sunsets in every direction, and the warmth of sunlight had been replaced by an almost primal up-the-neck chill. It felt like the planet itself had been put on pause at this particular place and moment in time, a frozen moment of "look.

So who was picking up the slack while the cheater was out chasing the butterflies of aliveness? Who was rocking babies, packing school lunches, and bringing home their paychecks? Who existed in the same less-than-stellar marriage and didn’t blow their boss? Chumps. Cheating takes time and resources away from the marriage—so, just by virtue of being there and not screwing around, chumps are usually the more invested partners. Not perfect partners, but committed ones.

Even Jeremiah, the prophet who delivered these words, had a life that was less than stellar according to our mindset. He was hated, forced from his home, thrown into prison, and tossed into a mud pit. So even for him, this magnificent prophet, the hope for a prosperous and glorious future was more to be realized in the hope of heaven itself than it was to be experienced in the temporal life of the here and now. Reading Hebrews 11, you can see that many of God’s people in history had to have the same kind of future hope.

And Mallow laughed joyously. "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion. "But we,—we, our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic resources,—have had to work with brute economy. Our generators have had to be the size of our thumb, because it was all the metal we could afford. We had to develop new techniques and new methods,—techniques and methods the Empire can't follow because they have degenerated past the stage where they can make any vital scientific advance. "With all their nuclear shields, large enough to protect a ship, a city, an entire world; hey could never build one to protect a single man. To supply light and heat to a city, they have motors six stories high,—I saw them—where ours could fit into this room. And when I told one of their nuclear specialists that a lead container the size of a walnut contained a nuclear generator, he almost choked with indignation on the spot. "Why, they don't even understand their own colossi any longer. The machines work from generation to generation automatically and the caretakers are a hereditary caste who would be helpless if a single D-tube in all that vast structure burnt out. "The whole war is a battle between these two systems; between the Empire and the Foundation; between the big and the little. To seize control of a world, they bribe with immense ships that can make war, but lack all economic significance. We, on the other hand, bribe with little things, useless in war, but vital to prosperity and profits. "A king, or a Commdor, will take the ships and even make war. Arbitrary rulers throughout history have bartered their subjects' welfare for what they consider honor, and glory, and conquest. But it's still the little things in life that count—and Asper Argo won't stand up against the economic depression that will sweep all Korell in two or three years.

  Least total darkness should by Night regaine   Her old possession, and extinguish life   In Nature and all things, which these soft fires   Not only enlighten, but with kindly heate   Of various influence foment and warme,   Temper or nourish, or in part shed down   Thir stellar vertue on all kinds that grow   On Earth, made hereby apter to receive   Perfection from the Suns more potent Ray.

the greatest danger which today’s humanity need fear is not a catastrophe which comes from out there somewhere, a stellar catastrophe, neither is it famine, nor even disease; rather it is spiritual malady, which is the most terrible malady because the most directly human among the scourges is to remain “without the taste for life.”5 In such a situation, the individual finds himself ever more vulnerable within the social fabric. This is the most dangerous outcome of solitude.

What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes. I can’t think of an example in my life. It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be. If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different. Don’t be fooled by the opinions of friends and family. They’re all liars.

scattered cracking sounds bristling gaps in the wood every now and then the red mark of a gunshot splinters of a language forgotten or, who knows, in a state of shards, bursting leaps, uproars and stellar winds or the simple rubbing together of our silences if they too should suddenly catch fire these flames, are they like a dance seeking in the night its roots felt and lived the whole length of a life the night outside is white, in the hearth, ardent and fragile beating of the embers of our lives — from "Nuits

What are the chances that we will encounter some alien form of life as we explore the galaxy? If the argument about the timescale for the appearance of life on Earth is correct, there ought to be many other stars whose planets have life on them. Some of these stellar systems could have formed five billion years before the Earth—so why is the galaxy not crawling with self-designing mechanical or biological life forms? Why hasn’t the Earth been visited and even colonised? By the way, I discount suggestions that UFOs contain beings from outer space, as I think that any visits by aliens would be much more obvious—and probably also much more unpleasant.

Nevertheless, to learn right away something new from the same example, how fleeting and weak, how imprecise that comparison would be! If the comparison is to carry out this powerful effect, how much of the difference will be missed in the process. How forcefully must the individuality of the past be wrenched into a general shape, with all its sharp corners and angles broken off for the sake of the correspondence! In fact, basically something that once was possible could appear possible a second time only if the Pythagoreans were correct in thinking that with the same constellations of the celestial bodies the same phenomena on the Earth had to repeat themselves, even in the small single particulars, so that when the stars have a certain position relative to each other, a Stoic and an Epicurean will, in an eternal recurrence, unite and assassinate Caesar, and with another stellar position Columbus will eternally rediscover America.

According to the traditional philosophy of the Magicians, every man is a unique autonomous center of individual consciousness, energy, and will—a soul, in a word. Like a star shining and existing by its own inward light, it pursues its way in the star-spangled heavens, solitary, uninterfered with, except in so far as its heavenly course is gravitationally modified by the presence, near or far, of other stars. Since in the vast stellar spaces seldom are there conflicts between the celestial bodies, unless one happens to stray from its appointed course—a very rare occurrence—so in the realms of humankind there would lie no chaos, little conflict, and no mutual disturbance were each individual content to be grounded in the reality of his own high consciousness, aware of his ideal nature In the his true purpose in life, and eager to pursue the road which he must follow. Because men have strayed from the dynamic sources inhering within themselves and the universe, and have forsaken their true spiritual wills, because they have divorced themselves from the celestial essences, betrayed by a mess of more sickly pottage than ever Jacob did sell to Esau, the world in this day presents a people with so hopeless an aspect, and a humanity impressed with so despondent a mien. Ignorance of the course of the celestial orbit, and the significance of that orbit inscribed in the skies forever, is the root which is at the bottom of universal dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and race-nostalgia. And because of this the living soul cries for help to the dead, and the creature to a silent God. Of all this crying there comes usually—nothing. The lifting up of the hands in supplication brings no inkling of salvation. The frantic gnashing of teeth results but in mute despair and loss of vital energy. Redemption is only from within and is wrought out by the soul itself with suffering and through time, with much endeavor and strain of the spirit.

suicide and scandal followed in his wake. The British weekly, the Sunday Referee (March 10, 1935) asked the question that over half a century later is only beginning to be answered. Who—and what—is Aleister Crowley? Around few men in contemporary life has been created such a wealth of fantastic fable and rumour as that which attaches to the name of this mysterious personality. Who indeed was this man, and why, if it were true he was guilty of so many unspeakable acts, was he never brought to justice or ever formally charged with any crime? To the modern student of Crowley, the answer to the second part of the question is simple. He was never charged with any crimes because there were no crimes to be charged with. And even if there were, to some, the magnitude and the importance of his work is such as to dwarf to insignificance an entire litany of personal flaws and excesses real or imagined. In the opinion of some of our contemporaries, Crowley was a genius of stellar magnitude. Currently his works enjoy a scrutiny and popularity that never was achieved in his

In the outer layers of young stars life nearly always appears not only in the normal manner but also in the form of parasites, minute independent organisms of fire, often no bigger than a cloud in the terrestrial air, but sometimes as large as the Earth itself. These "salamanders" either feed upon the welling energies of the star in the same manner as the star's own organic tissues feed, or simply prey upon those tissues themselves. Here as elsewhere the laws of biological evolution come into force, and in time there may appear races of intelligent flame-like beings. Even when the salamandrian life does not reach this level, its effect on the star's tissues may become evident to the star as a disease of its skin and sense organs, or even of its deeper tissues. It then experiences emotions not wholly unlike human fright and shame, and anxiously and most humanly guards its secret from the telepathic reach of its fellows. The salamandrian races have never been able to gain mastery over their fiery worlds. Many of them succumb, soon or late, either to some natural disaster or to internecine strife or to the self-cleansing activities of their mighty host. Many others survive, but in a relatively harmless state, troubling their stars only with a mild irritation, and a faint shade of insincerity in all their dealings with one another. In the public culture of the stars the salamandrian pest was completely ignored. Each star believed itself to be the only sufferer and the only sinner in the galaxy. One indirect effect the pest did have on stellar thought. It introduced the idea of purity. Each star prized the perfection of the stellar community all the more by reason of its own secret experience of impurity.

The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For Burnham personally the fair had been an unqualified triumph. It allowed him to fulfill his pledge to his parents to become the greatest architect in America, for certainly in his day he had become so. During the fair an event occurred whose significance to Burnham was missed by all but his closest friends: Both Harvard and Yale granted him honorary master’s degrees in recognition of his achievement in building the fair. The ceremonies occurred on the same day. He attended Harvard’s. For him the awards were a form of redemption. His past failure to gain admission to both universities—the denial of his “right beginning”—had haunted him throughout his life. Even years after receiving the awards, as he lobbied Harvard to grant provisional admission to his son Daniel, whose own performance on the entry exams was far from stellar, Burnham wrote, “He needs to know that he is a winner, and, as soon as he does, he will show his real quality, as I have been able to do. It is the keenest regret of my life that someone did not follow me up at Cambridge … and let the authorities know what I could do.” Burnham had shown them himself, in Chicago, through the hardest sort of work. He bristled at the persistent belief that John Root deserved most of the credit for the beauty of the fair. “What was done up to the time of his death was the faintest suggestion of a plan,” he said. “The impression concerning his part has been gradually built up by a few people, close friends of his and mostly women, who naturally after the Fair proved beautiful desired to more broadly identify his memory with it.

For unknown ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void. Here and there, denser accumulations of gas were imperceptibly growing, globes of matter were condensing-hydrogen raindrops more massive than suns. Within these globes of gas was kindled the nuclear fire latent in matter. A first generation of stars was born, flooding the Cosmos with light. There were in those times, not yet any planets to receive the light, no living creatures to admire the radiance of the heavens. Deep in the stellar furnaces, the alchemy of nuclear fusion created heavy elements from the ashes of hydrogen burning, the atomic building blocks of future planets and lifeforms. Massive stars soon exhausted their stores of nuclear fuel. Rocked by colossal explosions, they returned most of their substance back into the thin gas from which they had once condensed. Here in the dark lush clouds between the stars, new raindrops made of many elements were forming, later generation of stars being born. Nearby, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire, droplets in the interstellar mist on their way to form planets. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth. Congealing and warming, the Earth released methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen gases that had been trapped within, forming the primitive atmosphere and the first oceans. Starlight from the Sun bathed and warmed the primeval Earth, drove storms, generated lightning and thunder. Volcanoes overflowed with lava. These processes disrupted molecules of the primitive atmosphere; the fragments fell back together into more and more complex forms, which dissolved into the early oceans. After a while the seas achieved the consistency of a warm, dilute soup. Molecules were organized, and complex chemical reactions driven, on the surface of clay. And one day a molecule arose that quite by accident was able to make crude copies of itself out of the other molecules in the broth. As time passed, more elaborate and more accurate self replicating molecules arose. Those combinations best suited to further replication were favored by the sieve of natural selection. Those that copied better produced more copies. And the primitive oceanic broth gradually grew thin as it was consumed by and transformed into complex condensations of self replicating organic molecules. Gradually, imperceptibly, life had begun. Single-celled plants evolved, and life began generating its own food. Photosynthesis transformed the atmosphere. Sex was invented. Once free living forms bonded together to make a complex cell with specialized functions. Chemical receptors evolved, and the Cosmos could taste and smell. One celled organisms evolved into multicellular colonies, elaborating their various parts into specialized organ systems. Eyes and ears evolved, and now the Cosmos could see and hear. Plants and animals discovered that land could support life. Organisms buzzed, crawled, scuttled, lumbered, glided, flapped, shimmied, climbed and soared. Colossal beasts thundered through steaming jungles. Small creatures emerged, born live instead of in hard-shelled containers, with a fluid like the early ocean coursing through their veins. They survived by swiftness and cunning. And then, only a moment ago, some small arboreal animals scampered down from the trees. They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

My heart, mind, and soul are spread out, carefully wrapped and filed in this child’s vault. They are my life − captured and displayed.

AJ huffed a heavy sigh. “I’m not good at this.” She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands tucked under her legs. “Good at what?” “This…” he motioned between them “…this relationship stuff. I should care enough to ask you more about your past, the blood thing, the ridiculous profession you’ve chosen, the reason why you’re living with your brother … but I’m too fucking selfish. I can barely deal with my own pathetic life, I just—” She shook her head. “It’s fine. I have nothing to tell.” His head jerked back a fraction as his eyelids fluttered with rapid blinks. “What is that supposed to mean?” Jillian lifted a single shoulder. “You act like I’m on a cliff’s edge just waiting, begging you to ask me about my past and my ‘issues,’ but I’m not. The fact that you don’t ask me about it is why this…” she mimicked his motion between them “…relationship works.” He nodded with an absent stare. She’d gone too far. It was a slippery balance between too much and not enough. It’s human nature to desire what’s perceived as the unattainable. Was she making her past seem too unattainable? “Don’t.” AJ’s gaze snapped to hers. “Don’t what?” “I was simply stating a fact. Don’t interpret it as a game. I’m not playing hard to get with my emotions. It’s not a trap.” He rested his hands on his hips and stared at his feet. “It’s a gift, AJ. You will never have to be my gallant knight on his trusty steed, drawing your sword to defend my honor. I will never gawk at sparkly diamonds in the jewelry store window or ask you where you see our relationship going.” “You sound callous, but I know you’re not. I’ve experienced your compassion.” “That’s a gift too. I’ve never been compassionate toward you with an ulterior motive. I’m not callous. I’m strong. It takes a lot of strength to give unconditionally because the ego is a savage, demanding beast.” He narrowed his eyes a bit. “So nothing … you don’t want anything from me in return.” Jillian smirked, prowling toward him. “I’m compassionate, not a saint.” She slid her hands under his shirt, tracing the definition of each firm plane of muscle. He quirked a brow. “So you want me for my body?” A provocative smirk stole her lips as she pushed up his shirt and teased her teeth over his skin. “I think we both know it’s not for your stellar personality.” “You’re such a bitch,” he growled, grabbing her ass and lifting her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist and laughed. “But an honest bitch.

Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. I’m sure a lot of it comes from our education system, which judges rigorously based on performance and punishes those who don’t do well. Another large share of it comes from overbearing or critical parents who don’t let their kids screw up on their own often enough, and instead punish them for trying anything new or not preordained. And then we have all the mass media that constantly expose us to stellar success after success, while not showing us the thousands of hours of dull practice and tedium that were required to achieve that success. At some point, most of us reach a place where we’re afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what we’re already good at. This confines us and stifles us. We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at. If we’re unwilling to fail, then we’re unwilling to succeed.

Just before I left for Long Island and my new life, I got another call, this one from Dr. Ernest Sachs, up at Dartmouth Medical School. He was head of neurology at the time, and he invited me up to give a lecture. I was thrilled. I was to play the role of professor at my old alma mater! It was especially sweet because the very same medical school had rejected my application eleven years earlier, even though I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and my brother was one of their stellar graduates. It is events like this in one’s past that fall off the story line. What if I had been accepted and gone? There would have been no split-brain work for me. How would that whole story have been different? I believe that things just happen in life, and pretty much after the fact, we make up a story to make it all seem rational. We all like simple stories that suggest a causal chain to life’s events. Yet randomness is ever present.

Leonardo received an adequate education, learning basic Latin, mathematics, and geography. He was never a stellar student, instead finding his attentions on things other than what were found in classrooms. The

We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.” In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs—to put less time than I’d like into one of those domains, so as to make space for another—and to accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway, with the result that my actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the fantasy. “The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

We are experts of the physical galaxy. We live on terraformed worlds and in massive orbital habitats. We tunnel through the sublayer to hop between stellar systems. We escape planetary gravity with the ease of walking out the front door. But when it comes to evolution, we are hatchlings, fumbling with toys. I believe this is why many of my peers still cling to theories of genetic material scattered by asteroids and supernovae. In many ways, the idea of a shared stock of genes drifting through the galaxy is far easier to accept than the daunting notion that none of us may ever have the intellectual capacity to understand how life truly works.

Six hundred miles away in Paris, and two decades before Franz met Felice, the French philosopher Henri Bergson tunneled to the heart of Kafka’s problem in his book Time and Free Will. We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.” In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs—to put less time than I’d like into one of those domains, so as to make space for another—and to accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway, with the result that my actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the fantasy. “The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

Present yourself to this moment and this moment will present you with its stellar magic and breathtaking miracles.

Thoreau’s stellar vision wasn’t merely technique, a fun-pack of optical tricks. It was a function of character. He considered the perception of beauty “a moral test.” Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It is in his heart. We can’t improve our vision without improving ourselves. The dynamic works both ways. Not only does who we are determine what we see but what we see determines who we are. As the Vedas say, “What you see, you become.

In the beginning, there was a rapid expansion of a Singularity. Around 380,000 years later, there was light. There was also hydrogen and helium and four stable, fundamental forces of physics. Atoms and those forces worked together to birth the first stars from massive clouds of gas, and those stars lived for hundreds of millions of years before they died in explosions that spread their matter across the sky in clouds of gas and dust—now with heavier elements than what existed before. The forces of physics worked together once again to craft new stars now tightly packed into the first galaxies. As the cycle repeated, heavier elements formed planets orbiting those stars, emerging from disks of gas and dust like dust bunnies under your bed. In our universe, planets can exist only because a few generations of stars died and were reborn. The rebirth of stellar matter into planets is how our Earth came to be. This planet, our home, is covered with a film of life unlike any we’ve yet seen anywhere else in the universe. As far as we know today, it is unique. A blue marble floating in the dark. Earth’s life is fed by a process in which carbon from the air and minerals in the soil are attached together by the energy of photons via photosynthesis in plants. In this process, everything on this planet lives by the constant sacrifice of the nearest star. Every blade of grass, every tree, every bush, every microscopic algae on this planet is a resurrected form of the Sun’s energy. I capture that energy by consuming other things that have died. Every time I eat a meal, the dead matter that made those plants and animals literally gives life to my body through digestion and my metabolism. One day, I will die, and in time my atoms will go back to giving life to something else. Much farther along the arrow of time, our own Sun will explode and spread its essence across the sky. Our Sun’s dust will meet with other stars’ remnants and form new stars and planets of their own. The universe itself exists in an eternal pattern of life, death, and resurrection.

AT THE STRIKING OF NOON ON A CERTAIN FIFTH OF MARCH, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway-station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.

We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.” In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs—to put less time than I’d like into one of those domains, so as to make space for another—and to accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway, with the result that my actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the fantasy. “The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.” Once again, the seemingly dispiriting message here is actually a liberating one. Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.

Planning Your Courses at the Schools of Experience If you think about McCall’s theory, going through the right courses in the schools of experience can help people in all kinds of situations increase the likelihood of success. One of the CEOs I have most admired, Nolan Archibald, has spoken to my students on this theory. Archibald has had a stellar career, including having been the youngest-ever CEO of a Fortune 500 company—Black & Decker. After he retired, he discussed with my students how he’d managed his career. What he described was not all of the steps on his résumé, but rather why he took them. Though he didn’t use this language, he built his career by registering for specific courses in the schools of experience. Archibald had a clear goal in mind when he graduated from college—he wanted to become CEO of a successful company. But instead of setting out on what most people thought would be the “right,” prestigious stepping-stone jobs to get there, he asked himself: “What are all the experiences and problems that I have to learn about and master so that what comes out at the other end is somebody who is ready and capable of becoming a successful CEO?” That meant Archibald was prepared to make some unconventional moves in the early years of his career—moves his peers at business school might not have understood on the surface. Instead of taking jobs or assignments because they looked like a fast-track to the C-suite, he chose his options very deliberately for the experience they would provide. “I wouldn’t ever make the decision based upon how much it paid or the prestige,” he told my students “Instead, it was always: is it going to give me the experiences I need to wrestle with?” His first job after business school was not a glamorous consulting position. Instead, he worked in Northern Quebec, operating an asbestos mine. He thought that particular experience, of managing and leading people in difficult conditions, would be important to have mastered on his route to the C-suite. It was the first of many such decisions he made. The strategy worked. It wasn’t long before he became CEO of Beatrice Foods. And then, at age forty-two, he achieved an even loftier goal: he was appointed CEO of Black & Decker. He stayed in that position for twenty-four years.

The brilliant psychologist Larry Crabb wrote, “The core battle in everyone’s life is to relate well to God, to worship him, enjoy him, experience his presence, hear his voice, trust him in everything, always call him good, obey every command (even the hard ones), and hope in him when he seems to disappear.”8 Crabb concluded, “That’s the battle the community of God is called to enter in each other’s lives.”9 That’s a battle I cannot win alone. I need a community that is waging the same war to include me in the fight. None of us can win the battle alone, and God didn’t design us to win alone. We win the lifelong battle to stay encouraged and hold on to hope only as we join others who need our help to win their battles as well. A local Christian hero and statesman, Bryce Jessup, said the key to his whole life and his stellar twenty-five-year run as a college president boils down to one line: “Dream a dream and build a team.”10 I’d add only that a dream without a team is merely a wish. Who is on your team?

The stuff of life, in other words, arose in places and times somewhat more accessible to our telescopic investigations. Since most of us spend our lives confined to a narrow strip near Earth’s surface, we tend to think of the cosmos as a lofty, empyrean realm far beyond our reach and relevance. We forget that only a thin sliver of atmosphere separates us from the rest of the universe. But science continues to show just how intimately connected life on Earth is to extraterrestrial processes. In particular, several recent findings have further illuminated the cosmic origins of life’s key ingredients. Take the element phosphorus, for example. It is a critical constituent of DNA, as well as of our cells, teeth and bones. Astronomers have long struggled to trace its buildup through cosmic history, because the imprint of phosphorus is difficult to discern in old, cool stars in the outskirts of our galaxy. (Some of these stellar “time capsules” contain the ashes of their forebears, the very first generation of stars that formed near the dawn of time.) But in a paper published in December in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team reported that it had measured the abundance of phosphorus in 13 such stars, using data taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. Their findings highlight the dominant role of so-called hypernovae, explosions even more energetic than supernovae that spell the demise of massive stars, in making the elements

Oh the stellar sensation, Oh the cosmic elevation; Time is sober in death, For the wine of love; Is the blue life of the earth.

Henry Grant, I think again as I exhale a deep breath that eases some of the pain that name causes me. It’s not even the name that I object to, if I’m bein’ completely honest with myself. It’s just a name. If Red had given me the most stellar name I could think of it would still suck ‘cuz it’s not my name. It’s someone else’s name. I’m givin’ up my birthright. It’s mine. Russell Marx. Me. It’s like I’m givin’ up my humanity, too, ‘cuz I was nothin’ but human when I was Russell. Now I’m supposed to be Henry and he’s some kind of freaky half-angel. I have had thousands of names in a thousand different lifetimes, but for some reason, this one, Russell Marx, is the hardest for me to give up. Maybe it’s ‘cuz I’m not dyin’ and movin’ on to the next life. I don’t know, but the pain I feel is somethin’ awful. I clutch the steerin’ wheel tight, drivin’ faster than I should through the sleepy little towns between Crestwood and Coldwater. I

The ledger of my life can lean heavy with a prolific array of stellar investments, yet in the tallying I would be wise to remember that an investment that is not of God will leave a zero balance on the ledger of my life no matter how many different ways I try to add it up.

FINDING FULFILLMENT For You, O God, have tested us; You have refined us as silver is refined . . . we went through fire and through water; but You brought us out to rich fulfillment. Psalm 66:10–12 NKJV Everywhere we turn, or so it seems, the world promises fulfillment, contentment, and happiness. But the contentment that the world offers is fleeting and incomplete. Thankfully, the fulfillment that God offers is all encompassing and everlasting. Sometimes, amid the inevitable hustle and bustle of life-here-on-earth, we can forfeit—albeit temporarily—the joy of Christ as we wrestle with the challenges of daily living. Yet God’s Word is clear: fulfillment through Christ is available to all who seek it and claim it. Count yourself among that number. Seek first a personal, transforming relationship with Jesus, and then claim the joy, the fulfillment, and the spiritual abundance that the Shepherd offers His sheep. In serving we uncover the greatest fulfillment within and become a stellar example of a woman who knows and loves Jesus. Vonette Bright We are never more fulfilled than when our longing for God is met by His presence in our lives. Billy Graham A TIMELY TIP Want to increase your sense of fulfillment? Then strive to find God’s path for your life . . . and follow it.

We’ve said that the universe is the sum total of all matter and energy, but what exactly is this? Until a few decades ago, astronomers assumed that the matter of the universe was primarily found in stars and galaxies, while the energy of the universe took the form of light. It now seems that this “visible” matter and energy are just the tip of the iceberg in a universe that remains far more mysterious. Just as planets orbit the Sun, stars orbit the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The more massive the galaxy, the stronger its gravity and the faster stars should be orbiting. By carefully studying stellar orbits, astronomers have been able to put together a map of the distribution of matter in the Milky Way. The surprising result is that while most of the matter that we can see consists of stars and gas clouds in the galaxy’s relatively flat disk, most of the mass lies unseen in a much larger, spherical halo that surrounds the disk (Figure 3.5). We don’t know the nature of this unseen mass in the halo, so we call it dark matter to indicate that we have not detected any light coming from it, even though we have detected its gravitational effects. Studies of other galaxies suggest that they also are made mostly of dark matter. In fact, most of the mass in the universe seems to be made of this mysterious dark matter, which means that its gravity must have played a key role in assembling galaxies. Evidence of the existence of dark matter has been building for several decades. More recently, scientists have gathered evidence of an even greater mystery: The universe seems to contain a mysterious form of energy—nicknamed dark energy by analogy to dark matter—that is pushing galaxies apart even while their gravity tries to draw them together. As is the case with dark matter, scientists have good reason to think that dark energy exists but lack any real understanding of its nature. In recent years, scientists have been able to conduct a sort of census of the matter and energy in the universe. The results show that dark energy and dark matter are by far the main ingredients of the universe. The ordinary matter—atoms and molecules—that makes up stars and planets and life apparently represents no more than a few percent of all the matter and energy in the universe.

And then we have all the mass media that constantly expose us to stellar success after success, while not showing us the thousands of hours of dull practice and tedium that were required to achieve that success.

Have you noticed how discourtesy and aggression are infecting our public life? What happened to gentleness?

When you let go of revenge and constantly mulling over the hurt someone has caused you, you can commit to your own path and happiness. Part of things coming around is you committing to being happy with or without people and their approval. So mark your path. Make it happen. Be a stellar person, and do what you need to do to carry on. Life will gift you because you have acted with integrity. And you won’t waste anymore of your invaluable time and energy on a past you can’t change anyway.

Then there are people who clean the bone so thoroughly, flawlessly ridding it of every last shred of meat and marrow, that you can conclude only two things: They will be stellar successes in all aspects of life, and they must be from another country.

was just a man who was struggling to make sense of his life after losing the one thing that meant the most. Basketball defined me. It gave me purpose. How could it not when I had invested so much of my life into modeling myself to be such a stellar player? I needed to get my shit together but

The sooner you can get comfortable with the ambiguity of two things being true at the same time, the sooner you will enjoy all parts of your life, even the not-so-great ones, because you know that’s not the whole story. Your whole story is so much richer than any one trauma or obstacle. With practice, you can learn to acknowledge and care for the “not-so-great” while also holding up what is absolutely stellar.

This problem enters the business world more viciously than other walks of life, owing to the high dependence on randomness (we have already belabored the contrast between randomness-dependent business with dentistry). The greater the number of businessmen, the greater the likelihood of one of them performing in a stellar manner just by luck. I have rarely seen anyone count the monkeys. In the same vein, few count the investors in the market in order to calculate, instead of the probability of success, the conditional probability of successful runs given the number of investors in operation over a given market history.

Errol Flynn was a film actor whose performances gave pleasure to many millions. On June 20, 1909, he was born in Hobart, Tasmania, and on October 14, 1959, he died in Vancouver, British Columbia. When he was seventeen he was expelled from school in Sydney, and in the next 33 years he lived a life which was full, lusty, restless and colourful. In his career, in his three marriages, in his friendships, in his quarrels, and in bed with the many women he took there, he lived with zest and irregularity. The lives of film stars are not cast in the ordinary mould, and in some respects Errol Flynn’s was more stellar than most. When he died, he posed the only question that I have to decide: where was he domiciled at the date of his death?

Although the first stars of the Universe could not have formed planetary systems, the process did not take long to get underway. Because massive stars are short-lived, the first billion years of the Universe already had time for 1,000 generations of production of the heavier elements. Observations show that the early universe was already a quite dusty place. Although massive stars do not live long enough to host planetary systems where life is likely to emerge, they are essential to producing the elements that lower-mass systems use to build habitable worlds. The Milky Way galaxy, our home, formed not long after the Big Bang, and has been building its stock of heavy elements ever since. Most of this galactic chemical evolution remains internal to the galaxy, although galaxies do sometimes collide and exchange material. Over the past thirteen billion years of nucleosynthesis in the Milky Way, there has been ample time for thorough mixing across the galaxy. Thus, our Solar System incorporates ingredients from a mix of myriad expired stars, most of which have been processed multiple times through short-lived stars. Every breath you take includes oxygen atoms from thousands of different stars that have lived and died in our galaxy over the past thirteen billion years.

it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly.

Listen. When you get stellar advice, it's worth something." "What's your advice?" "Do whatever you want. It's your life, no one else's.

That’s crazy! We can’t go the way of—” “Since when has human history been anything else?” asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder—Donna, being some sort of public archivist, is in Sirhan’s estimate likely to be of use to him. “Remember what we found in the DMZ?” “The DMZ?” Sirhan asks, momentarily confused. “After we went through the router,” Pierre says grimly. “You tell him, love.” He looks at Amber. Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he’s stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have been his mother isn’t, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary. “We uploaded via the router,” Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. “There’s a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I’m not so sure now. I think it’s something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity—they’re bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else, and it, uh, eats the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. We were”—she licks her lips—“lucky to escape with our minds. We only did it because of a friend. It’s like the main sequence in stellar evolution; once a G-type star starts burning helium and expands into a red giant, it’s ‘game over’ for life in what used to be its liquid-water zone.

With a stellar entrepreneurial track record, Adam S. Kaplan is a seasoned professional with a wealth of expertise. His excellence in the field of financial guidance and adept provision of strategic consulting showcase his extensive experience. His diverse licensing credentials underscore his multifaceted skills and unwavering commitment to ethical standards. Beyond finance, Adam offers consulting services on a wide range of topics, including business projects, career development, networking, insurance, and life coaching. He's also an aviation enthusiast, a meticulous model car builder, a dedicated Mets fan, a tennis aficionado, and a connoisseur of culture and culinary arts.

Absorption spectra?" - "Things they get absorbed in. Interests, that sort of thing. If you could take a sort of life-spectrum for everybody, of all the things they believed in and took an interest in and became involved in — all that sort of stuff — then they'd look like stellar spectra; a smooth band of colour from violet to red, with black lines where the things that meant something to those people had been absorbed.

What did Auden say? In headaches and in worry, vaguely life leaks away . .

We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.” In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs—to put less time than I’d like into one of those domains, so as to make space for another—and to accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway, with the result that my actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the fantasy.

Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. I’m sure a lot of it comes from our education system, which judges rigorously based on performance and punishes those who don’t do well. Another large share of it comes from overbearing or critical parents who don’t let their kids screw up on their own often enough, and instead punish them for trying anything new or not preordained. And then we have all the mass media that constantly expose us to stellar success after success, while not showing us the thousands of hours of dull practice and tedium that were required to achieve that success.

for Marcus in that stellar year of 136, with Commodus opting to ask his prospective son-in-law to fill the post

the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.” In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs—to put less time than I’d like into one of those domains, so as to make space for another—and to accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway, with the result that my actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the fantasy.

would give away all this super-stellar life, all the ranks and honors, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant's wife weighing eighteen stone and set candles at God's shrine.

Who are we? Who we are. Just what we’re taken as being. What we know and what we do. No less or more. Information being passed on. Patterns, galaxies, stellar systems, planets, all evolve; matter in the raw changes, progresses in a way. Life is a faster force, reordering, finding new niches, starting to shape; intelligence—consciousness—an order quicker, another new plane.

We now know that the atoms in our bodies were forged in nuclear reactions in stellar furnaces, spewed into the universe in supernovae explosions, and incorporated into our bodies through the long process of the evolution of life over the last 3.8 billion years on Earth. We recognize that after death, our bodily atoms will be dispersed once again through the universe, recycled to once again become star stuff in a cycle of events that will end only with the death of the universe itself. We are part and parcel of the universe, and at the hour of our death when we return to the universe, the old phrase [...] “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” need only be slightly altered to “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust” to be literally true. Cosmic evolution provides us with a master narrative in which our own birth, life, and death are integral parts of the universe, without recourse to the supernatural.

So I asked the salesclerk for a jar of confiture de groseilles, which is pronounced “gro-zay.” But with my less-than-stellar command of the language, I asked for “confiture de grosses selles” (which I pronounced as “gross sells”). The saleswoman’s jaw nearly hit the counter: I’d ordered turd jam…make that big-turd jam.

I was never a stellar student, but I paid attention to the interesting parts — and as I understand it, gravity between the sun, our planet, and the moon pulls the ocean in a rhythm as reliable as night and day, summer and winter, or spring and fall. It creates ebbs and floods in a pattern that the rotation of a clock, the breath in a pair of lungs, or the beating of a heart could never match. The tide was turning long before life existed, and it will keep turning long after we’re gone.

The Plant Kingdom exists to bring feeling into manifestation. On the plant level, feeling exists in a pure and passive form. The animal and human kingdoms manifest this more actively, more separately, but often with less beauty. Consciousness in plants is on a primal level of unity; therefore it is more psychic, telepathic. The earth, like a gigantic receptor or radio-station, inhales and exhales stellar and cosmic forces, the absorbed essence of which grows and unfolds as life. These forces are not all material, but include subtle energies of an occult or spiritual nature. Plants transmit the vital-emotional impulses, the life-force that is hidden in light. That is the gift, the grace, the power of plants. Plants exist to transmute light into life. Human beings exist to transmute life into consciousness, love. These three–light, life and love–are one, each an expression of the other, three dimensions of the same existence. Plants transmute light into life through photosynthesis. The human being transmutes life into consciousness through perception. The seers, through the yoga of perception, let plants speak to them. And the plants disclosed their secrets–many of which are far more subtle than a chemical analysis could uncover. Approaching plants in the same way today, not as objects for self-aggrandizement but as integral parts of our own unity, the true value of a plant will flourish for our unselfish use.

What if Soul #19,428,939,045 had failed the first 19 lifetimes and had it not been for the big renege and eternal damnation, on the 20th his goodness would have smacked the ball so far out of the park, with such profound benevolence and kindness for all, it would have permanently altered the course of human evolution, ushering in a golden age of caring and kindness so grand it’s not even conceivable on the present plane? Or let’s say it might have taken him 19 million times at bat before making such a mark in history. If eternal bliss lay beyond (mind you, that’s a very long time and a whole lot of bliss) for everyone, evermore? Suddenly 19 million times at bat becomes a pittance to pay for such stellar returns. As does 19 billion, or trillion, or zillion, given the inconceivable scope of eternity. The beautiful idea of God “loving humanity” so deeply that He gave us freedom is blown to smithereens on the day such freedom is taken back, considering that on that one day there could have been a breakthrough that now can never be. And we haven’t even posed the greatest of all questions that in a split second, if we even attempt to answer, obliterates the entire notion of hell and the devil: “Why?!

Like a sixty-year-old person on actuarial charts, the habitable Earth is three-quarters of the way through its calculated life expectancy. Earth is about 4.57 billion years old, and the laws of stellar physics tell of another billion years before the sun expands to the point that it bakes the possibility for life off the planet.

That the Tree of Life is doubtlessly a sky chart is something clear to every magician who had attempted to study it. However, it traditionally focuses much more on religious concepts and morals, and on the planetary correspondences than on its stellar knowledge. It almost neglects the stars (paths), relegating them to second plane and actually only twelve of the twenty-two paths are related to the constellations. When such a relationship is established, it is usually in an astrologically rather than astronomically manner. However, if we want to review concepts in order to identify the Tree of Life’s stellar roots, we have to retrace its basic associations and principles.

☚✿+91-9636763351 ✿☛ Vashikaran Specialist Spell Caster In Canada World Top Tantrik Baba +

☘------》+91-9636763351 Famous Vashikaran Specialist Astrologer America World Top Tantrik Baba +

+91-9636763351 ≭¤≭ vashikaran mantra to control boyfriend IN Delhi Mumbai Bangalore Chennai Hyderabad World Top Tantrik Baba +

Vashikaran Specialist +91-9636763351 How to learn black magic in hindi In United Kingdom World Top Tantrik Baba +

Vashikaran Specialist +91-9636763351 How to learn black magic in hindi In United Kingdom World Top Tantrik Baba +

Everything is dead already. Solar death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological temporality as configured in terms of philosophical questioning’s constitutive horizonal relationship to the future. But far from lying in wait for us in the far distant future, on the other side of the terrestrial horizon, the solar catastrophe needs to be grasped as something that has already happened; as the aboriginal trauma driving the history of terrestrial life as an elaborately circuitous detour from stellar death. Terrestrial history occurs between the simultaneous strophes of a death which is at once earlier than the birth of the first unicellular organism, and later than the extinction of the last multicellular animal.

Kamakhya tantrik contact number +91-9636763351 Aghori baba kamakhya World Top Tantrik Baba +