Stars and Gods Date Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - 09:48 PM PST Topic Beauty Riding in the car with the sunroof open late enough to see the moon on a cloudless night and the stars all around it. Not far away enough from the city to see all the stars, but far enough to see most. There's Mars, and a white moon with a shimmering purple aura around it that may be just my eyes. How did the ancient peoples know so much about them? Even with our tools we only know just enough to map our galaxy; they created calenders to clock hundreds of years of time passing and filled their history with the future and the changes they predicted by those stars. Ignore the fact they cut off their own genitalia and cut off the heads of babies and threw them in the river upstream from where they got their drinking water, thus ensuring the death of their species; they had dreamscapes and planes of the imagination carved out from before we even had analysis of the imagination and dream horoscopes. Zodiac calendars that have existed since before anyone can remember that can predict what type of human you will be just by knowing what day you were born on. All from the sky. It's beautiful to see Mars with the naked eye; the planet that shimmers light red instead of twinkling, setting it off against the starry background as the brightest and best. I remember my first look beyond our planet and into the depth of the sky; my father had gotten an old National Geographic at my bequest from the local library, the issue that catalogued images brought to our tiny minds from the vastness of space via the Hubble telescope. Images of planets and galaxies destroying themselves and recreating themselves in either an instant that I could not possibly measure or see to taking millions of years beyond my life and the lives of all who would come in my family's line. A fraction of a millionth of a fraction of a grain of sand on a beach that stretches to infinity; can god exist like this? Would I be god simply to be every particle in this experiment? Could I be a god? Could I see it? To be everything. In some stretch of irony, "Dust in the Wind" was what was playing on the car radio. And to pass from this existence to the next, along this infinite chain of space, does it matter? To be spread infinitely thin over this entire space, to be the space, would that be enough? Would I know? In some ways it seems such a failure of destiny to be trapped as a human being. We don't even have wings. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=371