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Delight Springs

Friday, December 18, 2020

"...until I started to grow up" (Cosmos: Possible Worlds)

Getting hold of reality and the future-

"So, why do I think we’ll make it? Well, for one thing, show me a person who didn’t seem or feel hopeless for at least some part of their adolescence. I sure did and mine lasted long beyond the usual teenage years. I was reckless and irresponsible. I caused my parents countless sleepless nights with my failure to call or show up as promised. My emotions were unpredictable. My room, and later my apartment, was usually a mess. I started things I didn’t finish. I would lose my possessions with disturbing regularity. I experimented with substances of unknown potency, flirting with danger to my brain and my life. I was careless with the facts. I was gullible because I had yet to internalize a means for thinking critically. I was selfish and couldn’t be trusted to keep my promises or to do the hard work that would get me the future I wanted. The future had no reality for me. In fact, reality had no reality to me. I couldn’t get a hold of it until I started to grow up."

-"Cosmos: Possible Worlds" by Ann Druyan

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Science as transcendence and spiritual quest: "Do these things and the cosmos is yours..."

Science, like love, is a means to that transcendence, to that soaring experience of the oneness of being fully alive. The scientific approach to nature and my understanding of love are the same: Love asks us to get beyond the infantile projections of our personal hopes and fears, to embrace the other’s reality. This kind of unflinching love never stops daring to go deeper, to reach higher. This is precisely the way that science loves nature. This lack of a final destination, an absolute truth, is what makes science such a worthy methodology for sacred searching. It is a never ending lesson in humility. The vastness of the universe—and love, the thing that makes the vastness bearable—is out of reach to the arrogant. This cosmos only fully admits those who listen carefully for the inner voice reminding us to remember we might be wrong. What’s real must matter more to us than what we wish to believe. But how do we tell the difference? I know a way to part the curtains of darkness that prevent us from having a complete experience of nature. Here it is, the basic rules of the road for science: Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. And question everything, including authority. Do these things and the cosmos is yours. 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.”

— Cosmos: Possible Worlds by Ann Druyan
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