Outer and Inner Space
Posted on October 23, 2012
I grew up during the space age. Sputnik was launched on my birthday in 1957. I was eight years old. In 1969 I watched men walk on the moon. Often I think about my grandfather, who lived during a time when humanity went from horse-drawn carriages to outer space adventures.
But this transition didn’t just change how he and I lived during this period. It changed our consciousnesses, our relationship to the rest of the universe. Over the last two thousand years, humans have gone from an Earth-centric vision of the cosmos, with sun and stars orbiting around a stationary planet, to a much bigger view that encompasses the whole universe and its billions and billions of galaxies containing billions and billions of stars, all wheeling and soaring through the heavens.
This picture, now known as “Earthrise”, of the Earth rising above the moon’s horizon, taken by Apollo 8 in December of 1968, changed my view of everything:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_102.html
Back in the day, I rarely agreed with President Richard Nixon, but I did concur with his statement that the Apollo 11 moon landing was “the greatest week since the beginning of the world, the creation.”
Instead of thinking of ourselves as earthbound creatures, we were now a part of a much greater reality. The borders we fight over are invisible from space Astronaut Leland Melvin said: “You see the earth in all its glory, with no borders. It makes you appreciate how fragile the earth is” And Willie McCool, pilot of the doomed Columbia space mission, said: “From our orbital vantage point, we observe an earth without borders, full of peace, beauty and magnificence, and we pray that humanity as a whole can imagine a borderless world as we see it and strive to live as one in peace.”
I believe that the ramifications of this change of consciousness are not completely understood yet. Has the Earth suddenly become a place of universal harmony as a result of this change? Obviously not. But perhaps it did make us aware of that possibility and of our profound Oneness as residents of this little blue speck in the Infinite Void!