Allowing the first Webb Telescope images to sink deep can be perilous.
Trap doors can open and drop the soul-mind into a bottomless spiral of unknowing. I found this exhilarating and, at the same time, annihilating – in a good way.
To get this effect, one way is through an analogy: the galaxies pictured above are in a window that would be the size of a grain of sand held up to the sky at arm’s length. Stop there. See the night sky. See the grain in your hand. Then see these galaxies within the grain, knowing how tiny a portion of space you’re seeing, how crowded the great darkness enfolding you truly is.
When that enormity has been absorbed, the vertigo and claustrophobia partly dissolved, even while realizing that viewers are probably looking back at you from other galaxies, feel the eyes and body of the beholder, your flesh self. Know that it has just received light generated 13 billion years ago. Stop there. Let your mind expand by 13 billion years. Notice how the timing of one long breath feels inside that. Becoming materially nothing in such a meta-cosmic array can be terrifying, humbling, thrilling, liberating, or majestic – or all of these sensations in turn, over minutes or days.
In the initial unnerving shock, I felt invited to re-design my deepest sense of humans as instruments (myself included), with and without extensions of our abilities to see, hear, feel, and comprehend – within a space far vaster than the one holding the pale blue dot so long ago.
This newly shattered context of existence can alter our sense of every part of it, transmuting all the contents and concerns of our now-sub-sub-sub-atomic planet and us inhabitants. And maybe other planets’ inhabitants too. Still, we as instruments live here, tiny conscious star stuff that we are. I’m now even more convinced that our elaborate stories make a difference in our lives, especially now that we can see we live in a science-fictional universe. At this sensate level, stories can affect the degree of suffering we experience, whether by our private interpretation or the stories’ effects on the actions and energies of others.
Being polyphasic can help, so we don’t disappear from our capacity to love while embodied, so we can remain in awe and let that appreciation flow out generously to our cohabitants. The time may also be optimal for allowing our creativity to expand – into the newly aware Space.
Photo Credit: NASA