The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically , she is the mind and they are the five senses. They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, and an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A . Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness...
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In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.
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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far. Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the relevation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents.
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At two-tenths the speed of light, dust and atoms might not do significant damage even in a voyage of 40 years, but the faster you go, the worse it is--space begins to become abrasive. When you begin to approach the speed of light, hydrogen atoms become cosmic-ray particles, and they will fry the crew. ...So 60,000 kilometers per second may be the practical speed limit for space travel.
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The churning separates the butter from the milk. In the same manner, through cosmic processes and upheavals of heat and cold, the Five Fundamental Elements (earth, water, fire, air, and space) were separated and Earth, this Ball of Butter, emerged as the product of the churning. If any person or thing has one of the three character-traits (balanced, passionate, dull) predominant in the makeup, we denote him as having that trait.
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In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.
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There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity.
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There is a place with four suns in the sky-red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth-and made of diamond....The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it.
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There are some hundred billion (10^11) galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred billion stars. In all the galaxies, there are perhaps as many planets as stars, 10^11 x 10^11 = 10^22, ten billion trillion. In the face of such overpowering numbers, what is the likelihood that only one ordinary star, the Sun, is accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be so fortunate? To me, it seems far more likely that the universe is brimming over with life. But we humans do not yet know. We are just beginning our explorations. The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight, and at this distance utterly lost.'
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The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach
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To understand the latest discovery about how the universe began, it helps to go back to the saga of the pigeon poop. In 1964, two radio astronomers at Bell Labs were working on an antenna for the new Telstar communications-satellite system. But no matter where Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson pointed the horn-shaped antenna, it picked up a hiss. Some kibitzers suspected that bird droppings in the antenna might be responsible, so the astronomers shoveled out the guano and shooed away the birds. Still the hiss. Scientists at Princeton University eventually traced the sound to a somewhat more distant source: the hiss was radiation left over from the cosmic fireball in which the universe was created.
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.
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The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
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Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
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God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things done.
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A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
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In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and female, are cosmic categories, not merely anthropological categories.
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You are ninety-eight cents' worth of cosmic star dust floating at the obscure edge of an ordinary galaxy, and yet you are the center of your own world; to friends and family, you may be precious beyond all worth. On one day, humanity seems the apex of all things beautiful, generous, mindful; another day, it seems a stupid beast.
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Cosmic upheaval is not so moving as a little child pondering the death of a sparrow in the corner of a barn.
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Suppose you're thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly somebody'll say like plate, or shrimp, or plate of shrimp--out of the blue, no explanation. No point of looking for one either. It's all part of the cosmic unconsciousness.
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Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.
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Physics is the science of all the tremendously powerful invisibilities - of magnetism, electricity, gravity, light, sound, cosmic rays. Physics is the science of the mysteries of the universe. How could anyone think it dull?
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Let us not forget that knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. ... I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insects as well as for the stars, Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
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Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust - we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
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No life if it is properly realized is without its cosmic importance.
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Artists should always think of themselves as cosmic instruments for storytelling.
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The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.
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For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
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The merger of human love with Divine love brings about Cosmic Order .
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