Looking into the Eye of God

 

This is a photo of the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), a Planetary Nebula in the constellation Aquarius, as photographed though my diminutive 72mm refractor. Planetary Nebulas get their name from the fact that they often look like planets through a small telescopes. The Helix nebula has been given the moniker the “Eye of God” because of its photographic resemblance to a giant eye, looking back at us from space.

Humanity has long gazed into space looking for a connection, something that tells us that all that we see is relevant to our existence.   All primitive cultures developed cosmological stories that attempted to explain how “we” came to be, and nearly all link us to “the heavens.”  Even those stories which place our origins on, or sometimes in, the Earth eventually link us to the stars in one way or another. In our modern Western tradition, we have both the Judeo/Christian religious tradition and ancient practices of Astrology which have historically connected us with the Cosmos.

In our religious traditions, we have the notion of an anthropomorphic construct of (an often all too human) creator deity, who resides in (or beyond) the heavens, looking down on us like a herdsman looking down from a hill top, overseeing his flock.  While those of a more mechanical mind, have construed more of a clockwork universe where the positions of the sun, stars and planets somehow govern our daily actions. While we Moderns now know that both these perspectives are faulty, we can never seem to get over the feeling that somehow that these outdated notions are still correct in some obscure way. I have had many friends and students that have said that when they look up into the night sky, they feel as if someone was looking back at them. While I know many more people who still refer to themselves as being Virgos or Libras when it comes to explaining away one or more of their personality traits.

I have spent my entire life looking into the sky and making connections. My perspectives have sometimes been influenced by popular beliefs, practices and traditions, but without fail, I always return to a more visceral, personal relationship. Not a person to person relationship like that of the Jews, Muslims or Christians, whereby some other entity with its own personality, interacts with mine; nor a physical oppositional relationship, where I am here and the universe is  somewhere “out there”; but rather a relationship whereby I am looking into my own mind, learning how to relate to myself.  

I have long abandoned any notions that I am something separate from the Universe, or somehow something “in” the Universe, like fish in an aquarium. When I look up into the night sky, I am the Universe looking back on myself.  This is not just some abstract metaphysical concept, but rather an actual point of perspective, no different than looking down at my torso and admitting that the body I see is mine. Since my first Near Death Experience at fifteen, I have realized that there is no other place but here, and that I am nothing other than this perspective of Universe looking back onto itself.  Every manifestation of the Cosmos is just another aspect of this inseparable whole, with each and every sentient being, just being another Eye of God, looking back at itself from another perspective.

The Universe is the whole realm of existence, the realm where; men and beasts, planets and stars, energy and atoms, are all just various aspects of the same inseparable continuum. There is no “there and here” nor “them and us”- there is just “here” and there is just “us”...and the sooner we all figure this out, the sooner we will stop trying to kill ourselves because of our ignorance, envy, hatred and greed.  All constructs of God and/or all constructs of the Universe, are simply overarching constructs of ourselves, and we must come to understand that there simply is nothing else.

Every time I look through my telescope, I know I am looking into the Eye of God, because he and I are of the same flesh, and seeing each other eye to eye, and seeing these things exactly as they are, is the only way I will ever understand who really I am.

Miles