In moments like these, I reach out to the only medicine that heals everything, including matrix overload – unplug and go outside. The serenity of the real world vs. the noise of the human-made world. What is the “real world”? It is everything that will continue to exist even if we stop looking at it or believing in it. Like the sky. Or the mountains. Or all forces of nature: birth, growth, evolution, rebirth. When social delusions start engaging my mind and senses too much, I just shut down the imaginary castle and turn to nature.
Earlier this year, on my birthday, we visited a place near Lithgow in NSW, which I had randomly found searching online and which turned out to be one of our most amazing natural experiences ever. The fact that we saw kangaroos for the first time and lived among them for 3 days was quite memorable in itself, but we also stood directly under the myriad stars of the Milky Way – something I won’t even try to describe, for it is beyond words. I made my first attempt to photograph the starry sky as well, obviously not a very successful one.
Source: Here is a similar publication on Astronomy.com
If this is true (and it probably is), then we’ve done a great job distancing ourselves from our life source and obscuring the best of guides we’d been provided. Gazing up into the night sky, we recalibrate our minds and keep the true perspective. No sense of personal grandeur can survive when faced with the scale of our galaxy. Greed, fame, power – all these seem irrelevant if we remind ourselves now and then what a minuscule part of the whole we are.
As a genetically predisposed book worm, I have been devouring sci-fi books and publications since early childhood. Back then there were dozens of magazines, newspapers and children’s books dedicated to all themes extra-terrestrial and cosmic. I remember reading “Andromeda Nebula” and “The Bull’s Hour” by Russian scientist and sci-fi author Ivan Yefremov on repeat, not to mention the British science fiction television series “Blake’s 7” which was hysterically popular when I was 7. Later the “Return of the Jedi” came into my life, followed by the science periodical “Cosmos” which my father had subscribed me to.
Back to our Milky Way now, here is a collection of educational facts:
- The Milky Way is approximately 890 billion times the mass of the Sun
- It has over 200 billion stars.
- There is a black hole at its centre with a radius of 22.5 million kilometres (14 million miles) which is a massive source of radio waves.
- Our view of the galaxy from Earth shows a glowing band all the way across the sky which we normally perceive as the Milky Way but actually all the stars we see in the night sky all the time are part of the galaxy (which we live in).
