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#2709 -
Nondual
Highlights
Dear Jerry,
Someone sent these Hubble
photographs to me recently. Contemplating them, I
realized that George Bush stopped funding this project
several years ago for ideological
reasons. He replaced it with a program to land
"real" rockets on Mars.
Christian fundamentalists abhor these photos.
Why? Because they call into question the naive and
absurd claim, made by Biblical literalists, that
the earth is merely three to five thousand years old.
The photos depict living, organic,
ancient mandalas formed in the vastness of
infinite space. They invite the viewer into the
experience of Beauty and stimulate the
realization that book-based religions, such
as Christianity, Judaism and Islam,
which describe a
separate Creator/God, are, based on the ostensibly
violent fruits they have produced throughout history, petty
and dangerous dualistic fantasies. In beholding these
photos one may be ushered into a state of inner
silence without the accoutrements of
"faith" or religion. They lead the
mind to the shining abode of the Self.
Namaste,
David Spero
URL: http://www.davidspero.org
Email: david@davidspero.org
Hubble telescope's top
ten greatest space photographs:
10. The Trifid
Nebula. A 'stellar nursery', 9,000 light years from here, it
is where new stars are being born.
9. The glowering eyes
from 114 million light years away are the swirling cores of
two merging galaxies called NGC 2207 and IC 2163 in the
distant Canis Major constellation.
8. Starry Night, so
named because it reminded astronomers of the Van Gogh
painting. It is a halo of light around a star in the Milky
Way.
7. The Perfect Storm,
a small region in the Swan Nebula, 5,500 light years away,
described as 'a bubbly ocean of hydrogen and small amounts
of oxygen, sulphur and other elements'.
6. In sixth place is
the Cone Nebula. The part pictured here is 2.5 light years
in length (the equivalent of 23 million return trips to the
Moon).
5. The Hourglass
Nebula, 8,000 light years away, has a
pinched-in-the-middle look because the winds that shape it
are weaker at the centre.
4. At four is the
Cat's Eye Nebul
3. In third place is
Nebula NGC 2392, called Eskimo because it looks like a face
surrounded by a furry hood. The hood is, in fact, a ring of
comet-shaped objects flying away from a dying star. Eskimo
is 5,000 light years from Earth.
2. The Ant Nebula, a
cloud of dust and gas whose technical name is Mz3, resembles
an ant when observed using ground-based telescopes.
The nebula lies within our galaxy between 3,000 and 6,000 light
years from Earth.
1. The
The dimensions of the
galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its
appearance.
It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years
across.