December 03rd, 2013

Question: When You Look at this Photograph What Happens to You?

The above photograph, titled eXtreme Deep Field is considered the most zoomed-in photograph ever created by humankind.

Essentially, you are looking billions of years backwards in time because what this photograph displays is a myriad of galaxies, some as old as 13.2 billion years; galaxies that were created shortly after the universe came into existence.

Michael Zhang notes:

The amount of photography and imagery that went into this image is staggering. The Hubble “space camera” was pointed at this tiny patch of sky for a total of 50 days, with a total cumulative exposure time of over 23 days (uber-long-exposure photography, anyone?). This resulted in 2,000 individual photos showing the same little section of the sky, all of which went into creating this photograph. It’s the “deepest image of the sky ever obtained” that reveals “the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen.

What scientists and physicists never broach, when discussing the notion of ‘singularity’ (the Big Bang and all it connotes) is of course what came before the Big Bang.

So what I like to do is contemplate the Big Bang and then hold alongside the theory of singularity the question of origin.

And then something peculiar happens. My mind stretches out to the endlessness of space, eliminating any sense of location, which, then, shortly thereafter does away with the concept of time.

If I do not have markers, locations, to designate any movement from A to B then, well, I don’t have any ‘time’. Because I’m not located in a particular place, neither are any of the galaxies, they might as well all be inside my head, which is the wild and poetic concept that the mystic Rudolph Steiner offered as a teaching.

Steiner suggested that human beings are a direct reflection of the cosmos and that our consciousness is imbued with the entirety of the universe.

In The Sun Mystery lectures he wrote: “Throughout a human lifetime, what happens in the head remains an image of the entire cosmos. The very fact that we have a head means that each of us carries an image of the entire cosmos around with us…”

If you want to amplify your mind being blown a wee bit more you can see the giant, hi-res version here.

So when I meditate on the amazing eXtreme Deep Field photograph that’s what I contemplate. How about you?



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Filed Under: Astronomy