fires43

In this context a phrase like "intergalactic space" has meaning only for
convenience. It refers to something we have only observed, not
experienced. And since we see it is there, somehow, we have to name it,
the way we have to name 0. It is a descriptive placeholder without
reference to any experienced reality. It does not compute, really.

A small enough number - such as the infinite smallness, 0 - is not within
a human frame of experience, and a large enough number - such as the
number of stars in the universe - is in the same way not within a human
frame of experience. At least, they have no identifiable logical link to a
glance at the Big Dipper riding the maple tops while you walk from the
garage late at night to the back door.

If you let the starlight work the back of your eyes so it soaks through
into the grayness, and then pumps by electrical impulse into the heart,
the heart then pumps it into your memory and your love of trees and
streams. You can feel a rustling, as if the intergalactic distance was a
wind on your mind's surface. The stars are still and fixed. Are the leaves
moving in the evening breeze, or is the mind moving?

It's possible to watch the movements of the mind, but it must be done
from the corner of the eye. If you look straight at it, it freezes like a
statue - as invisible as a ghost stared at, or the way the zodiacal light is
invisible until you look away, unfocusing your eyes and seeing sideways
while looking straight ahead at nothing. Intergalactic distances are so
transcendently huge they cannot be known at all, but only pointed at.
When you look up there at night toward the beginning and end of
everything, you awaken and fall asleep simultaneously. Awe and
bewilderment bestir your inner eye. In the stars heaven is only felt. Its
distance is unknowable.

The Lotus Sutra of early Buddhism refers repeatedly to "the
thousand-millionfold worlds." They are "numberless as the grains of
sand in the Ganges," and countless Buddhas "exist at present in …
countless hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, and millions of Buddha
lands in the ten directions," and there are "living beings of countless
thousands, ten thousands, millions of species." There is a period of time
called a "kalpa," which is so long it cannot be specified, thousands or
millions of years or more, and there are "kalpas of kalpas."

The universe may have begun 15 billion years ago, science tells us, and
a curious child will always ask, "And what came before that?" Sufis reply
cheerfully to this in a way similar to Lotus Sutra Buddhists by referring
to periods of time experienced in deep states of consciousness as
pre-eternity, eternity and post-eternity.

Before there were telescopes, it was known the heavens were
numberless, and the beings in them, and the time. Now, astronomers
apply numbers which correspond with some verifiable accuracy to
physical dimensions, but they are no more real than the Lotus Sutra's.
Astronomical numbers are too big to have any logic within sight of the
mind. The figures, proofs, charts and diagrams are lecture material that
simply glazes the mind, and can tire and actually sicken it by making the
intergalactic desert places seem more distant yet. The more we chart up
there, the further away it seems. The galaxies are so far from your own
experience that they're simply speculations.

For the Buddhas and the Sufis, it is not a matter of physics or
metaphysics, but of experience. The reports Ibn Arabi and Ruzbihan
Baqli made of their journeys read like drug hallucinations. Dante gives a
similar kaleidoscopic account of the regions of hell and the abstract
beauties of heaven, if tempered by medieval European orderliness.
Even Plato, whose razorlike rationality is widely mistaken for his
principal message, speaks of giant periods of time which repeat in
26,000 year cycles - a kalpa by any other name is just as big.

Where is the center of this? 2,400 years later the theory of relativity
seizes the notion of "frames of reference" and places the center
everywhere and nowhere - the location of the center depends upon the
observer. This is all the religious mystics ever had to say on the subject,
too.

The center of the universe is wherever you are now, which can easily be
seen in the radiation outward of the stars and galaxies from your central
vantage point. Layer upon layer of reality circling itself, from planets
circling the Sun, to the Sun circling the galactic center, to clusters of
galaxies moving like schools of fish, and clusters of clusters - countless
thousands, ten thousands of them in ten directions at least - all moving
in the same general direction of what astrophysicists call the Great
Attractor, no one knows exactly what it is or how it works.

In the Buddhist temple of Longhua in Shanghai, a statue of
Avalokitesvara - or Guanyin, the bodhisattva of home, peace and
protection - with four faces and a thousand gold hands, sits in the center
of a room, and along the inner walls from floor to ceiling are hundreds,
thousands, tens of thousands, millions it seems, of carved, painted
figures leaping outward in joy or fierce protectiveness, standing in
serene contemplation holding staffs and fruits, laughing, glowering,
gesturing with glittering eyes. Their robes, swords and scrolls are blue,
red and black, and from the center of the room the stern but generous
and enraptured faces of Guanyin spread her protection like a great
cloud over the thousand-millionfold lands of heavenly beings and
protective demons.

Numberless as the grains of sand in the Ganges, or as the miles from
here to the quasar frontier. The distances between stars are so immense
it will take the Pioneer spacecraft, one of the fastest contraptions ever
launched, more than 55,000 years to make the trip to the nearest star,
Alpha Centauri, if it lives. Spaces like this separate the stars in the Milky
Way, and 2.2 million light-years farther on inside M31 are spaces
equally vast and yet seen from Earth as a cloud of light. Whirling clouds
of light as far as the telescope can see, like countless drops of milk.

Where do galaxies come from, and where do they go? Some
astronomers say the cosmos isn't old enough for galaxies to have
evolved, as creatures evolve, yet there they are. It happened more
suddenly than could logically be expected, as if God had slapped the
shale-like surface of the sea and sent a spray in the air. As if the
thousand hands of Guanyin had slapped a thousand seas and sent a
thousand thousand sprays across the cosmos, sending thousands of
thousands of drops into being, that will sometime fall back and
disappear there still alive. 120 billion slaps, each spraying.

In the billions of galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars, surely there is
life recognizable even to us, animals and plants, and elsewise. Even the
species of the Earth, contrary to popular misunderstanding, have not all
been identified or cataloged - there are insects unknown to
entomologists, deep-sea corals and blind fish so far unseen by anyone,
and no doubt land creatures our frame of reference has not yet allowed
over the horizon. No one is sure where spiders come from since there
are no aquatic species and apparently they did not evolve, like
everything else, from the sea. They may have come to Earth on
meteors. What else is outposted in the stars, and other bewildering
elsewheres?

If as the metaphysics of some religions hold, every being is a world in
itself, then let's say also every world is a being. Thousands of billions of
worlds circling billions and billions of stars. Billions of beings,
uncountable beings in China, India, a cozy 1.3 million in Maine. Worlds
of worlds - Earth beings unknown and unrecognized by science. The
undiscovered country between here and heaven used to be inhabited by
gods, angels, spirits and demons, and only in the last few centuries has
our frame of reference pushed them over the horizon.

The far frontier for us is the nearby planets of rock and ice, empty spots
where two or three - Mars, Titan, Europa - may once have grown
microbes, primitive beings. In the yawning distance are the other stars,
the thousand-millionfold lands seen only as echoes in the telescopic sky
with planets and beings walking them, both visible and invisible. What is
it that speaks from the other side of the stars? Where is that voice
coming from, and where is it going? And why can't we hear it?

Or can't we? Clouds of stars illuminate the fir hills in the night air,
obscuring stars and more worlds beyond, and beyond. From over the
dark pine steeples around my house, light spreads like a great cloud,
and there is the frightening sense that on wavelengths dancing into but
unseen by my eyes, the sonor of God filling the universe with light is
swelling the distance.