[Skybird]

Originally Posted by ET2SN

Hydrogen.

Good one!

On topic, I at least know what we better should discover: and that is a way to ourselves. Assuming we could move out there, really far out there, we would only carry our problems and neuroses with us and project them onto the cosmos, and that would be like a boomerang that when it returns to us hits us on the back of our head, but squared in size and bump-effect.

Solaris. Stanislaw Lem's classic novel and the great movie made of it by Andrej Tarkowski (and that Lem did not like...) add's the twist to it I am after. In one passagem that I have already quoted once many years ago, Lem wrote this:

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here [on Solaris, Skybird] as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.

And:

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

The space out there, the space inside ourselves that is our mind - maybe the meaning of space exploration necessarily must embrace both in one and the same endavour. Because in the end we do not directly perceive and realise the nature of things and what our senses signal us they detect, our senses only show us by that that they work as they were intended. But its all a reality that we create inside our head, inside our brain, in our mind. We deal not with the universe per se, we deal with only our model and interpretation of it. And what we imagine, does not even really exist in the way we imagine it to be. Our brain's ways is the veil of Maya, and we cannot look beyond by just looking. First we must overlook something - ourselves, that is. That is what I understand to be at the heart and centre of every real spirituality. Trancendence can only be had at the price of leaving ourselves - read: our selves - behind. Forget about ourselves.

And maybe we then learn, like the protagonist Kelvin in Solaris, that the cosmos stares back into us.

Fantastic, great novel, btw. Who has not red it: read it!

(Different to Tarkowski, the movie by Soderberg with George Clooney unforgivingly cripples the ending by cutting off the merciless consequence and turning it into a stupid hollywood-kind of fell-well happy ending, sort of. Not a bad movie all along - until the end. Stupid: ruining the film on the last meters. )