Joseph Campbell Explaining Big Bang and our place in the universe:
When you go out into space, what you’re carrying is your body, and if that hasn’t been transformed, space won’t transform you. But thinking about space may help you to realize something. There’s a two-page spread in a world atlas which shows our galaxy within many galaxies, and within our galaxy the solar system. And here you get a sense of the magnitude of this space that we’re now finding out about. What those pages opened to me was the vision of a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence.
Billions upon billions of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other. Each thermonuclear furnace a star, and our sun among them. Many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces, littering the outermost reaches of space with dust and gas out of which new stars with circling planets are being born right now. And then from still more remote distances beyond all these there come murmurs, microwaves that are echoes of the greatest cataclysmic explosion of all, namely the big bang of creation, which, according to some reckonings, may have occurred some eighteen billion years ago.
That’s where we are, kiddo, and to realize that, you realize how really important you are, you know — one little microbit in that great magnitude. And then must come the experience that you and that are in some sense one, and you partake of all of that.
Daily Thoughts 