Quotes Tagged "cosmos"

So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when “all mean egotism vanishes.” Wonders (and terrors) we’re ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our senses can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The gulf between self and world, that no-man’s-land which in ordinary hours the ego so vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate and more connected, “part and particle” of some larger entity. Whether we call that entity Nature, the Mind at Large, or God hardly matters. But it seems to be in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its sting.

People want answers to the big questions, like why we are here. They don’t expect the answers to be easy, so they are prepared to struggle a bit. When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth—the Earth is a sphere that doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise. Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

The universe is the largest, the thickest and the most necessary book! Either we read this book down to the finest detail and consolidate our position in the universe, or we fall upside down like a climber who doesn't take enough precautions against the dangers of the mountain!

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

Life exists throughout the cosmos and is a consequence of matter in the universe.

Patriarchy has stolen our cosmos and returned it in the form of 'Cosmopolitan' magazine and cosmetics.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

Divorced from the cosmos, from nature, from society and from each other, we have become fractured and fragmented.

There's a band from Brooklyn called Frankie Cosmos, which is very nice.

Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.

When I was 6 years old, I played on a coed indoor team. We were called the Cosmos. And then, after that, when I was 7, I played on an all-girls club team.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

I felt like I'd been misplaced in the cosmos and I belonged in Maine.

It's presumptuous for us to think we are the only beings in the cosmos.