Search this site
Ponder on This
"This universe of ours, what is it really? Here we are, centres of consciousness, surrounded by a buzzing confusion which we must try to understand. But we are of the selfsame stuff of the universe -- perhaps ultimately a cloud of energy interacting with other clouds of energy -- and on that account we are in the role more of participants than observers. We cannot distance ourselves from our ambient, hold it at arm's length for impartial scrutiny. This fact has been heavily underlined by modern physics since it sets limits to our knowledge. What we experience is not external reality per se but our interaction with it, so that in a very real sense we are constructing our universe from ourselves."
"Astrology is an art, rather than a science or a system of religious beliefs. But what, then, is art? The artist mediates between different dimensions of life. The images, sounds, words and forms which the artist utilises are languages which can communicate the meaningful patterns of levels of reality which would otherwise be incomprehensible or incommunicable to the rational mind. When we are affected by art, it is because the work speaks to us on many levels: intellectual, intuitive, emotional, visceral."
"People who dismiss astrology do so out of either ignorance or rationalism. Rationalists have their place, but their limited assumptions and methods must be kept out of the arts. Interpretation of poem, dream or person requires intuition and divination, not science."
Gifts and More:
A Bit of a Bio:
Astro Inquiry is published in Washington State -- beaming out from Vashon Island. When I was 14 years-old, I made the dogged effort to write to as many astrologers in California as I could, seeing which, if any would take me on as a student. I lucked out with my teachers Ivy Goldstein Jacobson and Margaret Latvala, and studied with them through my high school years. A year later I became a member of Llewellyn George’s Educational Astrology organization in Los Angeles. I helped write, edit and publish the group’s quarterly newsletters... continues
SCHEDULE WITH FREDERICK NOW
Categories
- 6 Month Forecast
- Aim
- Alchemy
- Astrology
- Astronomy
- Buddhism
- Cats
- Charlatan
- Christmas
- Classes
- Colin Wilson
- Con-artists
- Conartists
- Cosmix
- Creativity
- Depth Psychology
- Diamond Approach
- Dreams
- Ego
- Frederick Woodruff
- Full Moon Watch
- Gurdjieff
- Humor
- Idries Shah
- Impressions
- Interviews
- Kulture
- Lunation Cycle
- Meditation
- Meister Eckhart
- Memes
- Miracles
- Music
- Myth
- New Moon Watch
- News to Chew
- Nisargadatta
- Pagan
- Passages
- Podcast
- Poetry
- Prose
- Qabalah
- Quotes
- Relationships
- Revolution
- Rumi
- Saturn
- Seasons
- Sleep
- Sufi Wisdom
- Sun Signs
- Tarot
- Teacher/Student
- Time
- Truth
- Union
- Universe
- William Blake
- Zeitgeist
- Zombie Apocalypse
AstroInquiry Greatest Hits
Consultations
A Dot Within the Matrix: A View From Vogager 1
Several months ago NPR aired a special broadcast that celebrated the 20th anniversary of the photograph you see on the right.
I recommend listening to the report, especially now when the globe is challenged by the largest ecological holocaust in the United States’ history.
Listen, look, and then reconsider the words of the late, great astronomer Carl Sagan. A reaction that he shared with the world after studying the photograph. A photograph taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which at the time was nearly 4 billion miles away, drifting in space.
A photograph which displays, if you look closely at that little tiny speck of light within the band of universal dust, a god’s eye view of: Planet Earth.
Sagan wrote:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.