HD 162826 , Laniakea, and Alan Watts, the Big Bang, and a Wiggly World

  Rebecca Boyle’s New Scientist article, Strangest Star (below; right click to expand), examines some of the little known peculiarities about the sun.  For instance, giant “droplets” of plasma the size of Ireland rise and fall back to the sun as rain; it is inexplicably hotter in the area surrounding the surface than on the surface itself; also, our  our sun may have a twin located currently in the Hercules constellation: “After their birth in the same cloud of dust and gas that formed our solar system, these solar siblings scattered hundreds of light years apart in the Milky Way.” (Click here for an idea of where our galactic supercluster, Laniakea, may possibly be  located and flowing in relation to the neighboring cosmic highway.)  She goes on to write, “Though they spread out in different directions, their positions still give away their birthplace… Even more tantalising, HD 162826 is already in a catalogue of stars that might harbour planets.”

These notions remind me of A Wiggly World, part of the Alan Watts “Out of Your Mind” lecture series, in which Watts draws attention to the concept of all things in the universe being connected.  Here is what he says:

I know there are astronomers that say there was a primordial explosion – enormous bang, millions of years ago, billions of years ago – which flung all the galaxies into to space.  Well, let’s take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened.  It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall – smash – and all that ink spreads – zishhh – and in the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it?  And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets are finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see?  So in the same way there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread.  And you and I sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way way out on the fringe of that bang.  We’re the complicated little patterns on the end of it.  Very interesting.

But, so we define ourselves as being only that.  If you think you are only inside your skin you define yourself as one very complicated little curlicue way out on the edge of that explosion, way out in space, and way out in time.  Billions of years ago you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being.  And then we cut ourselves out – crrhhh – like this, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang.  But you are, it depends how you define yourself.  You are actually – if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning – you’re not something that is result of the big bang on the end of the process, you are still the process.  You are the big bang, the original force of the universe coming on as whoever you are.  See when I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as: Mr. so and so, Mrs. so and so, Misses so and so – I see everyone of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in the particular way.  I know I’m that too, but we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it. 

And so what I would call of a kind of basic problem we’ve got to go through first is to understand that there are no such things – that is to say separate things, or separate events – that that is only a way of talking.  And if you can understand this then you’re gonna have no further problems…

…So the world does come thinged, it doesn’t come evented.  You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. The ocean waves and the universe peoples, and as the wave I wave at you and say “You-hoo,” the world is waving at me with you, and saying, “Hi, I’m here.”  But we are consciousness – the way we feel and sense our existence – being based on a myth that we are made, that we are parts, that we are things – our consciousness has been influenced so that each one of us does not feel that.  We feel we have been hypnotize, literally hypnotized, by  social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins, that we are not the original bang, but just something out on the end of it, and therefore we are scared stiff, cause, “my wave is gonna disappear, and that I’m going to die, and will be awful…”