STARLIGHT & US
How do you feel when you look up at the sky every night? I personally like staring at the night sky very soothing—tiny little stars twinkling in the vapid sky. Well, you can't exactly call sky vapid cause, unlike birds, airplanes still flies at night.
There are so many intriguing things about stars. I've talked about some of them here. Since stars are so far away from us, they've to travel many lightyears to finally reach our eye; in that process, sometimes the star dies, but because its light is traveling & coming into our vision, we see the star at the same place brightening as nothing happened. So, when sometimes we look up at the night sky, we actually see something that doesn't exist anymore. Some people describe this as when we look into stars, we look at the past.
One more exciting thing about the star is they twinkle. And how does that happens? Stars actually emit light constantly, but the path of that light has several dense and rare mediums & when light travels through those mediums, it continually gets refracted, which appears as twinkling of stars.
Perhaps we'd trust starlight here; it's true. But do you know that what we see as starlight & what amount of light the star really emits is different? It's called apparent & intrinsic brightness, respectively.
So there isn't quite anything we'd trust about stars.
STARS ARE LIARS?
Based on the discussion we had above, yes. It's hard to believe that any one thing we know about stars is true. Let's not talk about Astrology.
In fact, most of the things happening around us aren't really true. Time of sunrise & sunset, are they true? Not really. Sun is a star too, big fat liar. (and perhaps his pants are on fire too)
WHAT IS REAL?
Some of us would say, What we sense is real. What we feel is real. True but not always.
For sight, we can look upto example of stars.
For hearing, here's a little story from Ramayan.
Dashrath was a mighty king of Ayodhya. He once went hunting in the forest. And he was blessed with different kinds of miraculous weapons. One of which was a sound-sensitive arrow. Which would attack at the sound of prey. Dashrath heard the sound of gulping water near the pond. He thought it must be a deer & at the sound of it, he took out his miraculous arrow from his quiver & projects it towards his prey. And Snap! Work done, feast will be prepared later. Do you know how the story ends? Dashrath ends up killing a boy name Shravana in the deception of a deer. Turns out the poor boy was a single child of two blind parents.
I guess now you'd understand what I'm trying to say here. We can think of more examples of our senses fooling with us. Then what about how we feel? Is that a valid point if someone says what we feel is real?
We are not gonna talk about ghosts here. The idea of ghost is arbitrary.
So let's take an example of Motion Sickness here. Do you feel nauseated while traveling?What's the cause of it? A simple conflict between your ear & brain. Ear not only has the function of hearing but also of balance. The vestibular system in our ear sends the signal to brain, if the head is moving. And while traveling, your body is not moving, but the vehicle is. Whenever you're in an airplane or ship or any closed vehicle, your brain can't sense the motion, but your ear does. Ear keeps telling brain that body is in motion, but the brain denies, thus the nausea.
Have you heard of the placebo effect?
A placebo is a substance which is not an actual drug, but its administration makes the patient feel relieved or benefit from treatment without the administration of the actual drug.
And how'd you categorize hallucination (both visual & auditory) & delusions?
So, is it always appropriate to say what we see, feel, hear is true?
Not entirely true, right?!
WHAT DO STARS TELL US?
My point of telling you all about stars is, in a way, they resemble our lifestyle.
Stars here represent fears & superstitions. And the source of most of our fears & superstitions is also untenable, like starlight coming from a dead star.
Like stars can fool us with their twinkling, their false brightness, or pretend to be there when they're actually dead, we all have situations in our respective lives where we've to deal with made-up facts. Sometimes the fears are inclusive & run only in your family or community, but some of them, we all fight globally.
To explain, Hindu girls aren't allowed to enter temples & their kitchens when they're menstruating. Muslims & Jewish boys are circumcised in the name of God. In order to be completely devoted or accepted by Jesus, Christians follow Baptism. The superstition of all the natural calamities, including the CoVid-19 pandemic, is Karma or God's way to punish us for our sins.
More inclusive examples to an individual may include phobias. A phobia is described as an irrational fear. How many times we have a fear of going to heights, sitting in closed spaces, swimming, reptiles, birds, ghosts, etc. Are any of these fears really necessary?
Fear was built inside of us so that we remain cautious of our environment, sense the danger. Not to stop us from living our lives unconditionally. We have so much around us which is conditioned. And we have to live it that way, follow it, cause subtly we are prepared by our made-up conditions.
If there's a parallel universe, then we living our respective lives & the Universe we know about could possibly be the best example of it. What we do here also happens there but in the face of celestial objects. We can always look up there to find solutions to our problems & if not necessarily problems then our pattern of life. We are made of the same things as they're, just in different compositions.
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