one and the same. No Lilith. Lilith is a personality.
826-8
What an amazing connection—given that Pluto itself wasn’t discovered until 1930!
One other interesting fact concerning the Pleiades needs to be mentioned here. Many ancient cultures (especially Asian ones) claim that their ancestors came from this star cluster! This includes the Japanese, who have even named a car after it—the Subaru. The author has personally met a number of people in this country over the years who make the same claim. In fact, more than once following a lecture where I’ve set up my telescope and given those attending a view of the Pleiades, someone has burst into tears and said to me “That’s my home!”
The second basic type of star grouping is that of the “globular clusters.” These are enormous beehivelike swarms containing anywhere from 100,000 up to a million suns! Edgar Cayce didn’t actually mention any of them by name as he did the Pleiades—probably because even the brightest of them are only barely visible without optical aid, due to their great distances from us. But I truly hope he may have had the opportunity of seeing one of these starballs through a large telescope. The incredible spectacle greeting the eye of hundreds of thousands of remote suns staring back at you is quite beyond any words to describe! And we can only imagine what the night sky must look like to anyone living on a planet within such a cluster. (This is, in fact, the basis for Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall—one of the greatest science fiction short stories ever written. Based upon the immortal lines in one of Emerson’s essays—“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years …”—it’s a story about a planet that has multiple suns in its sky, causing it to become dark only once in several centuries. When it does, its inhabitants find themselves living inside of an immense globular cluster with countless numbers of blazing stars shining in their heavens like a starry blizzard!
In the author’s opinion, the ultimate reference to stars and clusters of stars (and all things celestial!) is the late Carl Sagan’s classic work Cosmos (Random House, 1980) and the visually stunning thirteen-part PBS television series based upon it. Both the book itself and a 2005 version of the video presentation, updated by Sagan’s wife and noted writer Ann Druyan, are available from the PBS Web site at pbs.org. It’s estimated that at least one-fifth of the human race—well over a billion people—have watched Cosmos! Sagan truly was an eloquent spokesman for planet Earth and for the universe itself. As such, he is sorely missed. But he is at home among the stars he so loved.
2The word galaxy does appear in one reading: “(Q) The ‘Primitive Man in Light’ looked out from the earth and saw us within the sphere of the Universe with its constellations which combined to form his consciousness. He knew then, that a ‘Way of Escape’ from the rounds of Reincarnation opened beyond this Universe—beyond the Galaxy—beyond the opening in the forehead of Cepheus. Will you explain this ‘Way of Escape’?”
“(A) We do not find it so. For we have this: These are the basis of—Let’s get what is the first principle here. These are concepts, these are not the activities of individuals who look out upon that; not as the earth as the center of its activities, but as the own solar system, here. It is true that the activities so far as in this sphere or Galaxy of activities of the planetary forces within this present solar system, the earth first became as the indwelling of the consciousness of the race or the man in this particular sphere …” (1602-3) Here it appears that the word galaxy refers to our own Milky Way Galaxy.
3Galaxies used to be known as “island universes”–a term that Edgar Cayce may well have been familiar with, as it was widely used in his day.
2
Life Elsewhere in the Universe
ARE WE ALONE?
One of the most hauntingly profound questions in all of science (as well as religion and philosophy) is whether or not we are alone in this vast universe. And as the noted physicist Lee DuBridge put it, “Either alternative is mind-boggling.” For if we are not alone—if we have sisters and brothers living on other worlds—it means there are other sentient beings “out there” with whom we may someday (or may already have, according to some) come into contact. But if we are alone—if we are the only living intelligent entities in all the cosmos—it brings with it both a realization of how unique and privileged we are and a deep responsibility to preserve that life as unbelievably precious. The writer Thomas Carlyle cynically summed up the issue of life on other worlds as follows: “A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.”!
But most of us who are absolutely convinced from the massive evidence of both science and basic logic that we cannot possibly be alone in the cosmos take a much more optimistic approach to this momentous subject. Here are just a few of the reasons for our conviction:
• There are more stars (other suns) within reach of our largest telescopes today than all the grains of sand on all the beaches and deserts on the entire planet Earth! Galaxies can host as many as a trillion stars. And there are an estimated 100 billion galaxies within the currently observable universe.
• We now know that most if not all stars have planets orbiting them. This is solidly based upon both theoretical and observational grounds.
• All the essential building blocks for life are scattered profusely throughout interstellar space and on countless other worlds. This includes vast amounts of water itself, which is found in the frozen, liquid, and vapor states—which, in the last instance, includes the outer atmospheres of relatively cool red-giant and supergiant stars as steam.
• We ourselves are literally made of stardust, for the elements in our bodies were fused inside of exploding stars eons ago. We are children of the stars!
• We seemed to have been genetically programmed to return to our source—to venture into that cosmos from which we sprang and join that galactic community of which we surely are a part. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer expressed it, “It’s a kind of homing impulse—we are drawn to where we came from.”
The beloved anthropologist and philosopher Loren Eiseley tells us in The Immense Journey that “So deep is the conviction that there must be life out there beyond the dark, one thinks that if they are more advanced than ourselves they may come across space at any moment, perhaps in our generation.” And in a similar vein, Sir Arthur Clarke’s classic science fiction short story The Sentinel (the basis for the famous movie 2001: A Space Odyssey) contains the following lines: “I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.” This remark refers to the fictional beacon set up by aliens that was triggered upon our reaching the Moon. But, in fact, the human race has long been inadvertently letting others know of our presence through radio and television broadcasts that leak out into space. (There has also been at least one enormously powerful message intentionally beamed to the stars from the huge 1,000-foot diameter radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.)
One of NASA’s former associate administrators, Wesley Huntress, has stated:
