Space & Silence

I just finished watching a promotional video and reading the website for Virgin Galactic. This is a company created by Richard Branson of the Virgin brand. Today they unveiled their second generation commercial spacecraft. The spaceport and runway are under construction. Everything done to the Greenest specs. Reservations are being taken now. The promotions are impressive. This is not an airline, so much as an adventure tour designed to make a reality of what Epcot and many others have dreamed of. The current price is $200,000 for a flight with a $20,000 refundable deposit. Still out of range for most people, which will give it time before it becomes a bus for a villanous rabble of crowded seats and bad service. Right now it is clean and pure.

Looking it over and reading the material, I am struck by the intense emotions it stirs in me. It is this sort of thing that keeps me in the Bright Green camp. A vision of a beautiful merger of human ingenuity, poetry, science, and nature. Humans at their best, which is pitiful rare and less than is necessary. We cannot save ourselves, but the divine spark is in us. We are not all bad.

Thinking of the otherworldliness of such an experience, reading the descriptions from the test runs, it will be a world of experiences pressed together. The expectation, the intensity, the release, and the compression back into the everyday. I have often looked for good descriptions of what it is like to experience space. To live outside of our realm. I am struck by the silence that they describe. As the rocket engines cease, there will be utter silence it says, surrounded by sublime otherworldy visual beauty and the experience of no weight pulling against ones muscles and bones, the loss of up and down.

Space is silent. If God is "up" in our conception, then this is His realm. Amazing that the metaphor extends so well into an experience the writers of those metaphors could never have known. God dwells in silence. In perfect peace. Be still and know... Our senses fail and cannot fully appreciate what it is to be in that mode. But it is attractive. Once it repelled me, but it has drawn me in as I have glimpsed pieces of it.

I am not wholly ignorant of it. I have often sought out these kinds of otherworldy experiences. I am reminded of free-diving. The stillness, the cold, the quiet, the loss of up and down, the beauty. I wonder if in space, I would hear my heart beat as clearly as I do under water?

I have taken a deep breath (the expectation) and plunged head first into the blue deep (the intensity). No air, so sounds are perverted, and ultimately stilled, though those that persist are long and distant. The rhythm of my lungs, my constant accompaniment, is stilled and the pulse of the liquid within me replaces it, slowing, slowing, as I hang between planes(the release). Up or down, right or left have no meaning save in relation to my own body. The zen masters were right. The center of the universe is 6 centimeters below my navel. Strange shapes move about me, sleek and fast. Eyeing me and ignoring me. I am insignificant here. And as my body undergoes the mammalian reflex and shadowy webs begin to obscure my vision I am at perfect peace. Just then, I am keenly aware that I am not at all alone. There is a presence pervading this place, pervading me, dwelling here. And it jolts me. My vision recovers, I look for the glimmer and glide toward it. My chest expands with some invisible substance (the recompression) and then I burst back into my world with a deep inhalation.

In some ways this seems the same as the description of space. In other ways it is different. But in both, God dwells, depths and heights. He inhabits these worlds that are not for us. It is sublime.