I had no idea Marina would be doing a post on Deep Space and Awe, so this is an aha moment of synchronicity.
Scientists created this photo by taking a considerable risk of discovering nothing, yet they persevered into the unknown and pointed their telescope into a tiny speck of sky that appeared to be devoid of stars. After 10 days of photographing they discovered over 10,000 galaxies!
This speaks to going beyond the knowns in our lives and to enter the dream state with an I know absolutely nothing mindset, a beginner’s mind to find new intelligence that presents themselves to us in the dream state.
John Keats coined the term in 1817 “negative capability” to describe the pursuing of a vision even when it leads to intellectual confusion and uncertainty. Maintaining in this space of possibility while in the dream requires suspending the search for meaning.
For us as imaginal explorers to see beyond what we think we already know we have to consider a new way into understanding the image. Maybe the house in the dream actually is not a fixed object or the person in your dream is not human at all but a hybrid alien come to share a new way of seeing and being in the world. For example, I recently had a dream with a man standing in a doorway and behind him was a blue room. Once in the room in the dreamwork it became apparent as I stilled my mind and became present to the wall and began to become like the wall to know it, it became evident that this wall was alive with capacities for touch, that caress and massage those who come to know it. The man in the doorway as I entered him was crystal clear inside, you could see through him, and he had animal paws for feet. Now you would not have known this about him by just taking him for what you saw in his appearance. We can experience this in life all the time if we meet each person and experience with fresh eyes and an attitude of presencing to what is in this present moment. This takes me back to the Hubble image, they had presumed nothing new was there and look what they discovered! What are we missing out on all the time with our presumptions of knowing? I find this utterly mind-boggling and inspiring to slow down every moment I remember to see without the action of presuming. This takes attention and work, our brains are filtering out information all the time to make survival easier but at a cost for expanded perception. The more we do this though, new neural pathways can open up for us, and we can widen our experience of living in this magical world. We can experience Awe every moment !