When speculating: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
This is why speculation must become our enterprise.
What if ...there were no such thing as extraterrestrials;
rather, only post-terrestrials and pre-terrestrials?
What if ...the entirety of outer space contained no life;
and that only across happenstance could alien sentience
emerge before or after us across the vast oceans of time?
What if Earth were the virtual center of our creation?
What could that exactly mean, anyway?
Just who are we, to be referred to as our?
Do we belong to each other . . . or not?
Must each individual face oblivion alone?
We like to think of space as a wide open area,
like a sort of vast empty room; when in fact,
outer space really has no shape of that sort.
(It appears more like an intricate labyrinth
comprised of the narrowest interlinking
passages in an interminable array of
coiling gravitational twists and turns.)
Are the wide arcs of sprawled star points
spread out across our night skies really
in fact just the illuminated remnants
of long dead Hosts now reaching our eyes?
(If so, the only living portions of our universe
would be those branches of our Host—our galaxy:
These arms would extend from the Head of our star
in two spiraling directions; One, toward
the core of our Milky Way Tree; and Two,
toward the emptiness of the void to one side.
Both of these directions curve toward and
away from our blind spots. These extend past
the shoulders of our cosmic horizon. The stars
spangled and glittering across our night sky
remain a backdrop afterglow from the heat
death of long forgotten Suns still haunting us.
Then only the remaining body of our own galactic
Host must extend in two directions from our Sun;
The Vine to be glimpsed here and there sunken
brightly amid the glare of all the long lost systems!
by Shaun Lawton
Ghosts may appear as traces of electromagnetism lingering here on Earth before surrendering to the cold void. The Ghost in the Machine refers to the collective portion of galaxies which have long since burned out and cooled off in the vast cauldronic core of our universe. When we peer deep into the nucleus of our cosmos, we necessarily gaze in a direction diametrically opposed from that spot which has been established as being our own planet.
All telescopes since their advent in the early 17th century here have one thing in common: their function is to magnify details that are not farther away than us and our terrestrial location in space (for that would be impossible, and in direct contradiction to the nature of our position in creation, which incidentally happens to already be, by definition, that which exists the farthest away from all remaining points in the universe), therefore, a telescope's function is to zoom in on the various details which comprise the deep inner essence of the macrocosm (itself the central core making up the heart of creation).
In other words, telescopes are in actuality that which allow us to observe deeply into the interior of reality. Microscopes are the instruments which in fact bring to view the farthest and outermost territories of our expanding universe. Our typical understanding of the difference between how microscopes and telescopes work is entirely backwards. In short, telescopes look in, and microscopes look out. This unassailable fact is such an obvious and fundamental truth that it should really go without saying. I repeat it here in the Asylum of Starry Ghosts due to my sneaking and ever-dawning suspicion that most of us have been quietly assuming otherwise for the greater portion of our lives; for us to have understood it the other way around.
Speaking for myself at least, I can testify that I have certainly been perceiving it backwards for most of my developing adult life. That is why I am grateful to have ascertained what I now refer to as the Law of Inversion, my place-holder or label, if you will, which I feel best encapsulates into a nutshell what I consider to be my own philosophy.
To further focus in on the essence of my philosophy, one need only take this Law of Inversion and apply it to all aspects of one's perception of reality. In deed we appear to be the latest development along a startling evolution having resulted from an endless series of such inversions so that in effect we have come to now stand upon our world without being able to absolutely determine what in reality is actually "up" or "down"; "in" or "out"; and "real" or "fantasy;" such is the condition of our lot, trapped out here in our ultimate solitude and freedom amid a crowd of lost stars.
Welcome to the Asylum of Starry Ghosts, a sanctuary where souls interact largely oblivious to one another's presence. A sort of mirror held up by dancing pixels for us to peer into and see ourselves from a different angle in order to gain new perspective. A web log representing a single gleaming nodal point amid a vast interlinked network of hypertext documents comprising digital reproductions of most all of the knowledge our species has gathered over the course of human history since the dawning of the Paleolithic era.
If you are reading this currently, congratulations. You are literally the cutting edge of the blossoming essence of creation itself. You have made it to the farthest possible fringes of our expanding universe. There is absolutely nowhere further you could possibly explore, except for what lies directly about you in your particular area of the world, with nothing but time on your side. It's up to you to take your adventure ever further. Perhaps we will meet someday at a point beyond this horizon. If not, may your journey into the unknown fare well. Hello.
