MY PAEAN TO THE STARS...

The stars are our timekeepers.

Their claim on our attention is profound and enduring. As far back as
we venture to go in the history of the great civilizations of the ancient world,
vanished already when Rome was built, they have always played a central role in
human affairs. Timeless and archetypal, it is the hidden purpose of the stars to
be gazed and wondered at as witnesses of our existence, indeed to be catalogued
and computed as living and oracular symbols in which men recognize their doubts and their dreams, their destinies, and perhaps even themselves.

Of course, like most attempts to describe the heavens, these are romantic stereotypes. But
if one is to ascribe a particular design to the stars for reasons other than
purely scientific, it is to provide a rationale for the human imagination and
thus to enhance the sphere of association and to waken and give guidance to
man’s capacity to evolve. This detail has importance since nothing yet discovered during the long history of human civilization rivals the charismatic conception of the stars as
a principle at once of energy and organization, as a living mythological symbol
of metaphysical redemption, an object of wonder, veneration, awe and
speculation, and even as a guide to the human psyche itself.

It might have been thought perhaps that modern men would seek to
disaffiliate from their archaic commitment to the eternal and the mythic, or in
some measure sacrifice psychological susceptibility to certain demands of logic
and exactitude. But for all our rationality, the impulse of the imagination
cannot be purged or refuted by facts. In our hearts and minds the fundamentally
active rather than the specifiably refractive, life rather than logic, has
proved itself a force of undiminished power.

Nor is it a question of physical measurement. Stellar evolution unfolds
against an authentic spiritual background, the ultimate incomprehensible
perspective from which everything has to be viewed - pure and unconscious space.
Because the universe we seek to fathom, in its spiritual essence as in every
aspect of its physical appearance as an impersonal force, uses the principle of
first causes as a means of conceptualising itself, it would also seem capable,
on these terms, of grasping itself as a purpose.

Intelligence involves self-knowledge. In fact, even without introducing
the concept of intelligibility, if there can be anything like a first cause, it
might just as well by the representation of the Universe as the object of its
own contemplation. An object, particularly with regard to the genesis of man,
which generates and extends itself by an ongoing process of self-realization.
Nor is it an abstract theory to suggest that what is in fact a crisis of modern
civilization is not so much indicated by the fact that the world’s ecological
life-support systems are under serious threat, but by circumstances which, at a
time of acute spiritual transition, appear to be the direct consequence of an
increasing vacuity of metaphysical purpose.

Dreamy