Happy Birthday, Carl Sagan!

[Starboard Tack]

32. Awe is an excellent word.

Last edited Sun Nov 11, 2012, 08:14 PM - Edit history (1)

Amazing how much a three letter, monosyllabic word can infer. Awe is an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime.
I see spirituality as part of the natural world. I do not believe in the supernatural. Everything is natural, even though it may appear otherwise. All depends on our perception and out openness to things we cannot perceive. Our inability to perceive certain things does not mean they don't exist.

As Sagan said On Science and Spirituality
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark