Blissful Life

Category: life

  • Why Your Dreams Must Be Unattainable

    What is there in simply dreaming about things that would never happen??!!!
    You can dream, dream and dream…(like APJ says)…..but…life is not a bed of roses.

    When I showed my list of dreams, one of my dearest friends asked me the above question.

    And I answered: Because,
    Reaching the goal is not the goal. Striving to reach there is the goal 
    – Swami Chinmayananda

    To repeat Chinmayananda in my own words, dreams are not meant to be achieved they are just reminders to move on. When you are a student, score maximum, when you are writing entrance aim for the top, when you are a doctor, try to be a better doctor, and then try to start a hospital of your own. Then may be you can expand that as a chain to other parts of India, then the whole world. Or start blogging. Or travel to places. Or treat poor people in remote villages.

    Just having a dream is not enough. The dream should be sky high.

    If you have a small dream from your childhood, and you somehow achieve that dream, then you stop growing. You stop learning new things. You get stuck in life. Problems begin to pile up. Your job will have become so boring to you that you will concentrate on your problems more and innovative ideas less. And then life starts to become boring. And that is when life is really going to be a thorny bed.

    But when you dream big, you try (at least try) to make things happen. And that would require that you grow. You will have to learn new things to make your dream happen. You may have to travel. You may have to meet people. But you grow.

    If you really take life in its sense, then these are really roses.

    Heard this story?

    Two guys were walking through the jungle when they spotted a lion. One of them reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of running shoes. The other guy looked at him.
    “Do you really think those shoes are going to make you run faster than that lion?”
    “No, and I don’t have to. I just have to run faster than you.”

    Though I don’t suggest this policy, this is life these days.  You don’t have to be the best, but you can be somewhere in front of the trailing lot, and you will be surviving. When you do nothing you just rot away. But when you try to reach somewhere, you end up at least a little higher.

    So, dream high so that you move on. And remember that even though you may never reach your dreams, you will reach higher than most other people, and that would suffice almost always.

    To sum up,
    “When you stop dreaming, you stop growing.”

  • The Never Forget Rule About Reading

    Of course reading is the best habit on the planet. A man IS what he reads. This is very evident from the fact that children who are exposed to books on atheism or rational thinking grow up as atheists or naturalists and the children who are forced to read the mythological books only most often end up as hard and fast believers.
    (Well if you think the above observation is invalid then try that at your own kids. Even if they are a few years too old, when they get to read books like Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained they will start telling you thousand reasons why God probably does not exist)
    Or leave all that ask a kid doing well in science whether they are/were subscribing to any scientific magazines or weeklies. The answer will most probably be “…for 4 years or so…”

    But I know reading is great. I thought you had something else to tell.

    Yes, I am coming to it.
    This might not happen to everyone. But some people when they find a book interesting, they keep on reading the same kind of books one after another. And they will never be tired, so they will read more and more of the same kind.
    Now, that is a problem.
    You should NEVER read the same kind of things.
    Because reading is supposed to gain you ideas. And when you read the same stuff, may be from the same author or of the same genre, you will end up addicted to the same. Books are all interesting. You may be finding this interesting. But it does not mean that you will not find the other interesting. And may be when you start reading the other you will find that the other is more interesting than this one.
    But you never read the other stuff, so you will never know the other side.
    It is like always having vanilla shade of ice-cream because you liked it the first time you ate it. Sometimes you may like strawberry much more.

    And this is particularly true when you are reading things that may shape your opinion.
    For example you read a a book about socialism by Karl Marx (may be Das Kapital).
    Socialism is great and Karl Marx will show you why. And that idea will seem interesting to you too.
    And then you have two options.
    Either go for the Communist Manifesto or for a “Capitalist Manifesto”
    If you go for the first you will end up as a biased frog in the well.
    But if you go for the latter you will end up learning a lot about both the ideas, about the differences between them, about the pros and cons of each and you can always decide which one is better.
    Because when you read only one, unless you are reading from wikibooks, you are hearing from just one side. And you will never know what lies they tell you.

    So that is it. Read. And read diverse.

    Don’t narrow your collection to a single colour.

    Make it a point to read an entirely different book after you finish the one you are reading now.
    You will end up a lot more.

  • 3 Questions to Define What is Productive and What is Not

    Time management is about knowing what is productive and what isn’t as much as Bhagavad Gita is about self improvement. When you are able to conceive the difference between productive and unproductive work, time management is just a matter of avoiding the unproductive one and doing the productive one. But how do we distinguish between the two?

    Any work doing which we are bound to benefit in the future can be termed as productive. (But only when you are doing it as efficiently as possible and have nothing more important to do, as I will explain below)
    Learning anything new, exercising, helping someone else, …

    And any work doing which we may get benefit in the future are unproductive.
    Watching a film (about which a question may be asked in the Who wants to be a millionaire? program which I’m planning to participate in 20 years from now), playing farmville in facebook (thus showing my friends my skill in farming?), chatting endlessly with friends (do you think that the amount of time you spend with your friend strengthens the bond of friendship between you?) …

    Your mind may sometimes trick you into believing that you’re being productive when you’re actually less than 10% of what you can be, as is clearly demonstrated when someone gets addicted to anything I said above (social networks, tv shows, etc)

    Let us analyze them one by one

    Social networks:
    Facebook, orkut, and all others of the genre are truly great sites when it comes to keeping in touch with friends, sharing photos, videos, clearing doubts in an online forum and so on, and I personally have a profile in each one of them. But they become evil when we start forgetting why they are there. They are meant for strengthening interpersonal relationships. But you could spend a whole day in any one of them, and still end the day gaining nothing more than what you could achieve in 10 minutes. Think of how you could post updates every 15 minutes throughout a day and 2 of your greatest friends who log in at the night sees just the last 2 of your updates and comment on them. Think of how you could post a very clever, very attractive single update a day and still have almost half a dozen people liking and commenting on your update.
    Think of how you can get back your time from these sites. Think how you can compress your activities to bare minimum.

    TV:
    The #1 time killer in most house holds even after the advent of the internet is television. Because while internet soon becomes boring especially when you don’t know more than 3 sites by their URL, TV + remote ensures that you find something or the other every time you switch the thing on. And unlike internet you needn’t even know what you want to waste time on TV.

    Time for some entertainment… Aha I’ve my favourite program in Nat Geo (well Nat Geo is after all educational)… Oh it’s commercials time, let’s see what HBO is showing. Is it Rush-Hour 3? My Goodness! Never got a chance to watch it. And it has just begun… [2 hours later]… my gosh, my eyes are paining. I think I need some rest. [Power off]

    Tell me how many of us haven’t gone through these exact routine. You get a chance holiday and think that you would finish all your pending works on that day. But at the end of the day you would find yourself just a bit further than where you started.

    Because you forget what you should have been doing. You think you are being productive when you aren’t actually.

    So the next time you are in a doubt whether or not you’re doing the right thing, just ask yourself these questions.
    #1, Is what I’m trying to do my absolute priority?
    This is another way of asking yourself whether you have a task to be completed with its deadline tomorrow, or whether you have a critical examination tomorrow. (Most people think of doing some exercise, or learning javascript at such critical eleventh hours) Just ask yourself whether there’s anything very important. Even if you are trying to exercise or learn a new language, right now it is unproductive, if you have a deadline tomorrow.

    If I don’t have anything absolutely necessary to do
    #2, Is what I’m trying to do going to be of any help for me in the future?
    Am I learning? Am I building my muscles? Am I doing something new? Am I building up on my relationships? Am I really having fun? Am I being adventurous? Am I doing something, the fruit of which I can proudly display in front of others?

    And if I’m doing something useful
    #3, Can I do what I’m doing more efficiently?
    Am I utilizing what I’m doing to the maximum? This last question can have great effects. You will soon find yourself chatting with friends just enough, such that you don’t find both of you talking about how bad your favourite actress performed in her last movie (unless you are a movie critic).
    And don’t think you will be termed as a kill-joy, or a silent person. Talk to your friends enough. But just enough. Don’t let gossips be your topic of discussion. And don’t fear that you will turn out to be an uninteresting person. How about talking about a picnic or a group work. Find topics that are productive, interesting and relationship strengthening, all at the same time.

    Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.
    – Charles Richards

  • 26/11 and The Colour of Life

    The true colour of life can only be appreciated when we get out of the frame and just stay as a witness.
    This, I understood when I was flipping through all the channels in my television, tonight on 26/11.

    Let me first of all salute all those heroes who died. I wish I have a death like theirs.
    It requires a lot of courage to know that you are going to die and still stand up to a terrorist. I wish to include all of them by name. But doing that would mean they have become our history. They haven’t. They are the martyrs of our reality. They are very much alive in our discussions today.

    All the channels have been airing special bulletins on 26/11 today. With a tinge of sorrow everyone reported about the deaths. And then they showed how life has came back. In NDTV, they had showed the gunshots, the burning Taj, the press lying on the floor, the firemen trying to curb the fire. And then they showed the today of the Taj Hotel. Pigeons flying. Men feeding them. Tourists taking snaps. And a small child crawling on its knees through the pigeons, happiness on her face. It was beautiful. And that is what I wish to call the Colour of Life.

    Life is so very beautiful because it is multi-centred. There is no absolute one thing that everybody wish to do. There is variety. There is diversity. There is colour.

    Just go to a city in the night. You will feel that. There will be lights everywhere. Blue, yellow, neon, sodium. There will be the fruit seller with his orange, blue, black, yellow, red. There will be the flower seller. There will be the stationary shop. There will be the rice shop. There will be restaurants, cafes. There will be the mobile coupon centres, Xeroxing stations, the cycle shop, bars, the hardware shop. There will be the hospital. And not to mention the vehicles on the road – cars, buses, rickshaws, motor cycles. And there would be the trees on the sides which we simply fail to notice in the dark, but when we reach near them we feel an eerie sense of fear of the ghost hiding above it.

    Or just flip the channels of your television set.
    There will be mourning prayers for the dead at some place. Debates about the same at some other place. And then there will be that cricket star who took 5+ wickets in his come back match. And then discussion on how he performed. Then there will be the unexpected 0-1 loss of a soccer club. And their manager’s explanation. There will be prime time movies. There will be soaps. And there will be reality shows. And there will be fashion shows. And there will be a lonely preacher talking about religion. Then there will be some ads. (These ads are the most contrasting colours. They will be so funny sometimes. Like after the interview with the NSG chief about how they finished the terrorists there was the docomo ad where a car hits another and the man who was driving the first car get down to see what happened, suddenly police surround them from all directions, and this man would be holding his hands up “Hands up”. But the police men catch some terrorists from the other car, gives a pat on his back and leaves).

    And there will be people. There will be a fisherman who talks in impure Hindi about how he saw the terrorists getting down from the rubber dingy they used to travel. And there will be a debate where different experts tell their own views about how the world should work. One foreigner telling India should unite with Pakistan. And an angry Indian saying how Pakistan hurt the “people of India”, and how they want nothing but a war. And the anchor who does not let emotion come into the debate, but still pours in questions which can be answered only through emotions. There will be sports stars, analysts, super sexy models, actors (including actresses), yoga masters, commentators, extras, junior artists, real artists, judges, showmen, and the animal planet man who goes after the largest otters. And there will be another debate, where a victim describes very emotionally about how he was terrified as well as all others when they heard gun shots, and how the hotel authorities helped them to escape, and how they comforted each other, and how the NSGs gave them cover and took them to safety under the local police. And then about how there was some report which joked at the victims who suffered. How the government was doing nothing. How Ajmal Kasab has more security than any other man in Mumbai. And he asks the minister P Chidambaram “What have you done?”
    And the minister says calmly “If you were I what would you have done. That’s the answer to that question.” (This is when I came to understand that all our politicians are not fools running after power)

    And there is this whole sense of joy, sorrow, humour, love, trust, respect, motivation, failure, desperation, solitude, business, confidence, seduction, success, hope, affection, envy, hatred, warmth,…This is called the colour of life. The way things go on. The way people come and go. The way topics come and go. But life goes on, for ever and ever.

    Just get out of the painting called life and view it as a whole. It’s so colourful. When we are inside it, seeing only our neighbouring pixel, we can’t see the true colour of life.


    Let life go on…

  • Achieving God

    The success of experiencing what I did and am trying to share with you through this post will depend on how detached you are from your mind. (In doubt? Read the post The Secret to (Infinite) Happiness)
    Earlier I told you about the happiness you get out of the realisation that you are neither your body, nor your mind, and that how your body or mind feels is not how you feel. There we talked about detaching your mind from yourself, and not letting your mind influence you.
    But today we are advancing to the next step. Controlling your mind

    We often find ourselves indulging in pleasures (what saintly people call worldly pleasures). And most often we find that something in us does not want us to do that. Let it be watching television on the day before your exams, or having a deadline closing in and still finding time for everything else but the project, or knowing that you have to exercise for a healthy life, but still in the bed every morning; the times when you say “I couldn’t resist”

    What was it that you couldn’t resist on those occasions? The desire in your mind.

    Until you learn how to control your mind, true happiness can never be achieved.

    And this ability, the ability to control your mind is very difficult to acquire, unless you are willing to train it for hours and hours. (In saintly terms, prayer or meditation)

    But I just found a short-cut.

    Let’s start it straight away. (Works well if there is anything you have been postponing)
    Find a disgusting task, completing assignments, learning, reading, exercising (these will turn to be fun later, as I will show you).
    Try to do it now.
    Your mind is telling you not to do it.
    Try to do it. Mind fighting. You try. Mind. You. Mind. >><< egh… dishyum… dishyum… ><
    Don’t let mind take over you. Control your mind. Teach it that you are the master and it your slave.
    Make it do what you want.
    Now, the first task is the only difficult task. If you can do this by brute force over your mind, you are successful. Everything else is easier.

    The moment you finish the first task something in you starts working. You feel a lot satisfied, confident,…
    These are the symptoms that mind has accepted you as its master.

    If nothing happened it is because you did the task through compromise with your mind. You told your mind to remain silent for a few minutes, while you finish the task. Mind will step aside, and, after you finish the task, take over again. That is not the way. Tell the mind first hand that you decide what to do, and that mind can only accept what you decide. Then do the task. And even after the task, you will remain the master.

    Now, the satisfaction, the pleasure you just had, remember it. Just remember how happy you feel when you are in control of yourself (and not your mind). Don’t forget that ever.

    (If you can, read the rest of this post only later. Though nothing is going to happen even if you read it now, it helps you better to take the control of your mind, if you read it later.)
    _______________________________________________________

    If you are like me, your mind will regain its authority within 2 hours of completing the first task.
    It will hold a diplomatic conversation with you. Mind: “Hey! I accept defeat, you are my master. Will you please let me enjoy for an hour?” It will humbly request you. And you will let it. But the moment you do that mind will be back in power. So, what to do now?

    Actually you shouldn’t have allowed the mind even a moment. The more freedom you give your mind, the more it will take control of you. But still, you got trapped. Now how do you bounce back? Simple. Remember the pleasure you had when you had mind under your control? Yes, that pleasure of satisfaction and the feel of control (far better than even OP :D). Remember it. Savour its sweetness. So you have two pleasures waiting for you, one silly, fragile pleasure and the other everlasting, supreme pleasure.

    Remember it and fight your mind. Lo! Your control is back with you. And don’t lose it to mind ever again.

    Just go in full control of your mind for a day or two.
    And when you are pretty sure that you have your mind under your control, let it have some fun, still under your control. Some controlled entertainment. For an hour or so. And every otherwise gruelling thing you do, command the mind to treat that it is fun.

    The mind is a great servant but a horrible master

    And when letting your mind have fun be cautious. Our mind is so tricky that sometimes it will make us think that we are in control while actually it is in control. This can be called pseudo control. But you can easily identify whether you are having pseudo control or actual control. Just command your mind to do something, if it obeys you are in control, and if it doesn’t you’ll have to start taming it again.

    So, once you have tamed your mind, like a good pet dog, it will obey whatever you say. And may be if our mind does have some secret potentials like the saints say, then some day we will be able to bend spoons.

    And when you are in complete control of your mind, then you are in control, you are God, the Almighty.
    Enjoy the bliss.

  • When You Look Back At The End…

    Life whizzes past you so quickly that you forget to do or get what you really want to.
    You go school for years and finally there will be a day of farewell and you suddenly feel you missed to do something. You spend your youth, your winged days and finally when you start slowing down you find that you could have did even more when you were younger. And when you finish bringing up your family, you think you could have did it better. You retire, and you find that you did nothing more than anyone would have done. Finally you are ready to breath your last, and while you look back at your life, you feel like you have messed it up. Wasted a whole life.

    Why is it such that it strikes us only at the end, when we have got little time left, that we are doing things the wrong way? Is there no way to get an advance notice?

    Fortunately, there is. And it’s really simple.

    Just think of the flashback that’s going to happen at the end. What scenes would you want to see. Make them happen now, right now.

    There’s nothing you can’t do that you would wish you had done. Our only fault is that we procrastinate. We take life as it comes and do nothing to make it as we think it should be. We lack the courage to take the initiative to make things happen.

    We think that there is always a tomorrow.
    But we forget that there isn’t always.

    We think that nothing will happen if we don’t do it now.
    But we forget that later we may wish we had done it.

    We think that we will end up losing.
    But what have we got to lose?

    We think that life takes us to where we will reach.
    But we forget that we decide where life should take us.

    And that’s why I’m saying:  

    Live the best life you can, so that in the future no one can point at your life and say “Hey! You missed the point”

  • Is An Amoeba Conscious Of Its Existence?

    Just think of living things and non-living things.
    We know that we are conscious of ourselves. But what is this consciousness? Where does it come from?

    Think in terms of atoms. There are atoms and molecules in our body. They are certainly not conscious.
    We have many carbon, oxygen, etc. combined to form proteins, carbohydrates, etc. They too aren’t aware.

    Now we have these things interacting to form cytoplasm and cells.
    Is it in these little corners of our body where we begin to realize our existence?
    Why does the DNA replicate? Why does it control the cell? Why are mitochondria synthesising energy? Why does the cell grow, divide? Why?

    So, the question:
    Is an amoeba conscious of itself??? 

    We are not amoebae. So we do not know it directly.

    But let us think of our own selves.
    We are made up of cells. But we are not aware of our cells. (Otherwise there would have been many many people talking in your head right now)
    So let us assume that cells aren’t conscious of themselves.

    Now, the next question:
    Then who is conscious?
    Take a single cell and you don’t get consciousness. But bring them all together you get people discovering relativity theory and nuclear fission.
    Where is this consciousness originating from?
    Is it from the cells itself? Are the cells actually self aware?
    If yes, then what is this awareness?
    We know that a cell is made of nothing but proteins and similar stuffs. What is it that makes an artificial protein different from a natural one. Why can we make an artificial heart, artificial eye, but not an artificial life?

    Now, if it is not the cells that are conscious, but the agglomeration; How does the neurons form mind? Or how do we think? What happens between the two moments when we are fast asleep and when we’ve just awaken? What is thinking through my mind right now? What is reading this post in your mind right now? Who are you?

    Why is artificial intelligence impossible? Why can we make powerful cranes and trains but not a clever robot?

    What is the difference between life and death? What is the electricity that runs through our bodies and make us move, talk, think? What is consciousness? What is life?

    Are we just runners in a relay passing the baton of life from our predecessors to successors? Are we even authorised to know why this fire called life burns?
    —–

    (Though I don’t believe a God exists) Oh God! Please let me know !!! Please!!! (saints say that you should do this very thing to attain realisation, so what I’m doing right now is practically online meditation, or online praying or praying through blogging. Well God must be having an internet connection too, hope that he’s using a search engine far more powerful than google, and finds me)

  • Imagining Nothing

    What if there was nothing?
    No me, no you, no blogs, no people, no life, no planets, no stars, no universe, no nothing.
    It is beyond imagination. Imagine nothing. (What? Imagine OK but nothing? How do I imagine nothing?) Of course you can imagine the lifeless planets. But you will have to remove them from the frame too. And then you will have to remove the frame from the frame. There is nothing. And there is no one to know that there is nothing.
    You can try to imagine because you exist. But what if you never existed? What if no one ever existed? Who would witness the universe? And what if even the universe never existed? There is nothing to witness and there is no one to witness. But what is that? Nothing? What is nothing?

    Quite incomprehensible? Thinking about nothing is an excellent way to pass time. But the real fun is after it. Once you think about nothing, everything you think about later in life will start seeming “nothing” to you.
    The whole universe would have been meaningless unless someone ever existed to witness it. And you? You are one of those who have been privileged to witness the universe. You are the meaning of this universe.
    Everything that happens between these privileged people is meaningless compared to how meaningless it would be if there was no one to witness this universe.
    The fact that you exist is the most important thing. There is nothing more important than it. No problem, no war, no question, no answer, nothing is even equally important.

    You are here. And nothing else matters.

  • Gandhiji Best Expressed

    I am really really busy today, but I have to make a post to mark this very special day too. So I thought rather than telling about Gandhi, I will tell what Gandhi told. Here are my favourites among His quotes:

    • A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.
    • A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.
    • Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love. 
    • Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.  
    • A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.
    • Be the change you want to see in the world.
    • First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
    • God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist.
    • Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.
    • An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
    • An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching. 
    •  Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. 
    • Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.  
    • Faith… must be enforced by reason… when faith becomes blind it dies. 
    • Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion. 
    • I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.  
    • It is any day better to stand erect with a broken and bandaged head then to crawl on one’s belly, in order to be able to save one’s head. 
    • It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.  
    • My life is my message.
    • Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment. 
    • The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. 
    • The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
    • Fear has its use but cowardice has none. 
    • You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.
    • True brahmacharya is this: one who, by constant-attendance upon God, has become capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited.
    • Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

    I was thinking about how easy life becomes when we practice truth. How we are justified no matter what we tell or do. How people start believing you. How people hear you. How you can talk anything without any preparation. How you don’t need to remember what you told. How you can finish conversations very quickly. How people understand your behaviour. How you can explain things easily.
    Its a whole lot easier than when you dwell on false prepositions.

    Try it. Tell the truth. And feel the difference.

  • Pale Blue Dot

    Can you see a tiny little dot in the above picture. That is our good old earth. Just that it was photographed 3.7 billion miles away from the home of anyone reading this. And the famous Carl Sagan gave the following words relating to that little speck:

    “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
    The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
    Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
    The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

    It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

    There’s nothing more I can add to what Sagan said. Just see that picture once again and take a few breaths.