I dug out video tapes of the series "Cosmos" hosted by Carl Sagan that Tom recorded in the early '8O's. It's fascinating going back to that stuff because I watch it now and I don't listen to the science, I listen to the religion within what Carl Sagan presents as science. I'm involved in reading the Lotus Sutra and the ideas I get from that inform how I interpret what Carl Sagan is talking about.
When I first watched "Cosmos" years ago, it was like planting seeds of ideas. Then my education and experience informed how the seeds would germinate and grow. It's a nice circle. My education and experience determined how I would understand the seeds. But without the seeds, there would be no ideas to grow. It just so happened that my education and experience had a religious resonance. If my education and experience were different, I might be interpreting the ideas borne of the seeds differently.
The ideas in "Cosmos" fit in so well with what I've learned through religious ideas. In the first episode, the series is presented as a journey on the "ship of imagination, unfettered by our concepts of time and distance". I read spiritual release in that. It's a goal. It's God. God is the ship of imagination. God is the vehicle.
Carl Sagan presents the ship coming to Earth from deep, deep space that appears to be a conceptual exercise. We approach from billions of trillions of light years away. Mind-boggling numbers. Numbers so large that we brush them off because it's easier to do that than try to conceive of them. Numbers so large that they exceed the limits of our cognition so we resign ourselves to their enormity and avoid appreciating them. That's exactly what's in the Lotus Sutra. Eons and eons of lifetimes so lengthy as to be unable to be captured in words.
There is also the idea of the cycles of universes. This actually isn't from "Cosmos", but it's a scientific idea with a parallel in religion. They say the universe began with the Big Bang, when all the matter in the universe was contained in an infinitesimally small dot in a time and space we can't even conceive of, and it "exploded" and began it's expansion in time and space as we know it. The question that plagues astronomers now is whether there is so much mass in the universe that it will stop expanding and collapse upon itself in a cosmic Big Crunch, or if it doesn't and will continue to expand forever.
The universe, by astronomers' estimation is some 16 billion years old and still expanding. It has been expanding for an enormous amount of time and will continue to expand, and when it begins to contract, it will be contracting for an enormous amount of time.
To inject my religious understanding, I conclude that there is enough mass in the universe that it will eventually stop expanding and begin to contract. It's a cycle. These huge time frames fit right in with the Lotus Sutra and the time frames it marks for existences of major Buddhas. Reigns, if I must.
I must note, though, what Carl Sagan said in reference to Ptolemy. Ptolemy "proves that intellectual brilliance and genius is no guarantee from being dead wrong" (!) Carl Sagan comes through with the one-liner.
