Beyond Knowing Earth is Not Flat
Aristotle debunked the flat earth theory over two thousand years ago. I learned the earth is a sphere in first grade. Yet, the world doesn’t feel that way. The same goes for most scientific facts. Knowing some truth is much less meaningful than physically feeling it or having a deep intuition about the subject. Over the past several years, I have been working to embed scientific understanding further into my consciousness. Doing this has led to substantial mental health improvements and natural psychedelic experiences.
Virtually everyone in modern society accepts mainstream explanations for the earth’s shape, movement, and place within the solar system. However, the models and theories procured by scientists stick only to the surface of my brain. I believe this is for two reasons. 1. The requisite reasoning, like massive-scale astrological reasoning, does not regularly emerge from day-to-day neuro pathways. 2. Wiring in my brain deeply nests a bias from years of having a stationary perspective.
The sun defines the center of the solar system at a distance equal to hundreds of missions to the moon. It is so large the fastest military aircraft would not complete a round-trip for almost two months. The surface is one thousand times hotter than the hottest air temperature ever recorded on earth. But why bother with this information when all that matters to me is the result?
My brain prefers to think in terms of consequence over cause because it was the winning strategy in psychological evolution. The sun is merely the lighting above the stage of life. People water their lawn early in the morning, regret wearing pants on a summer day, take walks on the beach during sunset, and install solar panels on their roofs. I couldn’t care less that it’s composed of plasma or to find out what plasma even is. Only on occasion, with fleeting curiosity, do I escalate to the more complex pathways on these topics. It is similar to how video game software optimizes by reducing rendered detail of something as the player moves away and completely ignores anything that is not on the screen.
All else aside, it feels next to impossible when I do try to grasp the nature of things. I’m gullible and lack experience from different vantage points. I’ve been a witness to almost ten thousand days where the sun rises and sets seemingly independently — the void of consciousness during sleep slices time into discrete blocks on my calendar. I’ve only ever seen the earth’s curvature when flying in an airplane; Yet because the horizon is so vast and the bend is so slight, I still struggle to comprehend the planet as a sphere. Anyone who has ever lived, other than a few astronauts, has seen only one side of the moon with their own eyes. Only months in a zero-g environment could break my sense of up and down. The easiest thing to do is give up and fall back to my old ways.
A lack of worldly thoughts had never threatened my life, relationships, or career. I was convinced for the longest time that there wasn’t a good reason to change my way of thinking.
One evening I was lying on the ground gazing up at the night sky with a friend. The entire starfield was in my view. After a few minutes, my eyes started picking up the faint glow around the horizon. The way the light distorted from the curvature of the earth showed me a picture of the night sky I’d never seen. I completely comprehended, for a moment, that I was looking outward into an abyss from a massive spherical planet. Since that night, I have been searching for ways to reshape my brain to reproduce more moments of enlightenment.
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
— Edgar Mitchell, Apollo Astronaut, on seeing the earth from the moon.
What Mitchell and many astronauts describe is known as the overview effect. A shift in cognition related to earth and its context. As someone who has never been in space and likely never will, I envy those Astronauts. But there are other ways to develop a “global consciousness.”
The most basic way I try to induce enlightenment is by looking at pictures released by NASA. I may stare at a single photo for several minutes. The High Definition Earth View experiment has been running almost non-stop for six years on the ISS. It is essentially a live stream of earth available here on YouTube. It is truly a gift to have access to the real-time observation of the planet anywhere there is an internet connection.
The Milky Way galaxy is the foggy cloud spanning the sky that is only visible on clear nights without light pollution. It contains hundreds of billions of stars, but the naked eye only sees a minuscule fraction. The field of view is at least tens of thousands of light-years across, and in the summer, the earth looks into the glowing core. Our galaxy is unique in that it is known to be very large and is extremely large to the eye. Whenever I am lucky enough to see the Milky Way, I first give my brain a moment to comprehend it. Then, I try to understand that there are trillions of other galaxies beyond the cloud. Those galaxies are tiny from my perspective due to their distance, like Andromeda, which can be seen under certain conditions as a small faint smudge alongside our galaxy. This technique has been by far the best at helping me understand the scale of the universe. My first time felt like a microdose of psilocybin.
The sun does not move independently across the sky and then teleport to the other side the following morning. It is kindergarten astronomy, yet I still fall into a habit of geocentric thought even as an adult. Every evening and morning, I dedicate a moment to look toward the horizon and remind myself that the earth is rotating. The intuition of the earth’s rotation is a critical component to feeling anything like the overview effect.
Stargazing is a pain in the neck. So it is better done laying down. Not only does laying down eliminate physical strain on the body, but it also orientates the forward direction toward the sky. Looking forward into the atmosphere enhances my awareness of the planet and how gravity controls my sense of direction. Overall, laying down to look at the stars is many times more rewarding on average.
Lastly, I think specialty eyewear that allows prolonged observation of the sun could be worth its weight in gold. After all, the sun is a giant ball of hot plasma at the center of the solar system, and it isn’t easy to appreciate that reality. I’ve caught glimpses of it here and there, of course, but was instantly blinded. The best I can do is peripherally analyze it when looking in the general direction.
Passing grade school astronomy then never touching it again will get someone through life perfectly fine. But I am finding that a more profound intuition about the world and universe is the definition of enlightenment, and there are practical routes toward it. Some people might think this is too out-there for them, but you are made for it if you read to this point.
