More detail on the recent Hubble photo of the galaxies
“Astronomers are already identifying some curious trends. For example, about 30 galaxies here seem to have redshifts greater than 5, meaning we see them as they were when the universe was less than 9 percent of its present age, or less than 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. But only three are candidates for having a redshift around 6 (cosmic age 900 million years). “Why is there such a huge drop in galaxy numbers at z = 6?” asks Benitez. For now, the answer remains elusive. “
Lying meditation
- Buddhist lying meditation
- Lying meditation posture
- Lying meditation and prayer
- Sayadaw U. Jatila on the benefits of lying meditation
- Lying meditation andthe four fold way
- Yoga Savasana pose
- Lying meditation for teens
- More on Buddhist lying meditation
- Sri Chinmoy on lying meditation
- Kundalini Rainbow meditation
I am in Ottawa this weekend doing a little business. At the moment I am sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee and waiting for my friend to pick me up and take me to a place where we are going to play music.
I lived here between 1991 and 1994, during three incredibly rich years of learning. At the time I was working for a national Aboriginal organization, the National Association of Friendship Centres, but I was also doing a lot of reading and writing, and was a little active in the Ottawa literary scene as an associate editor of ARC magazine for a couple of issues.
That was a vibrant time in my life, as it occupied the years between leaving university and settling down to start a family. My journals from the time reflect a mind trying to come to grips with literary conventions, ideas for poems, chunks of text for an experimental novel I was writing and thoughts on organization, process and music.
One of the things I remember about Ottawa, and it was confirmed for me on this trip again, was the lively cafe and pub culture. There are pubs everywhere, little neighbourhood watering holes and places for people to gather and talk. And cafe talk is absoutely unique here, not simply because it is peppered with government jargon and Ottawa insider gossip. It is unique especially because it is largely bilingual. It is very common when eavesdropping on Ottawa conversation to hear people speaking French to one another until they come to a word that makes more sense in English, at which point the conversation switches seamlessly into English. If they come to a hplace where a French word is more a propos, alors ils reviennent au Fran�ais encore. Il m’a toujours stup�fi�…
Sitting meditation resources:
- Meditation Handbook approaches (and a lot of other stuff)
- Shinay Tibetan practice
- C’han sitting practice
- Jack Kornfeld sitting meditation
- Won Buddhism sitting practice
- Zazen practice
- Thich Nhat Hanh sitting meditation
- Comparison of Christian and Zen sitting practice
- Four sitting practices
- Tonglen practice while sitting
The other day I blogged that the Hubble photo was a glimpse into the suburbs of the universe. Of course this isn’t true at all. In fact we live on the edge of the universe. Every moment, as the universe keeps expanding, we get further and futher away from the Big Bang. So any photograph that sees 12 billion years into the past is actually looking towards the centre of the universe, or downtown.
In 1964, the echoes of the bigbang were discovered. The entire universe is bathed in cosmic background radiation which is essentially the sound of the Big Bang cooking everything up. If we look far enough back we see nothing but smooth energy. The above photo is a representation of this, except that it gives the impression that the cosmic background radiation is OUTSIDE of us, as if we live in a fishbowl universe, floating around. In reality our universe is more like a balloon, being inflated. We are on the outside of the balloon getting further and further away from everything. So the background radiation is in our past, in the direction from which we have come.
In other words, welcome to the suburbs folks.