Profound Autism

by Lei Motilla

Raising your head up, staring at a point on the night sky, and being fixated for an unusually prolonged period of time in a public place where people are going about - will make you appear strange if not autistic. 

But can you keep your eyes from immediately surrendering to such sight of exquisite beauty - a magnificence gone out of bounds, an unfathomable cosmos, and an enthrallment to indulge in; to marvel at, and to marvel on what such infinity makes of you?

Most people are too preoccupied by the requirements of life, that their vision beholds necessary only those immediate to perception, that they regard matters outside the confinement of their own horizon, beyond their concern.

However, special are the few whose sight is not just able to defy gravity, but also whose curiosity refuses the limit of their own understanding. 

For above and beyond culture, exigencies, goals and just about everything we value or disvalue out of the splendor of human experience in the course of history, lies not mere scintillating displays of dots and pretty lights for our viewing pleasure, seeing it only as what our receptors receive is seeing it only as an astonishing image.

But recognizing these emanating lights that took a thousand light years to travel as the rest of the universe reaching out to let us know that we are part of it, of a Universe whose very origin is an emergence from uncertainty and intense violence, that the order is in manifest of disorder, intelligible or not. 

There is a space of inexhaustible measure, timeless and inconceivable; a space our world and everything we think we know is suspended, where the truth pervades in absolute decree, where there is no representation or definition, and where the prominence brought about by our senses terminates. The magnitude calls to us humility but its profundity urges us to rethink again. Like an empty box that at second sight allows us to realize what we can and want to do with it.

And this is the reason why knowledge of Astronomy even in the most general level, as long as it is driven by interest coming from a sincere appreciation of its wonders, is and should be a vital pint of life. 

For without it, rational capacity would be devoid of its significance, we will fail to escape the captivity of convention, more so, life would cease to be enchanting.

I can say that, in essence, we are more than a consequence of a chain process, for we are, in the scale of the great cosmos, an infinitesimal, but conscious constituent of the celestial family.

A realization has begun from looking seemingly autistic, while gazing at the sky one starry, starry night.