“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean, to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
“Staring at the stars is like staring backward in time, since some stars are so far away that their light takes millions of years just to reach us. We see stars not as they look now, but as they were when dinosaurs roamed the earth: the whole concept just strikes me as amazing somehow.”
“The thing that changed for me, looking back at Earth, was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty of Earth, but how much blackness there was around it and how that made it even more special. I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me, but there is one new thing that I know, and that is: Planet Earth, you are a crew. When you see Earth from space, you realize that we are all one crew.”
– Christina Koch, Astronaut (Mission Specialist, Artemis II, 2026)
“And remember, the point of life is not to be the smartest person in the room. It is to understand things. To figure out how nature works. To do your part with the time you have.”
“I traveled miles, for many a year, I spent a lot of time in lands afar. I’ve gone to see mountains, the oceans I’ve been to view. But I haven’t seen with these eyes, just two steps from my home, lies on a corn of paddy grain, a glistening drop of dew.”
“And life also belongs to God, for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.”
– Aristotle
The more I ponder it, the more it seems that the essence of all life is inextricably linked to the phenomenon of consciousness. It is entirely possible, then, that consciousness may even be the very substance of life itself. This seems to be what Aristotle is suggesting, when he says, “The actuality of thought is life.” And therefore, it would follow that the ultimate form of life would be an eternal, ultimate, omniscient consciousness, i.e., God. We often think of the ancient Greek philosophers as ultra-secular, but here we have Aristotle rather comfortably admitting that not only must there be a God, but that God must be a singular living being, and that this God must be an ultimate, eternal, self-dependent manifestation of creative consciousness. And therefore, under Aristotle’s view of the world, God must also be the ultimate and most perfect manifestation of everything that is good. So, basically, Aristotle is saying, “God is good.” This is just one step away from what Jesus taught, that God is love, (love being the highest, most pure manifestation of good.) Therefore, it seems clear to me that the closer we get to attaining our highest consciousness – and manifesting our highest love – the closer we get to a more perfect connection and communion with God.
“Whether artists and authors ever live to see the dawn of their fame depends upon the chance of circumstance; and the higher and more important their works are, the less likelihood there is of their doing so. As a general rule, the longer a person’s fame is likely to last, the later it will be in coming. The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favorably received at first; but remain in obscurity until they win notice from intelligence of a high order.”