Do you see what I see?

Do you see what I see?

That's not a rhetorical question. I really wish someone could give me an answer, but at the same time I'm not sure there is an answer. What I have experienced feels like an extraordinary gain in depth, but I don't know how to express or communicate this experience to others.

Maybe you do.

Let me back up to this week's total eclipse and a two-millimeter glass bead I use in demonstrations. I really enjoyed the lunar eclipse. Frankly, it caught me off guard – my enjoyment that is. I really thought that this one, coming at dawn and ending (for us) with the moon setting while in total eclipse, would not be all that interesting. It was.

It was for me because I found it easy to stand there, face west, and watch the moon, the western horizon rushing up to meet it, while at the same time it claws its way back up into the sky and tries to hide in the Earth's shadow.

These broad mechanics were made clear because you could turn to the east and see the sky getting light. That made it easy to mentally envision the ball of the Sun, perhaps 10 degrees below the horizon. You could stare down at the ground to the east and grasp exactly where the Sun is, I know it was striking the Earth at a spot out of sight in that general direction, and when I turned around I could easily imagine exactly where the Earth's shadow was in the western sky – the shadow the Moon was climbing into in its eastward path around the Earth.

All the mechanical dynamics of the eclipse were thus intuitively clear and for me that is a great satisfaction. But I also think it provides an insight that is ineffable. I've said all I know how to say about it – I can imagine all the mechanics of the eclipse, not as a diagram in an astronomy textbook, but as real world events as they happen. I can place myself at a distant vantage point, somewhere beyond it all, where I'm looking down on the real Sun, Earth, and Moon and watching this complex little shadow dance. That's a sort of knowledge I feel deeply, but because I can't express it, I can't evaluate it – and I can’t really know if you are experiencing the same thing, something less, or something more. Hell, I'm no longer sure what "less" and "more" mean in this context.

This insight got expanded yesterday as I brought it together with another little piece. After watching the eclipse Tuesday morning, I had a small group here at 10 am for solar observing and another group at 1 pm. The day before I had had a similar group, and the day after still another. (It's been a sunny, clear week, with a nice sunspot and prominences. Good hydrogen alpha weather.)

I start all these solar sessions with a fun (for me) demo where the Sun is represented by a silver ball about 9-inches (225mm) in diameter and the Earth by a 2mm bead, dangling on a piece of fishing line. These two do a good job of making a scale model of the system – but that's easy. You can show that in a book, or on a Web page. It's what comes next that's mind expanding – I hope. With one person holding the ball, you have another dangle the glass-bead "Earth" where he/she thinks it should be in relation to the "Sun." Most put it about 3-6 feet away, which looks far, but isn't.

Then the 25-foot tape measure comes out and the person starts walking. At the end of the tape measure, the glass bead "Earth" is out of sight from the silver ball "Sun," but still not where it belongs in this model. Another 25-feet seems to raise the situation to the level of the ridiculous. But that glass bead really belongs out around 75-feet. OK – if you're a stickler for numbers it actually should be more like 80-feet, but with a 25-foot tape measure 75-feet is close enough and dramatic enough to make the point. (That puts the next nearest star - the next 9-inch ball – more than 4,000 miles away, but we'll save that for another day.)

The image I really try to get into my visitors' minds, is the image of that 2mm glass bead, dangling there in space, 75 feet away from the silver "Sun" - the 9-inch ball. Then I remind them of the volume of space we're dealing with – that is it's not simply a linear distance of 75 feet, but a spherical volume of emptiness that is huge – 75-feet in all directions from our tiny Sun - with nothing in the spherical volume except this little dust mote we call the Earth, another one about the same size, we call Venus, and another speck far smaller, we call Mercury. That's it – in a huge volume.

How huge – you need to be standing there with the 2mm glass bead dangling before your eyes and the 9-inch ball off in the distance. I don’t think you can get the same effect by reading about it. That's why I do the demo. But here's the rub.

I've done this little exercise now, in my backyard and in school auditoriums, several times over the course of a year. Yesterday I understood it. What's more, last night it all came together in my mind with the lunar eclipse experience.

I won't say I understood it for the first time. I understood it before I did it. I understood it as I developed it and as I did the math. I understood it the first time I walked it off for myself. But at each point along the way I understood it in a deeper and deeper fashion.

Am I boring you yet? See, while I hesitate to apply any label to myself, if I were to apply one it would be "writer." That's what I am – a writer. And yet, I cannot express in anything like an adequate way what I have experienced in this little exercise. I keep using that same word - "understood " – over and over again. And each time I use it I'm expressing an experience that is getting - for lack of a better term – deeper and deeper – more and more meaningful for me.

And suddenly, while getting popcorn and preparing to watch the Patriots in their last preseason game, the collective experiences of the total lunar eclipse and the repeated Sun-Earth demos, hit home in a new, almost profoundly funny, way. At 5 am on Tuesday I was looking down at the ground to the East and imagining where the huge Sun was at that moment – and I was imagining it hitting this very large ball we live on – the Earth – and this Earth casting a gigantic shadow which was starting to eat the top off of that incredible chunk of ancient rock that still carries all the scars it has received from thousands of encounters over billions of years. That's how it felt Tuesday morning.

Last night it felt differently. Last night I relived the eclipse, but now the Sun was a nine-inch silver ball, sitting down at the bottom of my yard, 75 feet away. And the gigantic Earth was this tiny dust mote, floating in a huge sphere of thinning Sun stuff that surrounded it – an incredible outpouring of unstoppable energy – and this dust mote was deflecting a minuscule amount of that energy while another dust mote about one-fourth the size, floated into the darkened path – that tiny, search-light beam of a shadow reaching out what? Roughly 50 mm (2-inches) from the dust-mote Earth.

Oh my, what a different view that was! I call that knowledge – experiential knowledge – and as I say, I don’t know how to express it, let alone measure it. I feel it. I'm sure I've gone somewhere I haven’t been before, despite encountering the same facts and the same situations and the same form of expression of them, many times. And I reject the term "mystical" for this experience. "Mystical" carries too much uncomfortable baggage for me. I'm not burning incense, smoking pot, or chanting mantras – these insights come unsummoned. In fact, one of the maddening aspects of them is that you can't summon them. All I can do is try to recreate the environment that evoked them – but nine times out of 10 this doesn't work for me, and I don’t have a clue if it's working for someone else.

And that's why I ask, do you see what I see? I want to know because I'd love to extend the communications process beyond what the numbers and words convey – beyond our skill as symbol manipulators, because I feel certain our experience takes us somewhere else, but every time I try to do that the experience itself defies communications in any other form – so I can't tell if it's working or not. It is what it is. A part of me says "accept it." Just leave it alone. And another part of me wants to verify it through something more concrete, more specific, more substantive