By Ethan Maurice | August 31, 2023

I recently had the grand privilege of speaking on Cosmic Consciousness and the inherent oneness of all things through an astronomical lens at the Festival of Yes.

Wandering through my near-death experience at sixteen, insights into the psychological growth process from Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, the formation of the universe, wise words from Ed Abbey, Alan Watts, Carl Sagan, and John Frusciante, and ultimately offering contemplating the cosmos as a means of transcending our repression of “the primary miraculousness of creation,” it felt wildly out of the blue and well received.

A true legend — while running the festival — the Yesman managed to record the speech on his phone! I polished and uploaded the audio to YouTube for your listening pleasure:

References:

I stand on the shoulders of my favorite giants. Below I’ll include referenced quotes, videos, and other mentions for further exploration and contemplation:

“Out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship.”

-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Most of us — by the time we leave childhood — have repressed our vision of the primary miraculousness of creation. We have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience. Sometimes we may recapture this world by remembering some striking childhood perceptions, how suffused they were in emotion and wonder — how a favorite grandfather looked, or one’s first love in his early teens. We change these heavily emotional perceptions precisely because we need to move about in the world with some kind of equanimity, some kind of strength and directness, we can’t keep gaping with our heart in our mouth, greedily sucking up everything with our eyes everything great and powerful that strikes us. The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived all they would be naturally paralyzed to act.”

- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

What you are basically — deep, deep down, far, far in — is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

- Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness

“I think the force that created us is expressing itself through our existence... that everything that we do and everything that we create is nature expressing itself the same way that when a flower grows out of the ground or a tree grows out of the ground is nature expressing itself.”

John Frusciante, John Frusciante Interview on Creativity & Inspiration

“He does not come to believe merely; but he sees and knows that the cosmos, which to the self conscious mind seems made up of dead matter, is in fact far otherwise — is in very truth a living presence. He sees that instead of men being, as it were, patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of non-living substance, they are in reality specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life. He sees that the light which is in man is eternal, as all life is eternal; that the soul of man is immortal as God is; that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundational principle of the world is what we call love, and that the happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain.”

- Richard Maurice Burke, Cosmic Consciousness

The visualization exercise is based on this Universe Zoom Out Video:

Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot Speech (where “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” comes from):

The ‘In This Together’ Bumper Sticker offered at the end of the talk: