“The greatest moment in the history of human imagination.” A thought-provoking title for Eric Nelson’s January 16, 2017 article in Communities Digital News challenging the fixedness of matter in regard to health. Inspired by Jay Walker’s TEDMED about a change in perception regarding earth’s relationship to the sun has implications relevant far into the future. Consider “human imagination” as you begin reading below and be sure to click through to read the entire article.
Jay Walker described it as “the greatest moment in the history of human imagination,” a period some 300 years ago when mankind first began to accept the idea that the sun, and not the earth, was at the center of our solar system.
“This, ladies and gentlemen, is the dividing line between faith and reason,” said Walker, an entrepreneur and founder of The Walker Library of the History of Human Imagination, as he described an illustration from the world’s first celestial atlas at the most recent TEDMED conference in Palm Springs.
“This atlas says the earth is spinning at about a thousand miles an hour. It says the sun is not coming up in the morning and going down in the evening… It’s also saying that the earth is traveling around the sun. There is no evidence for that is there ladies and gentlemen? Nobody feels the motion. Nobody feels anything is moving.”
In other words, said Walker, the greatest moment in the history of human imagination involved nothing less than “a complete rejection of [our] senses.”
This was not the first time, and certainly not the last, when a significant breakthrough in our collective understanding was prompted by someone’s willingness to not just imagine but also prove a reality above and beyond what our eyes and ears insist is true. Tempting as it may be to think that such radical insights are reserved for the likes of Copernicus and Galileo, however, we must not forget or neglect our own ability to look past the apparent fixedness of matter and discover something new about our place in the universe – a journey often involving “a complete rejection of our senses.”
Such a concept is familiar to me as a student of Christian Science, where I am continually challenged to seek out a fuller, more spiritual view of reality.