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In a small telescope with a good filter blocking out upwards of 99 percent of the visible light, the Sun looks like a big orange ball. There is not much to see, really. The orange ball is very round, sometimes with a few sunspots scattered here and there. Sunspots are small, dark, roughly circular patches, sometimes butted together. When your eyes get adjusted to finding the finer details, you can see that the sunspots look like wide-mouthed volcanoes, with very dark centers and lighter-colored surrounding areas that are easiest to represent in a drawing as lines sloping or swirling out from the center. Supposedly it's possible to see flares and prominences on the active surface of the Sun, but I've only seen sunspots.

A sunspot is a cool area. "Cool" seems like a strange word to use when describing an object which is for all intents and purposes in a perpetual state of thermonuclear fusion. A sunspot's temperature is about 4200 K, while the visible surface of the Sun, which is called the photosphere, can be as hot as 6400 K.¹ Galileo in the early 1600s was the first human being to invent a solar filter and see sunspots on the Sun's surface. The fact that the Sun had imperfections was a matter of profound cosmological concern to everyone, although of course neither Galileo nor anyone else had any idea what a sunspot actually is.

A sunspot is a manifestation of a disturbance in the Sun's magnetic field. Even in the small telescope you can get a sense of the photosphere's granular appearance, created by 1500 mile bubbles of hot gas that continually seethe up, cool off, and then retreat. The magnetic field pops up from some unlocatable place inside the Sun and disrupts the granules, making these dark patches. Sunspots occur in larger and smaller numbers over 11-year cycles, suggesting there is a cyclic activity to the Sun's magnetic field. Twenty-three cycles have been monitored.

The Earth is affected by sunspot activity. Sunspots are associated with "solar flares" which blow off energy that often reaches Earth, ignite auroras and can disrupt radio communications. From 1645 to 1715 almost no sunspots were noted by astronomers following Galileo's lead, and this quiet period corresponds to the Little Ice Age, when Earth's average temperature dropped about .5 K, and researchers believe there must be a correlation. Some studies have suggested that periods of human creativity correspond to times of sunspot maximum. This begins to sound a little like astrology because it's on a boundary where definite, scientific causation leaves off and indefinite possibilities begin. Nonetheless, it comes to us from the application of scientific method. The activity of the Sun apparently bears some relation to the activity of the human mind.

Interestingly, astronomers talk about the Sun in general categories called the "Active Sun" and the "Quiet Sun." The Quiet Sun refers to all those facts about the Sun which are relatively stable. For example, at the Sun's core thermonuclear fusion is steadily turning hydrogen into helium, creating unfathomable heat. The temperature at the core is about 15,000,000 K.² Heat radiates up from the core through the radiative zone. (Radiation means heat energy is transferred from place to place at the atomic level, by electrons.) The temperature decreases through the radiative zone until it reaches a convective zone, where the heat is transferred by convection, that is, by currents of hot gas moving up, cooling, then settling again, until the heat energy reaches the surface, or photosphere.

No one has ever looked directly into the interior of the Sun, and so the core-radiative-convective structure is inferred from conditions on the surface, as observed through telescopes and other instruments. The inner atmosphere just above the seething visible surface is called the chromosphere. The chromosphere is still a "quiet" aspect of the Sun, even though things become a little strange here (as though the conversion of 4.5 million metric tons of matter per second into energy were something humanly ordinary). Because the photosphere's visible emissions are so powerful, the chromosphere is essentially invisible, except in the moment just before and after a total eclipse of the Sun, when it becomes visible to the eye as a bright pink or red flash. In scientific terms this flash is called a "hydrogen-alpha emission," or a particular wavelength of light generated from a transition of hydrogen from one atomic state to another.

The chromosphere extends into a transition region of the Sun's atmosphere, and beyond the transition region is the corona. The corona is the familiar flaming blaze around the Sun photographed during total eclipses, the only times when it is visible. In the transition region there is a sudden increase in temperature which continues through the corona. This is particularly strange because common sense, even in science, would suggest that the farther you are from the source of heat (the fusing core), the more heat energy would be lost, and therefore the cooler the temperature would be. But outside the Sun, it's the reverse. The temperature increases slightly, from the photosphere through the chromosphere, and then leaps in just a few hundred miles to about 1,000,000 K in the transition region and the corona. Apparently astronomers are not sure exactly why or how this happens. The word "paradox" occurs in at least one discussion, and it is generally thought that "the photosphere heats the corona from the nonthermal source of energy stored in its magnetic fields" (Meyers 573).

At this point the discussion becomes a bit uncertain for non-scientists, and indeed the writer's next sentence begins: "Two mechanisms are thought to be involved." Apparently it is a bit uncertain for the scientists, as well. It has something to do with magnetic fields, again, which are not thoroughly understood.

In fact no one has ever observed a magnetic field, only its effects. The Sun has an internal concentration of charged energy related inextricably to its physical mass; this is its magnetic field. The magnetic field is the area of space where magnetic forces are exerted on physical bodies. The forces exist where the connection between energy and matter becomes tangible, like two magnets attracting or repelling each other.

In the Sun the tangible connecting points run north and south in lines. But the Sun rotates at different speeds, faster at the equator and slower at the poles, and so the magnetic fields twist and bend like rubber bands. When, cyclically, the magnetic lines twist too far out of shape, the tangible meeting point of energy and matter becomes disturbed, and the lines rip through the photosphere, blasting holes in the granulation and looping back together, so to speak, at footpoints. Sunspots appear, and other things invisible to the eye occur outside the photosphere. These unstable events are categorized under the phrase "Active Sun."

Sunspots are "active" because they come and go sporadically, if cyclically. Solar prominences occur when clouds of hydrogen gas are suddenly ejected from the photosphere, usually in the vicinity of sunspots. Solar flares are violent eruptions of energetic particles and electromagnetic radiations from the magnetic storms (analogous to thunderstorms) occurring at sunspots. It's the flare from the sunspot which discharges energy into interplanetary space and creates magnetic and radio disruptions on Earth. Coronal loops and arches are also associated with the magnetic field.

The Sun seems to be continually escaping from itself, burning hydrogen in its core and sending energy outward by radiation and convection toward the surface. At the surface it somehow gains strength and radiates tremendous heat, enough to warm the planets, and sends prominences and flares outward as though grasping in some ecstatic and largely invisible desire to illuminate and emerge into the atomic universe of space-time. We notice it only during an eclipse, in the second before the Sun goes dark and the chromosphere appears as a flash of red light, and in the moments when the corona glows in visible flames around the black disk of the Moon, if our filters are efficient and our instruments are delicate enough.

***

These bald facts capture the attention because they seem so far outside the range of normal human experience. The concept of enormous ongoing nuclear fusion, unfathomable temperatures, sheer size (the Sun has 300,000 times the mass of the Earth), the idea that the Sun's luminosity³ is so overwhelming it is blinding to the unfiltered eye - all these facts are, from a certain perspective, awe-inspiring. The very idea of a "magnetic field" becomes downright mysterious. A detailed description of a magnetic field involves a description of the activity of electrons, and a description of the activity of electrons is inferred from the abstractions of mathematics and the indications of elaborate detecting instruments. In a very real sense, no one has the slightest idea what magnetism actually is or consists of, apart from the fact that it operates in very precise mathematical ways. Describing subatomic activity creates no more of a sense of reality than does describing the effects of 15 million degrees. They're both out of direct human range. Really, the Sun is as mysterious as it's ever been. The idea that it has a core, a radiative zone, and a convective zone is no more plausible or believable than the idea that the mind has an unconscious zone and a conscious zone. Both ideas are so useful in describing what is directly observed that they are spoken of as essentially proven, but no one has ever seen or laid hands on "an unconscious" or "a core."

***

The whole mass of scientific information seems analogous to the filter on a telescope. The Sun and many of its processes are clearly understood through abstractions about electrons and magnetic fields, the way the dull orange ball is clear and precise in the lens. But at times when I step back from the eyepiece and squint for a few seconds into the blazing white radiance overhead, sudden tears and a slight headache behind my eyes permanently dissociate the clean orange circle from the blinding whiteness. Some radical intuitive intelligence, in those moments, loops up out of the mass of data and announces that the filtered orange image of the Sun is not the Sun. Science's clinical descriptions of the Sun are as remote from our experiential reality as the ancient myths of solar divinity.

What is the Sun, if not an orange ball or a mass of inferential and mathematical abstractions? Johannes Kepler, for example, would find the mathematics of magnetic fields astounding, yet he would not take the subsequent inferences for a description of reality, per se. For him reality inhered in neither inert matter nor the behavior of inert matter. Kepler, essentially a Pythagorean, began with the idea that the material universe reflects divinity: The Sun was not simply an empirical example of what Newton later called "lucid matter," but a living symbol of divinity.

For Kepler, God is like a point, and the point radiates outward in infinitely many directions, like lines forming, in one plane, a circle. "The centre flows out towards infinitely many points of the whole surface," he says.⁴ If the third dimension is added to this image, the radiating, infinitely-many lines form a sphere, which is the perfect shape of the created universe described in Plato's Timaeus, and elsewhere. The "circle is to the sphere," Kepler says, "as the human mind is to the Mind Divine, that is to say, as the line is to the surface" (161).

The idea of the central point's outflowing or radiating extends naturally to the most prominent object, perhaps, in the physical world: "The sun is a certain body in which [resides] that faculty of communicating itself to all things which we call light. For this reason alone it is the middle point and centre of the whole world, so that it may diffuse itself perpetually and uniformly throughout the universe. All other beings that share in light imitate the sun" (170). The Sun, in other words, is a natural symbol of the Divine Mind of God: "The mind is both inherent in the body, informing it and connected with corporeal form, and sustained by God, an irradiation as it were, that flows into the body from the divine countenance" (160).

This is reminiscent not only of Plato, but of Plotinus, whose highly technical metaphysics in the third century AD mapped out a similar metaphor, in which Nous, or Mind, is the first emanation of the central unity of the cosmos:

There is ... something that is centre; about it, a circle of light shed from it; round centre and first circle alike, another circle, light from light; outside that, not another circle of light but one which, lacking light of its own, must borrow ... all begins with the great light, shining self-centred; in accordance with the reigning plan (that of emanation) this gives forth its brilliance
        (Enneads, IV.3.17)

As citizens of the scientific universe we might think that Plotinus' image represents the primitive intellectual struggle of a great mind with too few facts. And we might think poor Kepler's vision is still obscured by religion and Pythagorean superstition because he lived, unfortunately for him, a few hundred years too soon. But at least in these versions there is a connection between the human mind and the central radiance: Kepler's symbolic mind is inherent in the body, and Plotinus' outer circle (which represents material reality), lacking its own light, borrows that of the great light. The individual mind, in other words, is an outflow of a central mind, or central point. We all somehow, as Descartes suggested, directly experience our own minds, and so thinking of mind as light and light as a radiant outflow connects the individual mind with the Sun, even though we stop short of thinking of the Sun as God. In symbols, reality touches the mind.

***

In his later work The Harmonies of the World, Kepler's main premise was that the world, or universe, is a living expression of the Divine Mind, or God, and his project was to show the mathematics which reflect the harmonies inherent in that Mind. Book V, in the painful and lugubrious detail typical of Kepler's work and writing, shows how the planets in their orbits describe the harmonic intervals of music, and he means that there is a harmony of sound constantly proliferating through the universe (which he, and everyone else, believed was constituted chiefly by the Sun and planets). This harmony is the natural expression of the perfection of God.

To us this sounds like wishful thinking, what one prominent modern scientist, ridiculing the idea that the universe looks like it has a design, calls "that age-old pitfall of Western intellectual life - the representation of raw hope gussied up as rationalized reality." Stephen Jay Gould in his essay, "Mind and Supermind" speaks with the voice of scientific conscience, here, and we are honor-bound, as intelligent folks in the twentieth century, to heed his authoritative warning. The Sun and planets are not playing music, and even if they are, it is an accident. You can see what the Sun really looks like, by the way, through a properly filtered telescope.

Except it is not so simple. The Sun, it turns out, really is playing music. Astronomers have noticed, in the Sun's photosphere, oscillations with periods of about five minutes, growing and dissolving over half an hour. This implies that seismological activity inside the Sun's convection zone triggers vibrations that create sound waves. In actuality millions of tones are all ringing together like millions of solar bells, and if you invented the right receiver and amplifier, you could listen to them.

This solar music can be dismissed as an accident of the natural laws of physics, which themselves must be accidental consequences of the Big Bang. This is Professor Gould's view. But Kepler's approach - from abstraction to objective detail - and Gould's approach - from objective detail to abstraction - both contain a fact of reality: celestial bodies generate music. One may legitimately wonder where accident and coincidence leave off, and apperceptive and noetic processes begin.

***

Wolfgang Pauli, like his peers Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger and David Bohm, was intensely interested in what the findings of quantum physics implied about reality. In his essay on Kepler, Pauli suggests that the powerful universal symbols which Jung called "archetypes" have an actual objective existence, and that they serve as the bridge between sense perceptions and ideas. The human mind, in other words, meets the universe in symbols. Symbols are real.

A symbol is an extended and deepened version of a metaphor, like a circle dimensionally unfolded into a sphere. And a metaphor, in simplest terms, is an identification of one thing with another thing which it apparently is not. For example, Kepler's sphere is identified with the universe; the universe is further identified as the outpouring of the Divine Mind. Since in geometry the point is the origin of the line, circle and sphere, it therefore is identified metaphorically with God. In this way the point is very nearly identified with the sphere as well, because the universe symbolizes the Divine Mind, which is to say, God. All things are identifiable, or connected.

The Divine Mind, Kepler continues, in giving rise to a circle gives rise to other minds. The other minds or - and we can safely substitute this word, here - souls are structured like their originator: Each soul is:

A point in actuality ... and the figure of a circle in potentiality. Now, since it is energy, it pours itself forth from that punctiform abode into a circle ... How should [the soul] have any other way of going out, being itself both light and flame, than as the other lights go out from their sources, that is, in straight lines? It goes out, then, to the exterior of the body according to the same laws by which the surrounding lights of the firmament come in.

Pauli connects Kepler's circle imagery to Jung's theory that the mandala of eastern religions represents the wholeness or total quality of the mind. He says:

One is tempted to assume that Kepler's 'mandala' symbolizes a way of thinking or a psychological attitude which, far transcending Kepler's person in significance, produced that natural science which we today call classical. From within an inner centre the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world in which, by definition, everything that occurs is automatic; so that the mind, itself in a state of rest, embraces this physical world, as it were, with its ideas.

Like the apparent connection of sunspot activity with periods of human creativity, figurative reasoning like this seems suspiciously astrological or occult. Pauli, however, was not a crackpot, but one of the major contributors to the interpretation of quantum physics, which is presently the dominant physical model of the universe. Pauli is led to speak of activities of the mind as "reality" because, in various interpretations of quantum theory, it's clear that human consciousness plays a role in how reality develops. Consciousness is one element, at least, in the overall pattern of objects and events which we term "reality." Pauli is saying that consciousness is indeed, as Kepler detailed, like a point which outflows and embraces or participates in reality with ideas. The activity of the mind is real and actual, the way the activity of the Sun, as we empirically understand it, is real and actual.

In fact, consciousness itself describes circles by embracing and participating in its surroundings and forming itself into works of various forms and qualities - ideas formed in language; communities formed in moral, social and political structures; images formed in paints. And there is the further sense that consciousness from time to time transcends itself, boiling momentarily out of its routine surface and disappearing into some invisible yet dynamically active world which is normally, except under exactly the right circumstances, inaccessible to us.

Plotinus tells us it has happened to him many times: "Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-centred; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order, enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine" (Enneads, IV.8.1). This is not the world of Stephen Jay Gould, but it is a world nonetheless, alive and supernally active in the mind.

***

What the mind is, concerned Plotinus at least as intensely as it concerned Kepler or Jung or Pauli. In fact, in Plotinus' scheme Mind is the first reality of the created universe. In science, Freud's powerful trope indicates human beings have two minds, the conscious and the unconscious. The general idea is that the unconscious is the brain's vast reservoir of information, process, memory and function, and the conscious is the brain's notice of the surface of that reservoir, observing and using whatever bubbles forth, either summoned or unsummoned. Commonly we think of the unconscious as a depth which can and should be plumbed. We have an almost archaeological attitude toward the unconscious, diving down through layers of memory in one part, or through varieties of emotion and intuition in another, bringing back strange figures, half-formed thoughts, and inchoate or broken sensibilities gained no one knows where.

Powerful ecstasies and terrors are thought to reside in the unconscious; it is thought to be extremely dangerous to dive too deeply there without guidance or at least a buoy to connect with the real world. History is filled with - and probably has failed to notice - thousands of those who lost their minds in their own minds, not the least of whom (let us defer to the possibilities of Professor Gould's accidental universe) were perhaps Plotinus and Kepler. Mistaken and crazed - divorced from the real world - by the fantasies of their own unconscious minds.

But the minds of Kepler and Plotinus seem to have gone out, rather than in: Plotinus speaks of being lifted out of the body, Kepler of an energetic soul pouring itself forth, and Pauli speaks of the mind as embracing the physical world, as though the embrace was a literal event rather than a metaphoric description. By the time of Freud and Pauli, the metaphors of science similarly take on an eerie life of their own, as though the metaphor was more real than reality: the mathematical equations are more immediately real than hydrogen atoms, which are thought to fuse in the core of the Sun and send electrons to radiate outward from the center, none of which human beings can experience or even observe. "All things," concluded the Pythagoreans, "are numbers."

We believe the interior of the Sun is profoundly active, as a matter of fact, although we describe it as quiet, the same way we believe the unconscious mind to be profoundly active although it is invisible. Heat radiates up from the Sun's core the way thoughts bubble up from the unconscious. Hot gas moves through the Sun's convective zone, cools and settles, and repeats the process until the energy reaches the photosphere and churns the surface. In the same way, memories, for no visible reason, appear on the surface of the mind and then subside like pockets of wind riffling and blackening a pond, then lifting to disappear in the trees.

Inside the mind - which we could say is (for the sake of elucidation) an extended, deepened, dimensionally-unfolded version of the Sun - tremendous energies function. Old emotions emerge from memory to tear open the conscious present, as though powerful convections pushed things up and outward, then pulled them back. Far down inside the mind, driving the unconscious, are the engines of life itself. At a central point or core, the mind fuses the original elements of itself into other elements, the way the Sun, and the universe itself, fuse and derive themselves from hydrogen. The fusion creates tremendous energy which is the life of the whole body. It streams outward and upward, radiating electron-flows of heat from one point to another in all directions of the outer regions.

Further from the center the heat is less, and its flows converge in little vortices, like currents of water converging in whirlpools. Eventually there are millions of convergences, galactic shapes shuffling and inhabiting the mind. They cool and gain cohesion, grow larger, transforming into individual figures, like pockets of hot gas or like flows of air assembling into hurricanes. Like gases they heat and rise, cool and sink again, transferring their energy upward. These are the archetypes building the interior mind, as natural as weather itself, or as moving water, or as convection. They surge together, collide and rearrange themselves like spiral systems of stars, exchanging, assimilating each other, feeding and slowing each other's whirl and fluid motion.

Finally they rise intact and burst like springs of water or as pictures on the surface of the mind. They feel at this conscious point like whirlwinds circulating dust and leaves, or hurricanes roaring over the ocean, raising gray triangular waves and smashing boats and houses over rocks and flooding streets and buildings. Then subside from sight, like the conscious mind generating, trying and casting off or adopting realities constantly. Here at the surface, where the turbulence is apprehensible, is consciousness. It looks granular, with individual bubbles and whirlpools gushing up, but continuous, like the photosphere of the Sun. The granulation seems serene, normally - the largest upswells are not much bigger than the others. The surface of the mind is a granulation of thought and image, idea and feeling, and seems quiet because it's so normal.

The unconscious mind, in a peculiar way, seems most active despite its invisibility, the way processes of fusion, radiation and convection inside the Sun seem active compared to the quiet orange photosphere. The idea that nuclear fusion is at the core, and only bubbling is at the surface, suggests the real activity occurs at the point of generation, and the surface is a rest from violence. What fusing images inhabit our psyches but never emerge at the surface?

The limitations of our own vision, which sees only the surface, are all that differentiate the conscious from the unconscious. The two minds are the same thing. Ideas emerging in consciousness occur simply at the edge of underneath, and are different only by location from those that stay submerged; they form the visible granulation on a burning sphere of rising and settling bubbles. The conscious and the unconscious are no more separable than the photosphere and convection zone of the Sun. Simply, one is visible and one is not.

The quiet mind is what Plotinus meant when he spoke of "light from light." The steadiness of sunlight, generated inside the Sun and pouring outward to us, is the material nurturer of our physical reality; without it we'd be cooked, either never given time to evolve because of fluctuations of heat and cold, or burned in a sudden flash. Many stars are variable like that, after all, and the Sun is in the end a benevolent star among billions of billions of stars. The quiet Sun fosters life, irradiating steadily outward from its core to its surface to its atmosphere to the planets, and, twinkling, beyond them. The mind in its creative phase nurtures reality in the same way; it embraces the world with ideas that bubble through the surface and light outward in lines.

But the whole mind is rarely entirely quiet, as the Sun is rarely entirely quiet. There is constant activity and frequent disturbance. Things that are intensely raw boil from the mind. Emotions explode with tremendous violence at times, and powerful thoughts erupt as if from nowhere, throwing off energy in spikes and loops and sometimes turning the embrace of the conscious mind into a flood of radiative energy, transforming the shape of the universe. The thoughts of Christ or Newton affect other minds the way high-energy particles spur auroras.

This is the active mind. While the core quietly radiates heat and energy outward, in the interior the connecting-points between matter and energy generate activity. The mind, exactly parallel to the Sun, has an internal concentration of energy related inextricably to its physical mass. This is its magnetic field. The agitation of the body can disturb the mind the way the motion of the Sun disturbs its magnetic fields. A self, which exists where the connection of body and mind becomes tangible, struggles and surges normally against the impositions and appetites of the physical world like the magnetic lines of the Sun twisting and bending against the physical rotation of its gases. The lines themselves twist out of shape and out of unity and harmony with the inner processes. They bend and press in different directions, like different impulses of instinct and rationality, or fear and calm, or feminine and masculine pressing and entangling each other rather than staying whole and integrated. As they torque themselves to resist or adapt to the body's commotions, the mind realigns or agitates or disrupts the convections of the unconscious, and storms erupt through the conscious surface.

The active mind conjoined with the body constantly influences its surroundings. It radiates, convects and sometimes ejects material outward, so that the area around it is constantly transformed into buildings, homes, governments, relationships. The mind irradiates its surroundings. Its chromosphere and corona exert themselves compulsively outward, gripping the physical world in activity much more intense than the conscious mind is aware of. "Everything which is caused," says Dante, "is the effect, mediately or immediately, of some intellect."⁵ The mind's energy leaps radically to transfer itself to the universe.

This outer atmosphere of the human mind is neither conscious nor unconscious, neither interior nor superficial. The surface of consciousness is only a thinness over an interior. The radiant mind illuminates everything, the way the Sun pours streams of particles and energy Earth-ward to bathe the atmosphere, create auroras, disrupt radio communications and surround the Earth's magnetosphere with light.

In rare instances, the everyday mind extends itself beyond its normal range. When the force of habit is from time to time obliterated, as the Moon from time to time obliterates the normal sunlight, spicules and prominences appear as sudden illuminations, like the flashes of red light and effulgences of coronal sunlight revealed in an eclipse. Like the vision of the chromosphere around the Moon's black disk, the mind's whole irradiation emerges to awareness. In a moment of eternal contact, the mind experiences itself unfolding beyond its granulations into the universe, and enfolding itself into the deep being of space. Plato, Plotinus and Dante saw this vision, like emerging from a cave of shadows into blinding daylight. As if enabled, suddenly, to look at the unfiltered Sun.

It is an illumination as inexpressible as music, which is generated deep in the mind and also understood there where all tones are a single diapason, inflowing and outflowing together. It is invisible to the eye. With filters astronomy as a matter of course detects the strange array of Sun-born particles and waves of light and even infers musical tones, the way psychology, with absent-minded recourse to the unconscious, explains calamities of consciousness. But scientific instruments do not reveal the meaning or beauty of a chord. The burning corona of the mind is the superconscious, the flowing-out which embraces reality. To plumb the depths of the unconscious is to excavate the structure of the self, but to stream outward like light and flame to grasp the world is to inhabit and coincide with reality. It is outside the limits of the seeing eye, and beyond comprehension.

Lifted out of itself and streaming into the universe, the mind in a flash experiences itself as its own Sun and solar system, simultaneously self-centered and external. It makes and is and is made by its surroundings, and acquires identity with everything. It travels outward, as the solar wind after its ecstatic burst travels outward past the planets and through the cloud of comets, carrying electric and magnetic fields to the heliopause, and meets the cosmic rays and magnetic field of the galaxy.

And the surrounding lights of the galaxy, hundreds of billions of them tens to tens of thousands of light years away, stream in as rays of light and wind generated exactly the same way. Exactly as and with the Sun they formulate the deepest reaches of space by filling it with radiation, light. Every star is a Sun, some huge and red and middle-aged, others small, crumpled and ancient, and still others new and blue and roaring hot with mind-material flowing out in flame and light.

So great is God that his very members are infinites

The Sun is not a discrete, accidental orange ball at the edge of a whirlpool of billions of other discrete, accidental balls. It is, in reality, a living symbol of how the universe precisely and carefully enfolds itself vanishingly into itself, as stars move in galaxies, planets move in solar systems, electrons move in atoms, archetypes move in minds. We can no more hope to understand this by viewing it objectively from afar than a grain of sand can hope to understand the desert by trying to view the desert floor. "Science with patience," wrote Rimbaud. "The torture is certain." The grain of sand is the desert.

The human mind inflames the universe, like the Sun. It contains the Sun, knows itself by the Sun, and in the most real sense it is the Sun, flowing into the universe like a wave, engendering meaning as moving water engenders vortices. The true pilot of the self, in Plato's metaphor, is the mind and an astronomer. The Sun, it has been observed, is a morning star.

NOTES

¹ Most of the factual information given here is gleaned from Michael Zeilik, The Evolving Universe, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1991, and from Robert A. Meyers, ed., Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academic Press, Inc., 1989.

² To convert this into the more familiar Celsius temperature scale, subtract 273: the temperature in the core is still about 15 million degrees Celsius. Or to convert this to the Fahrenheit scale, take the Celsius temperature, and make an equation: 15,000,000 = 5/9 (F-32). This makes the temperature of the core about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.

³ Represented as -26, where the lower the number, the brighter the object, with the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, being -1.5.

⁴ Quotations of Kepler are from Wolfgang Pauli, "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on Kepler's Theories" in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (with C.G. Jung). Princeton University Press, 1955.

⁵ From Epistola X, the "Letter to Can Grande," in Letters of Dante, 2nd edition, Clarendon Press, 1967
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