Selfies for Peace. Week 3
2 Selfies, 1 Week, 1 Message: Peace.
Carl Sagan was struck by a photo taken by Voyager II.
In it, he could see a beam of light and a blue dot in the distance — Earth.
That dot revealed a paradox: the Earth is so insignificant in the context of a vast universe, and yet so important because life thrives on it.
The image inspired him to go further. Reflecting on the Pale Blue Dot, he realized that everything that ever happened happened there, stories of love, hope, and joy, but also of hate, destruction, and greed.
He saw with clarity the human drive for violence, the desire for power, for conquering territory, just to feel a momentary sense of glory that would soon fade into non-existence. The insignificance of our egoic desires is evidence of our disconnection with reality.
We love peace, life and what happens when we make shine the best in Humanity.
As a testament to what is beautiful and holy, this week we bring two amazing women sharing their Selfies for Peace,
and , you’ll find their messages for peace below the original photo that inspired Sagan.
This week’s messages:
Jane Xu, PhD, MPH, MS writes from the U.S. with a message of Peace:
Peace is our natural yearning, and a basic condition for our well-being. Unfortunately, human desires for wealth, status, or power, etc., frequently (at times severely) disturb our peace, from personal inner peace, to societal and even global peace! May the peace-disturbing desires be tamed! May peace be restored in our souls, in our societies, and on our planet!
Sue Reid writes from the UK with a message of Peace:
Change comes when we stand together as one. Peace and love will win ❤️
Read our second-week post: And get to know them :)
Read our first-week post: And get to know them :)
Selfies for Peace is a collective effort to pass on our wishes for a peaceful world.
Would you like to help us? It is simple:
Would you like to submit your wishes and selfie?
It is extremely easy. We are just starting and we need all the support we can get.
The Pale Blue Dot
The Pale Blue Dot By: Carl Sagan
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.
It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Love,
Jose
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Amazing picture by Carl Sagan. It does really put life into perspective. We are nothing really, and we are everything. Thank you for reminding us to stick together and imagine a world of peace. Keep spreading the love Jose. 💕
That Carl Sagan's vantage point is so profound, it puts everything in perspective.
I agree with you Jose - From that vantage point, instead of seeing insignificance of the earth and humans, we can get an elevated sense of how amazing the existence of humanity is, and related to the topic of this post/publication, how precious peace is to keep humanity surviving and thriving!