Reaching for the stars

When we look up at the stars in the sky (which presents no problem for us at all, it’s like watching the cat sitting on the mat - it’s there, it’s alright) and we feel a yearning, part of that is a frustration of seeing something we can’t reach. We may gaze at stars but we always have to return to the here and now, to appreciate what we have at home. We have our own star, the sun, we have our own planet and our own companions. We are very lucky and yet we don’t appreciate it as we might. We look up at the stars. They shine down on us just as they shine down on their own orbiting planets, and that reminds us of our future, which we can’t possibly see because it hasn’t happened yet. But we can project probabilities by referring to the past, by listening to the stories which have made us what we are and moulded our social attitudes. It’s where we find out what has happened, and perhaps learn things about human history we’d rather not know about - like the many humans who have been exploited and the many lives wasted.
The age of the machines has arrived and machine minds are responsible for a lot of damage. We’ve even turned animals into machines and we have them producing goods for us from the confines of cages and concrete pens. In this respect things couldn’t be worse, and yet we can look up at the stars and imagine that other civilisations have been through this too. They’ve had to get to know who they are by seeing the very worst in themselves and then repairing the damage and coming, perhaps battered by their experiences, out the other side, thus getting to know the true nature of who they are.
Our treatment of animals is perhaps the nadir of our own civilisation. It symbolises not only what we are capable of doing to advantage ourselves but what we are capable of ignoring. Instead of wanting to know, to know who we are, to know what we must do. All of which is an essential stage in our development, that other civilisations, on other planets, must have been through or are going through or are yet to go through. Star gazing for us is no doubt much the same as it is for them, a reference point for reaching out beyond our own experience, to something better than we have here and now. Star gazing stimulates the imagination to design future trends based on probabilities, optimistic, vegan, non-violent probabilities.