Word: cosmically
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...Heffalump. Now astronomers can share his bafflement as they grope for words to describe their own strange encounter. Off in the distant heavens, among a grouping of stars that the ancients called Cygnus (the Swan), they seem to have found a celestial version of a Heffalump. It is a cosmic beast of such enormous gravity that it appears to be tugging, stretching and, indeed, slowly gobbling up its giant companion, a massive star more than 20 times the size of the sun. Like Milne's fantasy, it is a huge, great, enormous, big nothing. In the catchy phrase of retired...
Even in an age that has witnessed everything from the harnessing of the atom to flights across the solar system, the thought of matter going down a kind of cosmic drain stretches the mind. It is totally at odds with common sense and, a cynic might say, smacks slightly of selfdelusion, if not madness. After all, the frightful Heffalump turned out to be only Pooh with his head stuck in a jar of honey...
...only enlarges its universe but expands and ennobles itself. Perhaps the ideal metaphor is not Piglet's Heffalump but Browning's famous declamation: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for." To the growing fraternity of black-hole theorists, that cosmic vision is the ultimate lodestar...
Wayne Sulo Aho, 61, says he had his "cosmic initiation" in the Mojave Desert in 1957, when he encountered a "beautiful, majestic egg-shaped light" that was given off by a spacecraft. He claims that the extraterrestrial crew guided him through a number of "unusual experiences" including a military-style inspection of their ranks. Now president of an association of flying-saucer believers called the New Age Foundation, Inc., Aho this year urged President Carter to appoint an Ambassador to Outer Space, just in case more otherworldly visitors show up. So far, the President has not responded...
Among his more provocative propositions: that man created God in his own image; that a man cannot comprehend God's transcendent love unless he has fully experienced the carnal love of a woman; that God is a cosmic jokester, with man as his butt and the earth as his torture chamber; that nothingness is the bedrock meaning of existence...