Through it I got to see moons of Jupiter, phases of Venus and rings of Saturn. But above all these eye-openers, there was moon. There in eyepiece stood craggy mountains - spires casting long shadows across crater lowlands, dark maria and (painfully) bright highlands, a surface pockmarked with craters of all sizes, some with bright ejecta rays and some funny squiggle type features. I soon learned that greatest amount of detail was seen along terminator, that line splitting light from dark, where shadows played across features showing them in stark contrast. And to cap it all, each night different features could be seen in detail.

They say that as you get older, your memory plays tricks on you - you remember good things more than bad. I remember lots of clear, frosty winter nights when I could point my 'scope at moon and scan its disk for some feature I had not seen in relief before. These days, skies seem to be cloudy much more frequently and frosty winter nights are few and far between. I guess that's global warming for you!

Time moved on and I moved in and out of committee positions in astronomy societies, editing some magazines along way (I now put my own ezine, called Photon - http://www.photonezine.com), together every couple of months). Astronomy became more about bureaucracy of running clubs than about looking through a telescope. Then, in late '90s, wanting to get back to my astronomical "roots", I bought a 'real' telescope, an 8" reflector which I readily turned towards moon. Stunning views once again assailed my eyes (prompting memories of halcyon nights as a 12 year old looking through my old 60mm scope).

From viewpoint of a modern microbiologist, we hear call for integration and common sense in sciences that are all too often devising separate stakes and battlements to pontificate from, on high. The 'experts' thus proving their ignorance because result inevitably is specious ego and puffery. Truth did not divide herself up for prissy 'nerds' to prevail upon, with their massive convolutions and devious attempts to practice buffoonery upon her.

In August of 1980 Psychology Today ran an article by Harold J. Morowitz, professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. I recommend a complete reading of this article for anyone who has suffered through a complete exposure to all that our modern education system is comprised of; as it tries to convince you that everything is 'black and white' and that no soul exists through avoidance of its instruction (except a few artists who defy norm).

"REDISCOVERING THE MIND;

Physical scientists are returning to view that thought - meaning mind - is one of nature's ultimate realities'.

The study of life at all levels, from social to molecular behavior, has in modern times relied on reductionism as chief explanatory concept. This approach to knowledge tries to comprehend one level of scientific phenomena in terms of concepts at a lower and presumably more fundamental level... Reductionism at psychological level is exemplified by viewpoint in Carl Sagan's best selling book THE DRAGONS OF EDEN.

He writes: 'My fundamental premise about brain is that its workings- what we sometimes call 'mind' - are a consequence of its anatomy and, physiology and nothing more.' As a further demonstration of this trend of thought, we note that Sagan's glossary does not contain words mind, consciousness, perception, awareness or thought, but rather deals with entries such as synapse, lobotomy, proteins and electrodes…

Werner Heisenberg, one of founders of new physics, became deeply involved in issues of philosophy and humanism. In PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF QUANTUM PHYSICS, he wrote of physicists having to renounce thoughts of an objective time-scale common to all observers, and of events in time and space that are independent of our ability to observe them. Heisenberg stressed that laws of nature no longer dealt with elementary particles, but with our knowledge of these particles - that is, with 'contents of our minds'. Erwin Schrödinger, man who formulated fundamental equation of quantum mechanics, wrote an extraordinary little book in 1958 called MIND AND MATTER. In this series of essays, he moved from results of new physics to a rather mystical view of universe that he identified with 'perennial philosophy' of Aldous Huxley. Schrödinger was first of quantum theoreticians to express sympathy with UPANISHADS and Eastern philosophical thought. A growing body of literature now embodies this perspective, including two popular works. THE TAO OF PHYSICS by Fritjof Capra, and THE DANCING WU-LI MASTERS by Gary Zukav...