What is the Sun?
Modern humans speak of it as just a star, a small and ordinary one at that, located at the outskirts of a minor galaxy in some unimpressive corner of the universe. Supervised by that stern and dogmatic watchdog known as materialist-reductionist Western science, we describe it as an inert physical object, firmly in the realm of the knowable. The Wikipedia entry for Sun bolsters this mundane view with an impressive collection of facts, mere adjectives to attach to a noun, such as its Spectral Classification (G2V), its Metallicity (0.0122), its Obliquity (7.25°), its Core Temperature (27 million ℉), its Age (4.6 Billion years) and so on. Basically, it’s an incredibly big hot ball of plasma (oh cool! right?) at the center of the solar system, and we’ve measured it this way and that and published lots of experimental results, and sure there’s still a few things to be determined about its innards but that’s just a matter of time, so move along folks, there’s no mystery here. Oh, ancient civilizations and primitive folk worshiped the Sun, but we’re too sophisticated now for that kind of nonsense.
A simplified picture of this giant put down is also provided to all children as they come of age in the schooling system and receive their first vaccinations against imagination.
An alternate yet perfectly valid Wikipedia entry for what the Sun is might be written as a story.
The Sun is Life. If the entity known as the Sun were to suddenly disappear from the daytime sky, taking away its heat and light, the entire human race would be plunged into confusion and disbelief within minutes. As a global night lengthens into a continuous, smothering blanket, unbroken by the relief of dawn, the sickening realization that the Sun isn’t going to rise as usual would instead give rise to anger, denial, fear, and insanity. For a while, like all disasters this may bring out the best in us, and the groups gathered in solidarity around bonfires would show kindness and courage to aid each other. Still, as food and fuels dwindle, civilization will disintegrate as if it never existed. Plants and trees wither. Animals huddle in apathy or wander aimlessly to pass their remaining days on a miserably cold and dark planet. The last creatures to perish are the cannibalistic, the opportunistic, the least picky. A total shutdown of photosynthesis ultimately spares only the ancient extremophile microbes that persist deep under the frozen crust, as if it were 3 Billion years BC again. As proof of this narrative, consider the mass extinction events of the past. The dinosaur-killing asteroid that wiped out most species on the planet did so by kicking up a thin layer of dust in the high atmosphere to block out the Sun for a bit.
Which of these sorts of perspectives on the Sun feels more true, more powerful, more relevant?
Nothing could have begun without the Sun. Nothing could have existed without the Sun. Everything that we are is because of the Sun. Without the Sun existing, “we” would not be around to perceive it, or ourselves. No conscious beings at all to debate existence. If that is not a definition for God, the undefinable Source of creation, what is? The Sun is God.
The Sun is life. Sunlight illuminates the world that it brought into existence.
Is it a mere coincidence that despite possessing eyes that evolved under the Sun for millions of years, we cannot bear to look directly at the light of the same Sun in its fullness for even a casual glance, and the folly of persisting in doing so blinds us within seconds? Who dares to face a God? In order to face creation itself without burning up or turning blind, one must first turn in one’s ticket to the world of the living, and return to dust. Only then can one sit unflinching under its stare, as a rock on desert sands does.
Is it just an inconvenient technical glitch, an unsolvable physics problem, that no space probe we can construct will ever contact the Sun? No material found or fabricated on Earth can withstand the energy of creation itself. All forms become formless in that realm. Everything under the Sun will melt, vaporize, and become plasma, one with it, long before three million degrees Fahrenheit. We can never understand the Source by turning its illuminating light upon itself. Rather than face that humbling fact, we instead space launch probes the other way, into the frozen depths, because that’s all we can do.
All life on Earth grows and orients itself on an axis to the Sun, both in form and behavior. The morphology of trees evolving over billions of years, from photosynthetic microbes floating free as pond scum to progressively taller stacked versions, speak of the Sun as the attractor that shaped their form. Limbs reach out to the creator as far as physics, chemistry, and biology will permit. Flowers, leaves, tendrils, and roots are all in essence animated carbon and water wearing photosensitive garb. Animals, birds, and fish, being mobile and untethered, adjust and time their activities and movements to what the Sun suggests each hour of the day. A myriad assortment of molecular clocks spin inside the cells of each and every living thing, all geared to the daily turning of that giant wheel in the sky.
Magic is the ability of a trick to surprise and delight us. Magic of the ordinary kind loses its charm with repetition. Even if one doesn’t understand how the trick is performed, the senses deaden to it. All of human technology is like that. No matter how impressive it is at first encounter, eventually the enchantment fades and the trick bores. Even if most of us have no clue what the ten million odd components of a jet plane really do, we’ve seen those metal birds fly often enough to be nonchalant. True Magic, on the other hand, is the domain of Gods. It resists the devitalization that ordinary magic suffers from when repeated. Its charm is timeless, its appeal is universal. And what else is sunlight at dawn, if not True Magic?
For untold ages, man and ape alike have worshiped the great God who redeems the world by rising out of darkness. Carl Jung in recounting his travels to Africa observed baboons sitting quietly on the rise of a cliff, waiting for sunrise in what can only be described as a posture of adoration. Those same creatures, after having been chattering and screeching throughout the day, then fell into an unmistakable dejection with the coming of primordial darkness each night, and their eyes told of a longing for more light. In his book The Soul of the Ape, Eugene Marais similarly described how the primates he was studying would sink into what can only be described as depression each dusk as they watched the sun rays disappear. All tribal people have a similar response to sundown, and spirits rebound only when a bonfire is lit, for fire is compressed sunlight being released. In modernity, we similarly resist the gloom of darkness for long past what is good for us with artificial lights, essentially haggling out an extension of the day by invoking ancient stored sunlight from a power plant miles away.
All forms become formless under the Sun and one with it. Can anything face creation without burning up?
Worship of the Sun – as the proto God, not just a minor deity – was central to all civilizations, and to every society and all times except the one we find ourselves in. Many archaic creation myths symbolized the Sun as the father whose life-giving rays impregnate the Earth mother and bring creation into existence. The Egyptians viewed the Sun god Ra as being charioted across the sky accompanied by his retinue of lesser gods. The tranquility of the Native American Indian man was founded upon being a sun of the Sun, and his morning prayer was both to shepherd the Sun along its daily journey as well as to bask in its glory. In Hinduism, worship of the Sun god, performed as Surya Namaskar sun salutations, is the essential means to realize Brahman, the ultimate reality of the universe.
These tales of worship aren’t just nice stories. These are symbolic representations of reality itself. Ancient cultures recognized the Sun as the bedrock upon which rests not just all of the natural world, but existence too. Humans, the hairless apes with consciousness that can observe the universe, arise from this natural world. The power, potential, and plan to ultimately bear life on Earth in four plus billion years, including us self-aware apes, existed in the Sun from the start, just as an apple tree and its apples are already implied in a seed. Why then do we now deliberately choose to drain the Sun of all mythic power? Is it because to acknowledge its power is to acknowledge our true relationship to existence itself? Humanity, schizoid as it is today, would rather sever itself from all relationships and pretend to be floating untethered through space as a mere fluke, a random accident of the universe. That perverted way of thinking suits our sociopathic race, given our disconnection with the natural world.
A romantic might perhaps say that human love is by nature imperfect, and needs the fire of suffering to be forged into an eventually stronger form. Before love matures to recognize the divine in the Other, it must necessarily pass through painful periods of sulking, door slams, and feigned indifference. It would appear that we are in that kind of relationship with the Sun.
Einstein famously noted that imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire universe, and we will always be in a state of not knowing 99 percent of what is to be known. What’s missing from our waking moments isn’t more knowledge, but more magic. True Magic. To return to a proper relationship with existence, to stop feeling alien and alienated, perhaps we can start by re-imagining the Sun in a new light. The Sun is not merely essential for life, but Life itself – inseparable from reality, from consciousness, from us. We are the children of the Sun.
