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John Shepherd spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of miles into space.
Netflix’s John Was Trying to Contact Aliens is amazing and moving
The man who tried to contact aliens from his grandma’s living room
Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory official
Viktor Ambartsumian Armenian-Soviet scientist founder of the Byurakan Observatory
Synopsis Mount Aragaz is the highest mountain in Armenia. At an altitude of 3500 m one can find the remnants of a prestige project of the Soviet Union: the weather beaten buildings of Aragats Cosmic Ray Division. Here, more than a hundred men used to search for messengers from distant galaxies – particles, created by cosmic radiation on its way to earth in billions of tiny explosions. Most of the researchers left, when the financial support of the institution collapsed with the Soviet Union. However, despite the lack of funding a small group of Armenian scientists endures on the top of Mount Aragaz. Like astronauts in a spaceship they continue their research, hoping for a sensation: The discovery of unknown galaxies.
Statement
The Universe, the Nothingness, the Solitude – three scientists are holding out at what was once the Soviet Union’s greatest cosmic research station. Are they closer to the secret of Creation – here, on top of Armenia’s highest mountain? In their work they rather look like Sisyphus’ brothers, and it is not by accident that they start searching for the meaning of their existence, of God’s existence. Man asks, and the World does not reply. Or does it?
DURATION: 30 min
FORMAT: 35 mm / Farbe / 1:1,85 / DolbySR
LANGUAGE: armenian / german and english subtitles (optional)
PRODUCTION: Pelle Film in Ko-Produktion mit der HFF München und dem Bayerischen Rundfunk
Armenia’s Cosmic-Ray Catchers 2020 article
‘We’re Above Civilization’: life in a cosmic-ray station photo essay
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timespace coordinates: 1920’s London
Vita & Virginia is a 2018 biographical romantic drama film directed by Chanya Button, adapted from the 1992 play Vita & Virginia by Eileen Atkins. The film stars Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki,
Vita & Virginia tells the story of the love affair between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: 1870, Wichita Falls, Texas > San Antonio
News of the World is a 2020 American Western drama film co-written and directed by Paul Greengrass, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Paulette Jiles, and starring Tom Hanks and introducing Helena Zengel. The film follows a Civil War veteran who must return a young girl who was taken in by (Kiowa) Native Americans as an infant to her last remaining family. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: Los Angeles in 1990
The Little Things is a 2021 American neo-noir crime thriller film written and directed by John Lee Hancock. The plot follows two police officers (Denzel Washington and Rami Malek) who try to catch a serial killer in 1990s Los Angeles, when they find a strange man (Jared Leto) who becomes their top suspect. (wiki)
Deutschlandfunk Kultur: Eine Lange Nacht über Mystiker Jacob Böhme: Liebe und Zorn von Ronald Steckel (in German/download or listen)
Mysterium Magnum Chapter 11: Of the Mystery of Creation translated by John Ellistone for John Sparrow
“Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) was a peasant shoemaker who was infused with mystical divine light and started writing marvelous books in which he described panoramic visions of the Being of God, the eternal generation of the Godhead, the birth of the cosmos and the fall of Lucifer. Scholars of the royal courts and universities of Germany were astounded that an unlearned sexton could produce works like Aurora, The Three Principles of the Divine Essence and The Threefold Life of Man. These books, written in the homespun prose of a tradesman and with the strangest vocabulary the world had ever heard, exerted a mystifying power over his contemporaries. They thrilled Renaissance thinkers, reduced the clergy to sputtering rage and led some from darkness to light, but were received impassively by no one.
His thought is difficult to categorize except in seemingly oxymoronic terms like Esoteric Christianity, philosophical mysticism, sacred science, spiritual alchemy, Sophianic Lutheranism, psychological cosmology. Boehme’s philosophy synthesized two obscure seventeenth century intellectual movements (Germanic mysticism and philosophical alchemy) and, against all odds, became a significant force in the development of western science, art, philosophy and spirituality. Boehme has never been widely read and understood, but for the most part has been moderated to society by his interpreters—scientists and mystics, clergymen and occultists, scholars and fanatics. The diversity of thought inspired by Boehme indicates just how open to interpretation his highly figurative writings are. It has been said that the Boehmean literature is like a picnic to which Jacob brings the words and the reader brings the meaning. Boehme himself likens his writings to a looking glass wherein a man may see himself.
For three centuries Jacob Boehme’s thought ran through the western world like a hidden stream, influencing Newton, Milton, George Fox, the Philadelphian Society, the Cambridge Platonists, the Bavarian Illuminati (!), Goethe, Kant, Heidegger, Blake, Coleridge, Emerson, William Law, Madam Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Hegel and Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche, Martensen and his nemesis Kierkegaard, Carl Jung and Martin Buber; many occultists and many clergymen.
In the latter half of the 20th century Boehme lapsed into relative obscurity. His books remained difficult to find until 2010 when they were rescued from oblivion by, well, by this website. All of Boehme’s works in English translation are now digitized and available on the LIBRARY PAGE
TimeSpace Warps 