Dare to take this personally!

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. "

- Carl Sagan

Dr. Carl Edward Sagan (1934-96) was a popularising American astronomer and astrobiologist, and I am sure he meant this in the grand historical sense. But when I read the quote, it resonated as the immense difficulty of unravelling my past into the magic of the present.

Perhaps I will stand corrected, but the key to getting your power back is to give it up. The difference is surrender as opposed to conflict - and I am not making a political statement, just a personal one about my own state of being...

Against the backdrop of the cosmos, it is possible to feel the humility to understand the bamboozle... And I feel sure that Carl, the stargazer, must have known this, and his quote is just good advice to apply a new and more enlightened focus on life.