Yuri Gagarin: ‘My beautiful earth…’

What are you going to do on the moon?

It is a strange situation… When the first Russian astronaut, Yuri Gagarin – who reached closest to the moon in the history of man – came back, he was asked by the journalists, “What was your first thought when you reached the moon?”

He said, “The first thought… I looked at the earth. It was looking so beautiful from there. It is eight times bigger than the moon, and from the moon it shines exactly as moon shines, but eight times more. The moon becomes just as ordinary as the earth.”

It is only from far away that you catch the reflected rays of the sun. The moon has no light of its own; when you reach the moon, it is the most deserted, the ugliest spot possible, because there is no water, no greenery, no roses. Nothing happens there at all – it is just a desert, utterly dead.

“But from the moon,” Yuri Gagarin said, “my first thought was, `My beautiful earth…'” Strange, when you live on the earth, you don’t bother about the earth. Yuri Gagarin had lived his whole life on the earth and he had never thought, “My beautiful earth…”

And the second thing he said was, “When I uttered to myself `my beautiful earth,’ I remembered that I am a communist and I belong to the Soviet Union. But from the moon the earth is no longer divided into the Soviet Union and Germany and Japan and America and India.” All these stupid lines that we have created on the map don’t exist on the earth. For the first time, from the moon, he felt one humanity, one earth – and so beautiful.

Yuri Gagarin was in India. I met him in New Delhi and I asked him, “Since you have been back to the earth, have you ever thought again, ‘How beautiful is my earth’?”

He looked at me shocked. He said, “Nobody has asked that question and I have never thought that about the earth again.”

Man looks always to faraway things; he seems to be completely unaware of that which is obvious, that which is close.

Osho, Satyam Shivam Sundram, Ch 1, Q 2