recursive Tao

M.C. Escher, Reptiles, 1943

M. C. Escher, Drawing Hands, (lithograph, 1948)

Abstract diagram of M. C. Escher's Drawing Hands. On top, a seeming paradox. Below, its resolution.
Douglas Hofstadter

Twelve self-engulfing TV screens. I would have included one more, had 13 not been prime.
Douglas Hofstadter

Sierpinski triangle

Alexandre Duret-Lutz, Recursive Blanket Flower

Tao identity states

Igor Morski

Following the description of the observation of internal states of the consciousness system, Charles T. Tart discusses the description and properties of the self-observation of identity states, created by the sense of identity subsystem of consciousness:

Identity States

Self-observation, observation of others, and psychoanalytic data indicate that various stimuli can produce marked reorganizations of ego functioning very rapidly, even though these all remain within the consensus reality definitions of "normal" consciousness. These identity states are much like d-SoCs and can be studied in the systems approach framework. They are hard to observe in ordinary life because of the ease and rapidity of transition, their emotional charge, and other reasons. The isolation of knowledge and experience in various identity states is responsible for much of the psychopathology of everyday life.

Definition of Identity States

The concept of d-SoCs comes to us in commonsense form, as well as in terms of my initial research interests, from people's experiences of radically altered states of consciousness—states like drunkenness, dreaming, marijuana intoxication, certain meditative states. These represent such radical shifts in the patterning, the system properties of consciousness, that most people experiencing them are forced to notice that the state of their consciousness is quite different, even if they are poor observers. A person need not have developed an Observer in order to notice such a change in his state of consciousness: so many things are so clearly different that the observation is forced on him.
Although this is the origin and the main focus of the concept of d-SoCs, the systems approach is applicable to important variations occurring within the overall pattern we call the ordinary d-SoC, variations that can be termed identity states. My own self-observation and much scattered psychological data, particularly data gathered in the course of psychoanalytic investigations, indicate that as different situations impinge on a person and activate different emotional drives, distinct changes in the organization of his ego can take place. Certain drives become inhibited or activated, and the whole constellation of psychological functioning alters its configuration around them.
The most cogent formulation of these data into a comprehensive picture is that of the Armenian philosopher and spiritual teacher, George Gurdjieff. The following selection from Ouspensky's report of Gurdjieff's early lectures expresses Gurdjieff's idea that we have many "I's," many little egos:

"One of man's important mistakes," he said, "one which must be remembered, is his illusion in regard to his I."
"Man such as we know him, the 'man machine,' the man who cannot 'do,' and with whom and through whom everything 'happens,' cannot have a permanent and single I. His I changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings, and moods, and he makes a profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago. "Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation, says 'I.' And in each case it seems to be taken for granted that this I belongs o the Whole, to the whole man, and that a thought, a desire, or an aversion is expressed by this Whole. In actual fact there is no foundation whatever for this assumption. Man's every thought and desire appears and lives quite separately and independently of the Whole. And the Whole never expresses itself, for the simple reason that it exists, as such, only physically as a thing, and in the abstract as a concept. Man has no individual I. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small I's, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking 'I.' And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion."
"The alternation of I's, their continual obvious struggle for supremacy, is controlled by accidental external influences. Warmth, sunshine, fine weather, immediately call up a whole group of I's. Cold, fog, rain, call up another group of I's, other associations, other feelings, other actions. There is nothing in man able to control this change of I's, chiefly because man does not notice, or know of it; he lives always in the last I. Some I's, of course, are stronger than others. But it is not their own conscious strength; they have been created by the strength of accidents or mechanical external stimuli. Education, imitation, reading, the hypnotism of religion, caste, and traditions, or the glamour of new slogans, create very strong I's in man's personality, which dominate whole series of other, weaker, I's. But their strength is the strength of the 'rolls' in the centers. "And all I's making up a man's personality have the same origin as these 'rolls'; they are the results of external influences; and both are set in motion and controlled by fresh external influences."
"Man has no individuality. He has no single, big I. Man is divided into a multiplicity of small I's."
"And each separate small I is able to call itself by the name of the Whole, to act in the name of the Whole, to agree or disagree, to give promises, to make decisions, with which another I or the Whole will have to deal. This explains why people so often make decisions and so seldom carry them out. A man decides to get up early beginning from the following day. One I, or a group of I's, decide this. but getting up is the business of another I who entirely disagrees with the decision and may even know absolutely nothing about it. Of course the man will again go on sleeping in the morning and in the evening he will again decide to get up early. In some cases this may assume very unpleasant consequences for a man. A small accidental I may promise something, not to itself, but to someone else at a certain moment simply out of vanity or for amusement. Then it disappears, but the man, that is, the whole combination of other I's who are quite innocent of this, may have to pay for it all his life. It is the tragedy of the human being that any small I has the right to sign checks and promissory notes and the man, that is, the Whole, has to meet them.
People's whole lives often consist in paying off the promissory notes of small accidental I's."

Gurdjieff's concept of these rapidly alternating I's is similar to the systems approach concept of d-SoCs. If we call each I an identity state, then each (1) has an overall pattern of functioning, a gestalt, which gives it a system identity and distinguishes it from other identity states; (2) is composed of structures/subsystems, psychological functions, skills, memories; (3) possesses unique properties not present in other identity states; (4) presumably has some stabilizing processes, although apparently fewer than the ordinary d-SoC as a whole, since identity states can change so rapidly; (5) functions as a tool for coping with the world, with varying degrees of effectiveness; and (6) requires an induction process to transit from one identity state to another, a requisite stimulus to bring on a new identity state.
These alterations in functioning that I call identity states can thus be usefully studied with the systems approach to consciousness. Yet they are almost never identified as d-SoCs in ordinary people, for several reasons.
First, each person has a large repertoire of these identity states and transits between one and another of them extremely readily, practically instantly. Thus, no obvious lapses or transitional phenomena occur that would make him likely to notice the transitions.
Second, all these identity states share much psychological functioning in common, such as speaking English, responding to the same proper name, wearing the same sets of clothes. These many common properties make differences difficult to notice.
Third, all a person's ordinarily used identity states share in his culturally defined consensus reality. Although certain aspects of reality are emphasized by particular identity states, the culture as a whole implicitly allows a wide variety of identity states in its definitions of "normal" consciousness and consensus reality. Within the cultural consensus reality, for example, there are well-understood concepts, perceptions, and allowed behaviors associated with being angry, being sad, feeling sexual desire, being afraid.
Fourth, a person's identification is ordinarily very high, complete, with each of these identity states. He projects the feeling of "I" onto it (the Sense of Identity subsystem function discussed in Chapter 8). This, coupled with the culturally instilled need to believe that he is a single personality, causes him to gloss over distinctions. Thus he says, "I am angry," "I am sad," rather than, "A state of sadness has organized mental functioning differently from a state of anger." The culture also reinforces a person for behaving as if he were a unity.
Fifth, identity states are driven by needs, fears, attachments, defensive, maneuvers, coping mechanisms, and this highly charged quality of an identity state makes it unlikely that the person involved will be engaged in self-observation.
Sixth, many identity states have, as a central focus, emotional needs and drives that are socially unacceptable or only partially acceptable. Given the fact that people need to feel accepted, an individual may have many important reasons for not noticing that he has discrete identity states. Thus, when he is in a socially "normal" identity state, being a good person, he may be unable to be aware of a different identity state that sometimes occurs in which he hates his best friend. The two states are incompatible, so automatized defense mechanisms (Gurdjieff calls them buffers) prevent him from being aware of the one identity state while in the other. This is, in systems approach terminology, state-specific knowledge. Ordinarily, special psychotherapists techniques are required to make a person aware of these contradictory feelings and identity states within himself. Meditative practices designed to create the Observer also facilitate this sort of knowledge.
The development of an Observer can allow a person considerable access to observing different identity states. An outside observer can often clearly infer different identity states, but a person who has not developed the Observer function well may never notice his many transitions from one identity state to another. Thus ordinary consciousness, or what society values as "normal" consciousness, may actually consist of a large number of d-SoCs, identity states. But the overall similarities between these identity states and the difficulty of observing them, for the reasons discussed above, lead us to think of ordinary consciousness as relatively unitary state.
Gurdjieff sees the rapid, unnoticed transitions between identity states, and their relative isolation from one another, as the major cause of the psychopathology of everyday life. I agree with him, and believe this topic deserves intensive psychological research.

Functions of Identity States
 
An identity state, like a d-SoC, has coping functions. The culture a person is born into actively inhibits some of his human potentials, as well as developing some. Thus, even in the most smoothly functioning cultures, there is bound to be some disharmony, some conflict between a person's emerging and potential self and he demands placed on him to which he must conform in one way or another if he is to survive in that social environment. The psychopathology of everyday life is abundantly obvious and has been amply documented by psychological studies.
At the fringes of consciousness, then, there is a vast unknown, not simply of relatively neutral potentials that never developed, but of emotionally and cognitively frightening things, conflicts that were never resolved, experiences that did not fit consensus reality, feelings that were never expressed, problems that were never faced. Immersion is consensus reality in the ordinary d-SoC is a protection from this potentially frightening and overwhelming unknown; it is the safe, cultivated clearing in the dark, unexplored forest of the mind.
An identity state is a specialized version of the ordinary d-SoC, a structure acceptable to consensus reality (ignoring obviously pathological identity states). The extrainformational "This is me" quality from the Sense of Identity subsystem added to certain contents/structures constellates the energies of consciousness around them and produces an identity, a role that a person partially or completely identified with for the time. The identity "eats energy."
A particular identity state thus acts as loading stabilization for the ordinary d-SoC; it absorbs much available energy that might otherwise activate unknown and perhaps implicitly feared contents that are not acceptable. When you "know" who are, when you take on an identity state, then you immediately have criteria for dealing with various situations. If I am a "father" in this moment I know that certain things are expected and desired of me and I can cope well within that framework with situations involving my children. If the situation changes and I now become a "professor," then I have a new set of rules on how to cope with situations involving people who have identified with the roles of "students."
Some of a person's most important problems arise when his is in an identity state that is not really suited to the situation: my children are unhappy when I am a professor when they want a father, and I am not comfortable when my students want me to be like a father when I think the role of professor is more appropriate.
Being caught in a situation in which one has no ready role to use and identify with is unusual. For most people such situations can be lightly confusing or frightening, since they do not know how to think or act. They can become susceptible to any authority who offers ready-made roles/solutions in such situations. If the country is "going to hell" and nobody seems to have any answer, it may feel much better to be a "patriot" and blame "traitors" than to live with your confusion.
On the other hand, lack of an immediately available role can offer a unique opportunity to temporarily escape from the tyranny of roles.
Once a person has identified with a role, the resulting identity state stabilizes his d-SoC not only through loading stabilization, but through the other three stabilization processes discussed... When he is coping successfully and thus feeling good in a particular identity state, this constitutes positive feedback stabilization; he tends to engage in more thoughts and actions that expand and strengthen the identity state. If the fear of having no identity is strong and/or the rewards from a particular identity state are high, this can hinder escape from that identity state. Consider how many successful businessmen work themselves to death, not knowing how to stop being businessmen for even short periods, or how many men die within a few years of retiring, not having their work identity to sustain them.
Success from being in a particular identity state encourages a person to avoid or suppress thoughts and actions that tends to disrupt that state: this is negative feedback stabilization. A "good soldier" is obtaining valuable information about enemy troop movements—information that may save the lives of his buddies—by torturing a native child: he actively suppresses his own identity state of a "father" is order to function effectively in his "soldier' identity.
Being in a particular identity state also functions as limiting stabilization. The identity leads to selective perception to make perceptions congruent with the reigning identity state. Certain kinds of perceptions that might activate other identity states are repressed. The tortured child is perceived as an "enemy agent," not as a "child." This keeps emotional and attention/awareness energy out of empathic processes that, if activated, would undermine and disrupt the "soldier" identity.
Identity states, then, are both tools for coping with the environment and ways of avoiding the unknown. The degree to which they serve mainly one or the other function probably varies tremendously form individual to individual and identity to identity. Some people are terribly afraid of anything outside the few narrow identities they always function in: by staying in one of the other of those identity states constantly, they never feel the fear of the unknown. Others have less fear of the unknown, but find the rewards from functioning in a few identity states are so high that they have no real need or interest to go outside them. The latter type probably characterizes a stable, well-integrated society, with most citizens quite content in a socially accepted identity states.
For discussion of radically altered discrete states like hypnosis or drunkenness, the concept of the ordinary d-SoC as relatively unitary is useful. As the systems approach becomes more articulated, however, we shall have to deal with these identity states that exist within the boundaries of the ordinary d-SoC and that probably also function within the boundaries of various d-ASCs.
In this book, I continue to use the terms discrete state of consciousness and discrete altered state of consciousness to refer to the rather radical alterations like hypnosis or drunkenness that gave rise to the concept in the first place. I use the phrase identity state to indicate the more subtle division.

who knows where the Tao goes?

Across the evening sky all the birds are leaving
But how can they know it's time for them to go?
Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming
I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

Sad deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know it's time for them to go
But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving
I do not count the time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone while my love is near me
I know it will be so until it's time to go
So come the storms of winter and then the birds in spring again
I have no fear of time

For who knows how my love grows?
And who knows where the time goes?

Putney Vale Cemetery and Crematorium, Wimbledon, Greater London, England

a legacy for Tao - VII

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

The Fundamentalist Error Today

It is probably no coincidence that at the same time that these old epistemological debates resurface, we are seeing a renewal of apparently religiously inspired warfare all over the planet, and we are seeing a resurgence of the kind of understanding of faith that was expressed by my fundamentalist student who believed in the literal truth-value of religious texts. We are seeing not only Islamic fundamentalism, not only Christian fundamentalism, but also Jewish fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism, and patches of Buddhist fundamentalism (although Buddhism has some built in protections). Fundamentalism is not limited to “religions” however – it arises in Marxism and psychoanalysis, and, most seriously in America today, in free market economic fundamentalism and the strict construction of the Constitution, constitutional fundamentalism.
So a pattern of thinking – this style of taking things literally rather than regarding any text as having multiple levels of meaning with the interpretation changing over time, always depending on the context – is becoming a widespread epidemic. Both Christians and Muslims are increasing in numbers, and in many places, especially Africa, the forms of Christianity and Islam that are spreading are the most literal and the most supernaturally oriented, without the polite reinterpretation of texts as myth or metaphor that is fairly common among believers in the West.
Much of this has developed since Gregory’s death, but I remember arguing with  him in the 1970s that fundamentalism is by definition a modern pathology. Certainly the ancients took the creation story as true. But, without the modern concept of scientific knowledge as a particular kind of knowledge that is established and modified in specific ways, truth had a different, more ambiguous meaning. Fundamentalism attempts to give to non-scientific ways of knowing the status that is given to science, but it omits the openness of science to new evidence that is essential to that status.
Although what is happening in the United States these days looks fairly strange from the vantage point of Europe, what is equally worrying is that so many educated people throughout the industrialized world have simply become deaf to religious language, and have no access to thinking about the meaning of religion in people’s lives and motivations. Fundamentalists think their beliefs are “true” in a simplistic way, while others think they are “false” in a simplistic way. Scientifically educated people have not only ceased to believe particular doctrines but they have lost the capacity to empathize with those who do, transforming methodologies and useful heuristics, like reductionism, into ontologies. We need to be equally on guard against multiple kinds of illiteracy, for aesthetic and spiritual illiteracy may be as dangerous as scientific illiteracy.
Some of the pathologies of contemporary life may be due to the loss of kinds of knowledge that are now unacceptable because of the way they are coded and mixed with muddle-headedness. The rise of fundamentalism in a secularizing world is reminiscent of the Gospel story,

44 Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.
45 Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.
(Matthew xii:44–45)

44 Allora dice: Ritornerò nella mia casa donde sono uscito; e giuntovi, la trova vuota, spazzata e adorna.
45 Allora va e prende seco altri sette spiriti peggiori di lui, i quali, entrati, prendon quivi dimora; e l’ultima condizione di cotest’uomo divien peggiore della prima. Così avverrà anche a questa malvagia generazione.
(Matteo, 12:44-45)

where a man is cleansed of an unclean spirit who then comes back with seven others more evil than himself and, finding the man’s soul swept and garnished, moves back in with his companions. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. I think that the only defense against what I take to be a dangerous and erroneous set of attitudes towards religion is a much more flexible understanding of the possible meanings of faith, as contrasted with belief, in people’s lives, and in the lives of scientists. There is an apparent symmetry of mutual blindness.
There is still however a need for an integrative level of scientific description such as Gregory found in cybernetics. Perhaps our view is necessarily dependent on multiple alternative descriptions – we may even need a little help from some of the nine and sixty tribal ways to understand the world. It has been a mission of anthropology to collect and make available these multiple visions. What we ask of science is first of all, that it always include a degree of tentativeness and openness – and second, not that it be true but that it fit the evidence, which is very different. One could ask the same kind of questions of mythologies of many sorts. Do they fit? Do they offer an interpretative frame for the adaptation of a cluster of human beings in a particular environment?
Much of Gregory’s portion of Angels Fear was written at the Esalen Institute, in California, where Gregory went to live after his cancer, in the year before his death. In one essay written there, titled “Neither Supernatural nor Mechanical”, Gregory says he is horrified both by conventional scientific and technological views of the world and by the supernaturalism of Esalen. “The problem is not, however, entirely symmetrical,” he wrote, “I have, after all, chosen to live at Esalen, in the midst of the counterculture, with its incantations, its astrological searching for truth, its divination … My friends here love me and I love them … The beliefs of the counterculture and of the human potential movement may be superstitious and irrational, but their reason for being … was a good reason. It was to [generate that buffer of diversity that will] protect the human being against obsolescence”. The bracketing of a portion of the previous sentence indicates an insertion that I made in editing, for one of the strangely attractive features of Esalen is the comfort with which a huge miscellany of beliefs manage to co-exist. No zero sum truth there. Gregory feels sure that his counterculture friends are talking nonsense, but perhaps the nonsense is connected to something worth knowing, which might promote a degree of sensitivity or empathy with other organisms and a degree of perception and response to the pattern which connects.

a legacy for Tao - VI

Tao bird

Lincoln Cemetery, Kansas City, Jackson County, Missouri, USA

the two Truths of Tao

The search for the Self and Consciousness in the enaction perspective with consciousness and experience worlds without ground analyzed according to the Abhidharma contains within it a radical distinction between the ordinary, experienced and conventional truth and the ultimate truth, like the distinction between the expression of the Tao, the Te or The, and the ultimate  indescribable truth of Tao, a distinction between mundane and transcendental similar in many traditions, like the Ātman/Brahman duality in Hinduism and the Tonal/Nagual in Castaneda's reports:

WORLDS WITHOUT GROUND

The Middle Way

The Two Truths

The Abhidharma analysis of the mind into basic elements and mental factors already contained within it the distinction between two kinds of truth: ultimate truth, which consisted of the basic elements of existence into which experience could be analyzed, and relative or conventional truth, which was our ordinary, compounded (out of basic elements) experience. Nagarjuna invoked this distinction, gave it new meaning, and insisted on its importance.

The teaching of the doctrine by the Buddha is based upon two truths: the truth of worldly convention (samvrti) and the ultimate, supreme truth (paramartha).
Those who do not discern the distinction between these two truths, do not understand the profound nature of the Buddha's teaching.

Relative truth (samvrti, which literally means covered or concealed) is the phenomenal world just as it appears-with chairs, people, species, and the coherence of those through time. Ultimate truth (paramartha) is the emptiness of that very same phenomenal world. The Tibetan term for relative truth, kundzop, captures the relation between the two imagistically; kundzop means aU dressed up, outfitted, or costumed-that is, relative truth is sunyata (absolute truth) costumed in the brilliant colors of the phenomenal world.
By now it should be obvious that the distinction between the two truths, like the analysis of the Abhidharma, was not intended as a metaphysical theory of truth. It is a description of the experience of the practitioner who experiences his mind, its objects, and their relation as codependently originated and thus as empty of any actual, independent, or abiding existence. Like the Abhidharma categories, the description also functions as a recommendation and contemplative aid. This can be seen very clearly in the discourse of Buddhist communities. For example, many of the forms that Westerners take as poetry or irrationality in Zen are actually contemplative exercises directing the mind toward codependent emptiness.
The term for relative truth, samvrti, is also often translated as "convention" (within Buddhism as well as by academic scholars), which gives rise to much interpretative confusion. It is important to understand in what sense convention is meant. "Relative" or "conventional" should not be taken in a superficial sense. Convention does not mean subjective, arbitrary, or unlawful. And relative does not mean culturally relative. The relative phenomenal world was always taken to operate by very clear laws regardless of the conventions of any individual or society, such as the laws of karmic cause and effect.
Furthermore, it is very important to understand that the use of convention here is not an invitation to decenter the self and/or world into language as is so popular at present in the humanities. As the founder of the Gelugpa lineage in Tibetan Buddhism puts it, "... since nominally designated things are artificial, that is, established as existent in conventional terms, there is no referent to which names are attached which (itself) is not established as merely conventionally existent. And since that is not to say that in general there is no phenomenal basis for using names, the statement of the existence of that (conventional referent) and the statement that (all things) are mere nominal designations are not contradictory." Thus in Buddhism one can perfectly well make distinctions in the relative world between true statements and false ones, and it is recommended that one make true ones.
The sense in which the things designated, as well as the designations, are only conventional may be explained by an example: when I call someone John, I have the deep assumption that there is some abiding independent thing that I am designating, but Madhyamika analysis shows there to be no such truly existing thing. John, however, continues to act just the way a perfectly good designatum is supposed to, so in relative or conventional truth he is indeed John. This claim may remind the reader of our discussion of color. Although the experience of color can be shown to have no absolute ground either in the physical world or the visual observer, color is nonetheless a perfectly commensurable designable. Thus such scientific analysis can perfectly well be joined by the far more radical presentation of groundlessness in the Madhyamika.
Because this relative, conventional, codependently originated world is lawful, science is possible-just as possible as daily life. In fact, perfectly functional pragmatic science and engineering are possible even when they are based on theories that make unjustifiable metaphysical assumptions-just as daily life continues coherently even when one believes in the actual reality of oneself. We offer the vision of enactive cognitive science and of evolution as natural drift neither as a claim that this is the only way science can be done nor as a claim that this is the very same thing as Madhyamika. Concepts such as embodiment or structural coupling are concepts and as such are always historical. They do not convey that at this very moment - personally - one has no independently existing mind and no independently existing world.
This is a crucially important point. There is a powerful reason why some Madhyamika schools only refute the arguments of others and refuse to make assertions. Any conceptual position can become a ground (a resting point, a nest), which vitiates the force of the Madhyamika. In particular, the view of cognition as embodied action (enaction), although it stresses the interdependence of mind and world, tends to treat the relationship between those (the interaction, the action, the enaction) as though it had some form of independent actual existence. As one's mind grasps the concept of enaction as something real and solid, it automatically generates a sense of the other two terms of the argument, the subject and object of the embodied action. (As we shall discuss, this is why pragmatism is also not the same as thing as the middle way of Madhyamika.) We would be doing ii great disservice to everyone concerned - mindfulness/awareness practitioners, scientists, scholars, and any other interested persons - were we to lead anyone to believe that making assertions about enactive cognitive science was the same thing as allowing one's mind to be experientially processed by the Madhyamika dialectic, particularly when this is combined with mindfulness/awareness training. But just as the Madhyamika dialectic, a provisional and conventional activity of the relative world, points beyond itself, so we might hope that our concept of enaction could, at least for some cognitive scientists and perhaps even for the more general milieu of scientific thought, point beyond itself to a truer understanding of groundlessness.

Tao from the sky

This view of the twilight sky and Martian horizon taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover includes Earth as the brightest point of light in the night sky at a distance of 160 million kilometers.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/TAMU