Major Tom Awakened Fully

William B. Turner
3 min readJan 21, 2021

In his iconic hit song from the early 1970s, “Space Odddity,” David Bowie paints a picture of alarm on earth: “Ground control to Major Tom, your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong/ Can you hear me, Major Tom, can you hear me, Major Tom,” contrasted with a certain resigned equanimity on the part of Major Tom himself: “Planet earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do….”

It is perhaps not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that Major Tom achieved full awakening in his “tin can” as he floated helplessly in space. Indeed, he went the Buddha one better. Recalling that the historical Buddha, being a human long before the space age, died and his body decomposed as bodies will do on earth, while his consciousness, maybe, dissipated into space, such that he became light, our putatively enlightened Major Tom not only dissipated into light in his consciousness, but his body is now floating around in space, too, or it was for however long his tin can lasted, after which, we do not know what would happen to a human corpse left floating in space.

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