What a wonderful feeling it must be, to take that first trip in a craft of the future. Step inside and see nothing but metal and panels. Sit down, touch a control, or perhaps just think a thought, and something magical happens. Covering all the walls, upon all the flooring, there are advanced illuminating materials that fade on, displaying a sweeping 360 degree, spherical, completely enveloping real time image. Every pixel is integrated into the most magnificent virtual reality screen of all time. A predecessor to the holodeck.
The ship rises on artificial gravity, and floats like a leaf in a weightless pond of energy. You feel nothing. No acceleration. Within the field of warp propulsion, the energy of time is bent around the craft, to cause motion to occur with no inertial resistance. You literally fall towards your destination. During the first moments of your flight, as remarkable as the image surrounding you is, the more immediate senses of touch and balance clue you to the totally unique and organic feel of the motion of this amazing new craft. After a moment, the overpowering fear of such height fades away into your imagination.
Acceleration without inertia. What a strange discontinuity of sensation. Your eyes say one thing, and your inner ear, skin, and muscles say nothing. Finally to fly like an eagle! This must be how Einstein imagined he would have traveled through space, without the noisy Model Ts of Newtonian mechanical propulsion. The gift of your soul to your body, a star ship.
Zipping below you are the skyscrapers of New York. But just a moment or two later, St. Paul's Cathedral snaps into view along the Thames. WHAT AMAZING POWER! The sprawling countrysides of the Netherlands flow by underneath you, like an ocean of meadows. And you turn right.
A large body of water, it must be the Mediterranean. So blue this ancient sea really is. And now, in a sailing ship of the stars, powered by the wind of the Cosmos, we may cross it in three seconds, instead of 3 weeks. As the shore of Africa lights the interior of the craft with a dingy yellow hue, you slow down towards Cairo. You have never seen the Great Pyramid with your own eyes. And there it is. Two million two-ton blocks, placed together with the care of a watchmaker. The dimensions of this mammoth construction are squared to within inches, and its orientation to the headings of the compass, precise. It must be a great construction of intelligent life even on the scale of the heavens. Such perfect construction of such an instructive symbol of intelligence. In its day, its smooth white limestone sides, polished nearly to optical precision, glistened in the light of the sun - or the moon, or the stars. There is now no doubt that this great construction was, at the very least, a testimony to the heavens, if not a construction thereof.
But Africa, the birthplace of humanity, is full of wonders. At one time, the desert of Africa was as green and perfect an oasis as Amazonia today. Creatures of all variety roamed these jungles and plains, a few still remain today. The largest roaming beasts, the most savage hunters, the most poisonous reptiles, the most gentle grazers, the largest and smallest of the insects, fish that survive in dry land and mammals that swim through floods. And the earliest of human beings.
From the tip of Cape Town rises the Great Southern Ocean. Unfettered by land, the southern latitudes have an attitude all their own. The wind blows tempestuously through day and night, in a circle around the globe, driving gigantic, 50 foot ocean waves as common and routine as ripples in a stream. This place is for the bravest of sailors, many of whom met their fate face to face, shoulder to shoulder with nature, not too far from the ice world of Antarctica.
Colder than the deepest winter, home only to the sturdiest of creatures, Antarctica is a world only a few men and women have seen first hand. It is a desolate place, an example of many a world where the mean temperature is just a few degrees cooler. It's a continent of glacial ice, storing a reserve of pure water for warmer times, absorbing it during cooler times. The poles are the sponges of Earth, as they equalize the depth of the oceans in insurance of a balance between land and sea. What wonderful, rare simplicity and complexity both. How can anyone say that Earth is not a living being in the truest sense?
Past the Strait of Magellan, where in the early 16th century a world was circumnavigated by humans for the first time, the last remaining forest continent of Earth emerges. Life in terms most people cannot comprehend lives here. Millions of species dancing to the music of evolution, eating, sleeping, learning, competing, evolving, loving. The forests, jungles and rivers are the crucible of evolution, and we cut and burn them away.
Then you see them. Living mountain peaks, the chapel spires of Earth rising out of the foggy mist, but not touching your feet. Waterfalls from the heights, into lush forests below. What majestic creatures mountains are. Driven by the geologic life of Earth, they are born, grow, and die as well. Not far from the mountaintops, you are swallowed into a billowing cloud. And you sense the water, gathering together, ready to fall and replenish the life in the forest and rivers below. The gift of the ocean to the land, the cool rain.
As you ascend through the clouds, piercing beyond the lung of your world, a silence strikes every sense of your soul. Your gaze shifts from the blue light below, and you look up. A black blacker than sudden blindness hits your senses, or rather doesn't, as your eyes adjust to the silent night of heaven. And ever so gracefully, the campfires of the Cosmos begin to sparkle. Millions and millions of diamond colored lights are painted across time, shining with their infinitely narrow rays the brightest of lights directly into your eyes. How real the stars now are, without the veil of nitrogen and oxygen to cloud your vision. The life of the Cosmos is staring at you from those points of light. The love of the Cosmos is striking your retina.
As the patterns in the heavens gently turn, showing the motion of your ship, you are overwhelmed by the realization that you're floating in space, in a four dimensional ocean as vast to you now as the ocean must be to an amoeba in a tide pool of the Pacific. Indeed, you realize that we are all amoeba, embarking from a tide pool we call Earth. The vastness crushes your imagination with energy. It is the ultimate frontier, your ultimate purpose. It is the life of the Cosmos.
A profoundly humbling feeling overwhelms you as you realize that you are the truest of explorers, a sailor to other worlds. And then the greatest wisdom settles peacefully in your mind. The sense of time disappears. You were always on your way to this place, to every place, ever since you were like a green blade of grass on the sandy beach. The gift of the land to the ocean, the warm surface of the shore.
As you leave that beautiful, glistening blue Earth behind, you can't help but think how foolish we all have been, caught up in our trivial attentions, to ever have lost humility before nature. All that we have ever really known is locked up on that small blue globe, a vanishing speck of dust in the sea of time.
Some day soon, we shall all venture into the depths of time. But first, we must build an understanding of how we arrived at this place we call the present. We must acquire an understanding of the truth within ourselves, the truth of our souls.
The secret, I believe, rests in a reinterpretation of the nature of the Cosmos. I propose that we consider reinterpreting everything known to science in terms better understood in biology, under the hypothesis that the entire Cosmos is single being of life. I know that this kind of idea is anathema to most scientists, who may consider it "metascience", something like a religious faith and therefore unacceptable to reductionist logic. However, reductionist logic taken to its extreme has surely failed to cure the ills of society, and indeed contributed to most of them, at the same time as it has provided wondrous advances for us all. Since no human could ever understand the details of every specialization of science, must we not have a metascience in order to master the most important teachings from the collection of disciplines of truth? Surely we must make room for a science of holism, and my guess is we will come to think of it as a holy science, with new rituals all its own to ensure its passage to our children.
On July 4, 1994 the United States of America awarded the Liberty Medal to the Czech president, Vaclav Havel. In his speech he took the theme "We are not alone nor for ourselves alone." He observed that the modern age has ended, the artificial world order of the past decades has collapsed and a new more just order has not yet emerged. He went on to say that we are now where classically modern solutions do not give a satisfactory response. We need to anchor the idea of human rights and freedoms in a different place and in a different way than has been done so far. Paradoxically, he says, inspiration for the renewal of lost integrity can again be found in science: a new science that allows itself to transcend its own limits. He gave two examples of this: the anthropic principle, where science is confronted with a mystical implication in that our creation purely from anomaly is difficult to defend. The second idea was James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, where Earth is defined and described as literally a living being.
The words of such a holy science would not be laden with abstract nouns and the passive tense, they would be simple, active words. Words that convey precise reality, emotional meaning, and motive as concisely and powerfully as possible.
In the vision I suggest we consider, the Gaia hypothesis is extended in every direction possible. I call it the One Hypothesis. It is not a fundamentally new idea. Various aspects of it have been taught in various forms across history, by minds far greater than mine. In my version, evolution extends back far further than the double-helix of biology, but to space-time itself. In this vision, space-time is not machine, but rather life itself, and the power of evolution rests in a force called love. From these things, so I imagine, springs the Cosmos. Love evolves to reproduce physics, physics evolves to reproduce astrophysics, astrophysics evolves to reproduce chemistry, chemistry evolves to reproduce geology, geology evolves to reproduce ecology, and ecology evolves to reproduce you. We evolve to produce books such as this, to pass on our truth to our distant children.
What distant children shall you evolve to reproduce?
"We are a way for the universe to know itself."
- Carl Sagan
"A perpetual trend toward richness, the outcome of which cannot be foreseen, may be the true fate of the universe."
- George Musser, Staff Editor, Scientific American, January 1999
If I were to concentrate the meaning of my book down to two pages, what would I say? Scientists are close to discovering the physical nature of consciousness, and that origin appears startlingly fundamental to the nature of the Cosmos itself. There appears to be a very basic truth to the concept that the Cosmos is collectively conscious, comprised of a seething potential out of which individual beings of reality have formed, everything "material" simply a pattern of energy in time, deeply interconnected into one macrosystem at a quantum level. This has direct implications for the veracity of the ancient concept of the soul, and to a vanishingly young ability in each of us to communicate telepathically and to use the power of intent to literally create reality with our minds. Physicists are also close to discovering the means to derive energy and gravitational propulsion from this same seething vacuum energy. Serious contemplation and study is due to frame with great care the use of these fundamental new abilities.
We do know as scientists now, in just the last part of the last century since the birth of a being named Jesus, that there is unambiguous design in the nature of the Cosmos. It is coming to be understood that consciousness cannot be regarded as an accident. The layers of the onion of cosmology, physics, astrophysics, chemistry, geology, ecology, and biologist cannot be regarded as merely unintended order within chaos. There must at least be the principle of intent at work within the machinery of time.
I believe that each of these orders within time is like a student of the next higher order, one day to be "promoted" to teacher, in a perpetual process of learning and advancement. It is a continuous pattern of intent, with each order gaining new powers of choice. Every order has its laws, and every order has its freedoms. Every choice has its consequences, which must be learned. Once the lessons of the order are completed, an advancement occurs. A new order emerges. A phase transition in time presents itself, where fundamentally new choices are opened. And the more fundamental the revolution in the history of any species of order, the more lengthy is the period of revolution beyond what that species may expect it to be. We are witnessing one of these ultra-long-wavelength revolutions now.
What is the soul? What are you? Who are you?
The answer represents the ultimate significance of my hypothesis:
Faithful people across Western culture believe that God said: "I am that I am." Every scientist could agree with Carl Sagan's first statement in his book Cosmos: "the Cosmos is all that is". I am that I am. It is that which is.
These descriptions are nearly identical. The former, however, contains no duality.
Faithful people across Western culture believe that God said: "Let there be light." Every scientist could agree with the following logical sequence: Time has made all things. Time has yielded the Cosmos, through order upon order. The Cosmos is made of light. Light ordered is matter.
The mutual exclusivity of the scientific and religious accounts of creation is now clearly without basis. The name science has given to God is Cosmos.
I believe that every one of us is made of light, and every one of us matter. We are made of God. We are children of Cosmos, each a light in time. I - the truth of observation - am - the love of experience. The son and the father and the daughter and the mother are one, in each of us.
Time is a function, not a single linear dimension. The more general word for time is change. Patterns of temporal change - electromagnetism - form matter when organized into shapes called space, hence the compound word space-time. All orders of the Cosmos are built upon this function. The homo sapiens mind has a well-developed grasp of spatial change, and is just now comprehending the experience of temporal change.
You are entirely and completely a function of the Cosmos. The Cosmos wrote this book. The Cosmos is reading this book. Everything we make, the Cosmos makes. Everything we think, the Cosmos thinks. We are truly individuals within One. Imagination and thought are intent, and intent has the power to directly cause physical change. Every being has this power. This is a sacred power. It is the true "force".
We are always the student of the higher order and the teacher for the lower order, along a fractal ladder of intent in a field of change. Perhaps one day we will become teachers of younger beings on this world or another, in ways similar to our experience of evolutionary history. One day we may even become the origin of religions for animals lower in the order of biology.
You and I, whether good or evil, right or wrong, black or white, rich or poor, human or alien or snake or tree or ocean or stone or mountain or world or galaxy, are the children of Cosmos. You and I are animals of Cosmos called homo sapiens on the being of Cosmos named Earth, our Mother, a blue green speck of truth sparkling in the seething potential of the heavens, the infinite possibilities of change.
One day we will experience open contact with animals from other worlds. Perhaps the first ones we meet will turn out to have helped to guide us along, intellectually and perhaps occasionally even genetically, thoughout human history. Or perhaps they may be grander beings still than animals, having taken further steps in evolution we can't yet understand.
As that day approaches, we would do well to remember the significance of the most important single word in human language, the word that I believe will ultimately break us into the next epoch of our saga:
The word is TRUTH. Truth experienced, however painful or joyous, is a form of LOVE.