REFLECTIONS ON GOD, MYTHOLOGY & THE ORGANIC PROCESS OF LIFE By Observers Spaceship Earth is our Home Planet. The last half of the 20th century witnessed incredible leaps in our scientific understanding of planet Earth. An example of this is a revolutionary hypothesis proposed by an atmospheric chemist in the 1970s. Its name was given by James Lovelock who wrote a book called Gaia (Guy uh), named after the Greek Goddess of Earth. Lovelock's book examines the possibility of Life, Itself, being in control of its own environment. "This hypothesis, known as the Gaia Hypothesis, states that the Earth (Gaia) is alive," reads Dr. C's webpage (author unknown). " - - its impact on how we think of our planet, how we view the processes that create our atmosphere and climate and oceans is unmistakable. - Formulated by Lovelock in the mid-1960s, the Gaia Hypothesis proposes that our planet functions as a single organism that maintains conditions necessary for its survival. Basically, what Lovelock discovered, was that the Earth, or Gaia (or actually all Life on Earth), is in control of its own environment. - - Throughout history, the concept of Mother Earth has been a part of human culture in one form or another. Everybody has heard of Mother Earth, but have you ever stopped to think who (or what) Mother Earth is? - - The truly startling component of the Gaia Hypothesis is the idea that the Earth is a single living entity. This idea is certainly not new. James Hutton (1726-1797), the father of geology, once described the Earth as a kind of super-organism. And right before Lovelock, Lewis Thomas penned these words in his famous collection of essays, The Lives of a Cell: ' Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the Earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. - - - - - It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun." Thomas goes one step further when he writes: "I have been trying to think of the Earth as a kind of organism, but - ...it is most like a single cell." Whether the Earth is a cell, an organism, or a super-organism is largely a matter of semantics, and a topic that I will leave to the more philosophically minded. The key point here is the hypothesis that the Earth acts as a single system - it is a coherent, self-regulated, assemblage of physical, chemical, geological, and biological forces that interact to maintain a unified whole - balanced between the input of energy from the Sun and the thermal sink of energy into Space," concludes the website, for which I could find no author’s name. (for more info Google [Gaia] .) We've gotten close with the Gaia Hypothesis, which shows the entire Earth as one large living organism, but fails to show it as an intelligent organism. Highlife Theory, however, shows it as an extremely intelligent organism. The Highlife Theory was developed by Tony Bondhus in the early 1990's. It far extends our knowledge of the Gaia Hypothesis as well as our knowledge of Evolution. The Highlife Theory cuts to the very foundation of our understanding, and brings us enormous possibilities for a future that is beyond our wildest dreams. "I remember," writes Tony Bondhus, "watching "Batteries Not Included" several years ago. The movie, a Christmas present from Steven Spielberg, was about two little saucer shaped flying robot like life forms. They were about six inches in diameter and looked like cute little toys. They were electromechanical like a robot, but they were alive. In one fascinating scene the camera looked inside one of them and showed hundreds of microscopic robots each performing the delicate tasks of life. This intrigued me because if you look at a higher Life form, like people for example, you'll find that we too are made up of billions of lower Life forms. Each individual cell is capable of surviving and reproducing on its own with the proper environment. Each cell is identical in program yet an individual differing in every way from its neighboring cells. In much the same way, people are almost identical in design and programming of the mind and body. Yet all are individuals, forming their own opinions and doing their own thing. This is a basic principle of Life - lower Life forms coming together in a group for survival reasons and forming a higher Life form. This interaction is in fact the very essence of Life. Notice how the people of the Earth, as well as the plants and animals, all tend to group together in the same way. Each individual is living, reproducing, and then dying so that others may live. Each is performing a necessary function just like the cells of our bodies." As was mentioned earlier, James Lovelock wrote a book called Gaia that examines the possibility of Life itself being in control of its own environment. "I read the book after watching an interview. It was a truly fascinating interview," continues Tony Bondhus. "In the interview, - Lovelock cited as an inspiration for Gaia, that NASA asked him to figure out what to look for as signs of Life on another planet. NASA wanted a way of determining if there truly is Life on other planets by examining them with long range telescopes. What Lovelock discovered was that NASA should look for a planet where the atmosphere and climate conditions don't make sense.The idea being that if the atmosphere and climate conditions don't make sense, the reason may be that they are being altered or controlled by Life on the planet. Funny, how our search for Life on other planets, has helped lead us to the discovery of Life on Earth. In his book, Lovelock shows how Life controls its own environment. By controlling the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, for example, the temperature of the Earth is carefully maintained. As the temperature increases, plants grow faster using up the excess CO2 causing the temperature to decrease. As the temperature of Earth decreases, animals eat up many of the plants, and the temperature rises again. Normally, we can explain the atmosphere and climate conditions on a planet as a matter of chemistry. On Earth, however, this is not the case. The Earth has, for millions of years, maintained temperatures that will support Life. Millions of years worth of barrages of meteors, bursts of volcanic activity, and changes in solar radiation, have had very little success in changing the temperature of Earth. With Life, the soil becomes progressively more fertile, holds water better, gets aerated, etc. Without Life it eventually turns to sand. Almost all aspects of our environment are carefully controlled either locally or on the whole planet. In the interview, Lovelock mentioned that many scientists and other people misunderstood his Gaia Hypothesis, thinking that he was saying that Life Itself had a deliberate and intentional control of the environment. He was merely saying that Life had an impact on the environment, not necessarily an intentional impact, just an impact. This misunderstanding of Gaia was actually closer to reality than Lovelock had gotten, but even with this misunderstanding, people were not putting all the pieces together. Life Itself is in fact in deliberate and intentional control of the environment. Highlife Theory explains the mechanism (and) describes a new type of lifeform, one which is in deliberate and intentional control of the whole Earth's environment. One that is self aware. I don't use the term "self aware" lightly. This is where Highlife Theory differs from other theories. Previous theories showed that the Earth, or rather, all Life on the Earth, is one gigantic living organism, as does Highlife Theory. The previous theories, however, seem to indicate that this gigantic living organism is of very low intelligence, approximately equivalent to a single cell microorganism. This is contrary to Highlife Theory. Highlife Theory shows that this one gigantic living organism is by far the most intelligent living thing on Earth. Far more intelligent than us humans. - - .Sometimes people get confused when we speak of the Earth being a living thing, thinking that we speak of the rock itself. We speak not of the rock, but rather the network of Life on Earth. We speak of the network of Life as one gigantic living organism (for more info Google [Highlife Theory] ) In the 21st century, we will be forced to Change the way we view, and thereby treat, this Home Planet of ours, this Spaceship Earth. "Let the Earth spin on its axis, the galaxies expand and Nature Change according to its own laws",. - writes John McCain. - "We may still glimpse in the wonders of Nature the divine intelligence that created it and set it all in motion," he says in Character Is Destiny. We all know that there is something. Some Greater Something. But what is it? Many, maybe even most, will say 'God'. If we look, maybe we will see. We know that everything is evolving, but "evolution doesn’t explain everything," writes Charles Sade. "It doesn’t address ' what, or who, stirred the primordial soup.’ Well, perhaps the soup stirred itself. And just because that thought is beyond some people’s understanding does not mean a deity made everything (itself included, a neat trick no one has ever sufficiently addressed). What the scientists researching the relationship between consciousness and matter should be looking for is why mankind needs an explanation of its existence. If we could get past that (and all the religious nonsense it entails), we could finally take responsibility for ourselves and achieve great things. However, if we continue to cringe in the face of the Universe and ascribe all our actions to various supra natural beings, we will continue to lead circumscribed lives, praying to imaginary figures to guide and save us." And so we move on, as the time of our Life may well pass us by if we don't begin to think anew and move in a profoundly different direction. Before we can go about thinking differently and developing a new direction for 21st century living, it would help for us to understand where we have been, where we now are, and where we are going.. Writing in the Introduction to'A Brief History of Time' by Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan tells us that, "We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes Life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend." He goes on to say that "few of us spend much time wondering why Nature is the way it is, where the cosmos came from or whether it was always here, or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know." "We know the chicken comes from the egg, and an egg from a chicken, but where does it all start?" asks Vern Barnet. "And how will it end? More broadly, did the Universe have a beginning, and what happens at the end of time? Most cosmologists have abandoned the steady-state theory in favor of the Big Bang.The Big Bang theory says that about 14 billion years ago, suddenly the Universe exploded into being from a tiny, unimaginably dense point. Some religious thinkers have seen this as scientific support for the bible. More recently, however, the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating has led to modified steady-state theories with multiple small big bangs. And String theory offers weird possibilities of other universes alongside our own," concludes Barnet. When the new Large Hadron collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, located near Geneva, Switzerland becomes fully operational, we may get a glimpse into another spatial dimension, one of several whose existence is predicted by String Theory, science’s brave attempt to unify all the forces of Nature in one grand equation. To account for the fact that we perceive only three dimensions, physicists have proposed that the rest are curled up into infinitesimal loops. Even the very basics of String Theory are beyond my comprehension, so I will let the String Theory website speak for itself; "Theoretical physicists use mathematics to describe certain aspects of Nature. Sir Isaac Newton was the first theoretical physicist, although in his own time his profession was called ‘natural philosophy.’ The most puzzling and intriguing moving things visible to humans have always been the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars we can see in the night sky. Newton's new calculus, combined with his "Laws of Motion", made a mathematical model for the force of gravity that not only described the observed motions of planets and stars in the night sky, but also of swinging weights and flying cannonballs in England. Newton was both a theorist and an experimentalist. He spent many many long hours, to the point of neglecting his health, observing the way Nature behaved so that he might describe it better. The so-called "Newton's Laws of Motion" are not abstract laws that Nature is somehow forced to obey, but the observed behavior of Nature that is described in the language of mathematics. In Newton's time, theory and experiment went together. Today the functions of theory and observation are divided into two distinct communities in physics. Both experiments and theories are much more complex than back in Newton's time. Theorists are exploring areas of Nature in mathematics that technology so far does not allow us to observe in experiments. Many of the theoretical physicists who are alive today may not live to see how the real Nature compares with her mathematical description in their work. Today's theorists have to learn to live with ambiguity and uncertainty in their mission to describe Nature using math. In the18th and 19th centuries, Newton's mathematical description of motion using calculus and his model for the gravitational force were extended very successfully to the emerging science and technology of electromagnetism. Calculus evolved into classical field theory. Then the electron was discovered, and particle physics was born. Through the mathematics of quantum mechanics and experimental observation, it was deduced that all known particles fell into one of two classes: bosons or fermions. Bosons are particles that transmit forces. Many bosons can occupy the same state at the same time. This is not true for fermions, only one fermion can occupy a given state at a given time, and this is why fermions are the particles that make up matter. This is why solids can't pass through one another, why we can't walk through walls -- because of Pauli repulsion -- the inability of fermions (matter) to share the same space the way bosons (forces) can. But Einstein then extended his Special Theory of Relativity to encompass Newton's theory of gravitation, and the result, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, brought the mathematics called differential geometry into physics. General relativity has had many observational successes that proved its worth as a description of Nature, but two of the predictions of this theory have staggered the public and scientific imaginations: the expanding Universe, and black holes. Both have been observed, and both encapsulate issues that, at least in the mathematics, brush up against the very nature of reality and existence. Relativistic quantum field theory has worked very well to describe the observed behaviors and properties of elementary particles. But the theory itself only works well when gravity is so weak that it can be neglected. Particle theory only works when we pretend gravity doesn't exist. String theory is believed to close this gap. But particles in string theory arise as excitations of the string, and included in the excitations of a string in string theory is a particle with zero mass and two units of spin. This led early string theorists to propose that string theory be applied not as a theory of hadronic particles, but as a theory of quantum gravity, the unfulfilled fantasy of theoretical physics in the particle and gravity communities for decades. This doesn't mean that string theory is not without its deficiencies. But the zero distance behavior is such that we can combine quantum mechanics and gravity, and we can talk sensibly about a string excitation that carries the gravitational force.This was a very great hurdle that was overcome for late 20th century physics, which is why so many young people are willing to learn the grueling complex and abstract mathematics that is necessary to study a quantum theory of interacting strings. Think of a guitar string that has been tuned by stretching the string under tension across the guitar. Depending on how the string is plucked and how much tension is in the string, different musical notes will be created by the string. These musical notes could be said to be excitation modes of that guitar string under tension. In string theory, as in guitar playing, the string must be stretched under tension in order to become excited. However, the strings in string theory are floating in space-time; they aren't tied down to a guitar. Nonetheless, they have tension. The string tension in string theory is denoted by the quantity 1/(2 p a'), where a' is pronounced "alpha prime" and is equal to the square of the string length scale. String theories are classified according to whether or not the strings are required to be closed loops, and whether or not the particle spectrum includes fermions. In order to include fermions in string theory, there must be a special kind of symmetry called supersymmetry, which means for every boson (particle that transmits a force) there is a corresponding fermion (particle that makes up matter). So supersymmetry relates the particles that transmit forces to the particles that make up matter. Supersymmetric partners to currently known particles have not been observed in particle experiments, but theorists believe this is because supersymmetric particles are too massive to be detected at current accelerators. Particle accelerators could be on the verge of finding evidence for high energy supersymmetry in the next decade.[?] Evidence for supersymmetry at high energy would be compelling evidence that string theory was a good mathematical model for Nature at the smallest distance scales. There are several ways theorists can build string theories. Start with the elementary ingredient: a wiggling tiny string. Next decide: should it be an open string or a closed string? Then ask: will I settle for only bosons (particles that transmit forces) or will I ask for fermions, too (particles that make up matter)? (Remember that in string theory, a particle is like a note played on the string.) The final question for making a string theory should be: can I do quantum mechanics sensibly? For bosonic strings, this question is only answered in the affirmative if the space-time dimensions number 26. For superstrings we can whittle it down to 10. How we get down to the four space-time dimensions we observe in our world is another story. But the number of string theories has also been shrinking in recent years, because string theorists are discovering that what they thought were completely different theories were in fact different ways of looking at the same theory.And now the biggest rush in string research is to collapse the table above into one theory, which some people want to call M theory, for it is the Mother of all theories." [ From the String Theory website.] Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum propose a different explanation; that we inhabit a three-dimensional bubble in a universe of 10 or more spatial dimensions, some of which may be infinitely large.Until now, string theory has been an entirely abstract, mathematical construct, but the new Large Hadron supercollider may change all that, and if so - if, for example, it shows evidence of particles that travel in, or through, those extra dimensions - it will represent the first great theoretical breakthrough of the 21st century, blazing a path for physics the way relativity did a century ago "The cosmos," Randall says, "could be larger, richer and more varied than anything we imagined (Google String Theroy)According to a June 2006 San Francisco Chronicle article researchers have proposed a new theory that our solar system might be the home of thousands of very small back holes.‘ If verified by a NASA satellite scheduled for launch next year, their claim might overturn orthodox ideas about nature and the Universe. In particular, it could dramatically reinforce physicist’s growing suspicion that the cosmos is pervaded by invisible alternate dimensions, never-never lands that cannot be detected with existing instruments.Black holes are collapsed stars whose gravity is so intense that nothing can escape them, not even light - hence the adjective ‘black’. So far, there is strong evidence for only one type of black hole; the huge kind that inhabits deep space, millions of light years from Earth. One example is a titanic black hole that is sucking up nearby stars at the core of the Milky Way. Scientist know the black hole is there because the galactic core is emitting intense radiation - the death cry of devoured stars.But black holes might come in different sizes. Physicists have speculated that very small black holes might have formed after the Big Bang that spawned our cosmos and then disappeared.Now, researchers Charles Keeton and Arlie Petters have proposed that throughout the cosmos, very small black holes might have survived to the present day. Thousands of them could be drifting around our solar system.They base their claim on their interpretation of one of the hottest ideas in theoretical physics: ‘braneworld’ theory, a distant cousin of string theory. Brane is short for membrane.High school physics students learn there are four dimensions in the Universe; length, with, depth and time. But braneworld theorists say there are additional, unseen dimensions that can be described only with mathematical equations.If Keeton and Petters are right, then our solar system should have its own share of little black holes, perhaps as few as 3,000 or as many as 300,000 at any give time.What would happen if one of these black holes came to Earth and passed through a room?Keeton said a tiny black hole probably could suck up only a few atoms at a time.Yet it might not go unnoticed. If a black hole as massive as an asteroid - thousands of tons - passed through a room, there would be a subtle gravitation tug.So, to greatly oversimplify; according to string theory, matter ultimately consists of infinitesimally tiny, vibrating strings of energy. A harp or guitar produces different sounds when its wires vibrate at different frequencies. Likewise, a string of energy turns into different subatomic particles according to its vibrational rate. In brane theory, string theory is broadened to include multidimensional, vibrating membranes that pervade the cosmos’***WOW After reading all of that, I have to pause to reboot my own brain. - - -Now to continue; Images from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope have glimpsed galaxies back to a point just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, thought to be the explosive beginning of the Universe.Have we found the Big Bang’s smoking gun? According to a March 2006 Associated Press article, scientists say a process known as ‘inflation’ led to the massive expansion of the Universe, "By the faint cosmic glow of the oldest known light," the article reads, "physicists say they have found evidence that the Universe grew to astounding proportions in less than the blink of an eye. In that trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe expanded from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space through a process known as inflation. At the same time, the seeds were planted for the formation of stars, galaxies, planets and every other object in the Universe. "It's giving us our first clues about how inflation took place," said Michael Turner [of] the National Science Foundation. "This is absolutely amazing." Researchers found this long-sought "smoking gun" evidence by looking at the cosmic microwave background, the oldest light in the Universe. The light was produced when the Universe was about 300,000 years old -- a long time ago, but still hundreds of millennia after inflation had done its work. Even so, the pattern of light in the cosmic microwave background offers clues about what came before it, just as a fossil tells a paleontologist about long-extinct life.Of special interest to physicists are subtle brightness variations that give images of the microwave background a lumpy appearance. Physicists presented new measurements of those variations during a news conference at Princeton University. The measurements were made by a spaceborne instrument called the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe, or WMAP, launched by NASA in 2001. "It amazes me that we can say anything at all about what transpired in the first trillionth of a second of the Universe," said Charles Bennett, a Johns Hopkins University physicist who presented the research along with Lyman Page and David Spergel, both of Princeton. Earlier studies of WMAP data have determined that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, give or take a few hundred thousand years. They have also measured variations in the cosmic microwave background so huge that they stretch across the entire sky. Those earlier observations are strong indicators of inflation, but no smoking gun, said Turner, who was not involved in the research. They represent tiny inhomogeneities – dense spots in the superhot primordial soup that was the Universe in the first stages of inflation -- blown up to hundreds of light-years in size by the subsequent expansion of the Universe. The new analysis was able to characterize variations in the microwave background over smaller patches of sky -- only billions of light-years across compared to hundreds of billions. Due to some weird aspects of quantum physics, those smaller lumps popped into existence during the middle and end of the inflationary process as tiny subatomic particles. Then they would have expanded with the space they occupied to become today's stars and galaxies. Slightly denser than their surroundings, they would have pulled additional material in by gravity, building up into the massive galaxies and superclusters observable today. "Galaxies are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky," said Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist. The measurements are scheduled to be published in a future issue of the Astrophysical Journal" [end of article]. "Astronomers have found that galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed much earlier than they had expected. This suggests that planets where Life was possible could have formed as early as about 12 billion years ago. Our solar system - is much younger, about 5 billion years old. - - The Hubble has revolutionized astronomy. Using images from the craft, scientists have - discovered that a mysterious energy, called 'the dark force', is causing all of the objects in the Universe to move apart at an accelerating rate. This force is still poorly understood. But recent observations of distant, exploding stars has blown to smithereens some of science’s most cherished ideas about the Universe. To piece together an updated theory, they're now thinking dark thoughts about what sort of mystery force may be contorting the cosmos." "According to the standard view of cosmology, the once infinitesimal Universe has ballooned in volume ever since its fiery birth in the Big Bang, but the mutual gravitational tug of all the matter in the cosmos has gradually slowed that expansion. In 1998, however, scientists reported that a group of distant supernovas were dimmer, and therefore farther from Earth, than the standard theory indicated. It was as if, in the billion or so years it took for the light from these exploded stars to arrive at Earth, the space between the stars and our planet had stretched out more than expected. That would mean that cosmic expansion has somehow sped up, not slowed down. Recent evidence has only firmed up that bizarre result. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that distant galaxies are fleeing from one another as if the entire Universe is swelling in size. Ever since, astronomers have been hoping to answer a key question: Will the expansion of the Universe, slowed by gravity, go on forever, or will the cosmos eventually collapse into a Big Crunch? Despite decades of effort and countless studies devoted to the ballooning of the Universe, the findings stunned the astronomers. Few suspected that all along they were asking the wrong question. "For 70 years, we've been trying to measure the rate at which the Universe slows down. We finally do it, and we find out it's speeding up," says Michael Turner. "An accelerated expansion would seem to contradict all common sense," says Andreas Albrecht . Throw a ball into the sky, and after it reaches a certain height, it will come back down, he notes. Now imagine throwing another ball upward and finding that instead of it falling back down, it somehow keeps moving up faster and faster. For that to happen, there would have to be some force pushing upward on the ball strongly enough to overcome gravity's downward tug. Astronomers have come to believe that just such a force is stretching the very fabric of space. What is this mystery force? Cosmologists have proposed that it derives from dark energy—a substance whose properties and origin scientists have only begun to explore. At stake is more than just a better understanding of the fate of the Universe: The very presence of dark energy may enable scientists to explain the fundamental forces of the Universe and tease out the hidden connections among them. Says Albrecht: "This is the most exciting endeavor going on in physics right now." Astrophysicists have found new evidence for "dark energy," the mysterious, repulsive force that appears to be speeding up the expansion of the Universe. By combining and analyzing two huge astronomical databases, they have detected dark energy's "shadow" as it appears against the cosmic microwave background, the remnants of the Big Bang that back light the Universe.But in the topsy turvy world of dark energy, this shadow is actually brighter than its surroundings, suggesting that dark energy is so weird that it may have finally outstripped scientists' capacity for analogy. Previous evidence of dark energy has been based on measurements of distances to supernovae and on temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background. This new evidence, by contrast, is based on physical processes that act on light particles as they travel through galaxies and thus compliments the earlier findings. The researchers, headed by Ryan Scranton, found that cosmic radiation actually picks up energy as it passes through the gravitational fields of galaxies, suggesting that the force -- dark energy -- is acting in opposition to gravity. Talk about dark energy has been building ever since astronomers began making measurements suggesting that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up. Albert Einstein had theorized about a force that would cause objects to repulse each other, which he termed the cosmological constant, but he later repudiated his idea. As evidence has grown that such a force does indeed exist, it has come to be known as dark energy. Work on the latest findings began with the release of a detailed map of the cosmological microwave background made by a satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. Researchers compared the map of that radiation, which made its appearance 380,000 years after the Big Bang, with the position of millions of galaxies charted by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ongoing effort to map everything in one-fourth of the sky. Robert Nichol, an astrophysicist who has worked on the Sloan team for more than a decade, said combining the two databases allowed him and his colleagues to compare the energy of microwaves that flew through regions of space where lots of galaxies exist with those that encountered mostly empty space. Gravity in a dense region such as a galaxy can act on light particles as they pass through, a physical phenomenon called the Sachs-Wolfe effect. Physicists talk of a light particle entering a "gravitational well" as it enters a galaxy, picking up energy as it falls into the well, like a ball rolling down a hill. As the particle leaves the galaxy, it climbs back out of the well and gives up the energy it gains. But if dark energy also is exerting itself in opposition to gravity, the galaxy is "puffing" up and losing some gravitational oomph during the millions of years it takes the particle to travel through a galaxy. So the size of the gravitational well that the particle climbs out of isn't quite as deep as the one it fell into. The result is that the light particle has a little more energy when it leaves than it had originally. Astronomers have dark imaginations. They're already obsessed with another phenomenon that they call dark matter, which is entirely separate from dark energy. Dark matter is the invisible material that theorists say makes up 95 percent of the mass of the Universe. It gathers into vast clumps and exerts an ordinary gravitational tug on its surroundings. The proposed dark energy, in contrast, would inhabit empty space and would be evenly distributed throughout the Universe." - - [End of combined articles] "Where did the Universe come from?," asks Stephen Hawking. "How and why did it begin and where is it going? Did the Universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these long-standing questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the Earth orbiting the Sun. - - Only time, (whatever that may be) will tell." "As we shall see," continues Hawking, "the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the Universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked;' What did God do before he created the Universe?', Augustine didn't reply; 'He was preparing hell for people who asked such questions.' Instead, he said that time is a property of the Universe - and that time did not exist before the beginning of the Universe - - "Hawking goes on to say that, "In 1929 Hubble made the landmark observation that wherever you look, distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us. In other words, the Universe is expanding. This means that at earlier times objects would have been closer together. In fact, it seemed that there was a time about [13.7 billion years ago], when they were all at exactly the same place and when, therefore, the density of the Universe was infinite. - - Hubble's observations suggested that there was a time - when the Universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the Big Bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined. In an unchanging Universe, a beginning in time is something that would have to be imposed by some being outside the Universe. There is no physical necessity for a beginning. We could imagine that the Universe was created at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the Universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could still imagine that the Universe was created at the instant of the Big Bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the Big Bang."So from the Big Bang the Universe was born, alive and ever growing. Yes indeed, the Universe, Itself, is alive and ever-evolving. As astronaut Edgar Mitchell reflected, "I suddenly experienced the Universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious". Prior to the beginning, there was nothing. Nothing is everything when there isn't anything. Then, out of nowhere, there was caused a Big Bang and like the sudden explosion of a Black Hole, nothing became something and then there was everything. How can something come out of nothing? Doesn't there have to be an original source, an original action that caused the Big Bang?" And does the complexity of the Universe indicate the presence of intelligent design? The cover on a popular magazine posed the question "WHO IS GOD? Found on the inside pages are the testimony of twenty three then living individuals regarding their personal view of the image of God. Both young and old, rich and poor, people of many nationalities and faiths responded. One person stated that, "I don't know who or what he is, but I am almost sure he is there." Another replied, "He, She, It, Whatever." And another conceded, "God might be a woman, might be a man," And that, " - God is both black and white' - - "an almost imageless conception, a dark light or a light darkness." One person professed that, "God is close to me - whatever I'm doing. He's here now, and will be when I'm gone." And another conjectured that, "God has eyes like ours so he can see everything. God is always happy." Other testimony concluded that, "God is a mystery. We cannot understand him or his plans," and that "He is that bit of goodness inside us." And Arthur Peacocke tells us that "God is the ultimate reality. God is eternal, beyond space and time.""The ancients," advises Pat Rush, "were called 'polytheists' because they believed in many gods. These multiple gods frequently got angry with one another and took their revenge on Earth by victimizing each others' human followers. In polytheism both the good and the bad of Life did come from the gods" "A noted archaeology professor suggests that God had a wife," writes Faye Flam, " - or at least that ancient worshipers thought so." William Dever, a trained biblical theologian turned archaeologist, spent more than 40 years excavating in Israel trying to understand the people who gave rise to today’s monotheistic religions. "In various inscriptions and artifacts, he has uncovered evidence that suggest many people in ancient Israel worshiped a Mr. And Mrs. God - Yahweh and a goddess named Asherah. Questions over God’s gender and marital status go to the roots of our understanding of God’s nature. Some scholars see the perception of God’s maleness as a continued impediment to the empowerment of women. Dever’s [premise] rests on numerous artifacts including some with engraved inscriptions linking the name of the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, with "his Asherah." Asherah in ancient Hebrew may refer to a goddess or to a tree, though Dever says the tree was used as a symbol of the goddess, and that it seems forced to assume anyone was asking blessings from God and his tree. - - - the worship of one god - -monotheism - sprang up in a polytheistic world. - - but the mandate to the Israelites to worship only one god hadn’t reached many people. Some lived in remote places and many couldn’t read. They continued to practice ‘folk religions’, - in which the mother queen goddess Asherah played a big role. Would a god-goddess couple give us mortals a better sense of equality and sharing? While a single male god seems a bit degrading to women, referring to God as a she [also] seems forced, and as problematic as referring to him as a he," concludes Faye Flam "The belief in one God is called 'monotheism'," says Pat Rush. "It developed first with Judaism and later framed the beliefs of both Christianity and Islam. These three religions hold firmly to the belief that there is only one God and that this single God is uncompromisingly good and can do no harm." "Thousands of years ago," advises Arvind Khetia, "in the Rig Veda, the sages of ancient India explained the essence of spiritual harmony by stating, "Truth is one: sages call it by different names." They recognized that the finite mind could never fully comprehend the Infinite; therefore, different interpretations of the ultimate Reality are inevitable. In Hinduism, there are many deities: however, we recognize that these are manifestations of one, transcendental Reality, known as Brahman, the inner divinity of all beings. This Vedantic ideal of the divinity of the soul, in a spiritual sense, unifies all humanity. Swami Viuvekananda echoes this and defines God by stating; "The only God to worship is the human soul in the human body. The moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God within him, that moment I am free from bondage."Therefore, consistent with one’s spiritual capacity, one may choose a personal God or a transcendental God or simply pursue an ideal to represent the idea of God. When Gandhi was asked, "What form does God take in your inner vision?" Gandhi replied that "there cannot be any doubt that Truth is Supreme. Truth is God. I experience this truth every moment within me."Thus, any idea of God can be right, provided it transforms one’s character and leads to spiritual realization - -."But still, fired aloft and floating bodefully overhead like a flare in the nighttime sky is that other eternal question, "WHAT IS GOD?" There are indeed answers to both of these unanswerable questions. We just have to look at the Universe objectively and see Life with an honest eye.There has been a long tradition, (one originated by men, of course), of describing God in masculine terms, referring to Him as 'Lord' or 'Father' or 'King' or 'He'. This has been the inevitable course our language has taken. Due to the natural evolution of our species in a slowly changing social order, and because of the innate responsibilities of the male and female sexes in most species, including ours, back when we first crawled out of our caves, the women of our species have, until recently, stayed in the home to nurture the children and maintain the family infrastructure. The males provided the family with support and protection. Had males been given the birthing role, things would have surely been reversed, but as it has been, men have generally been the religious leaders, the business owners and operators, controllers of the legal and political systems, and supervised the educational institutions. It is still this way in many places on Earth today. Men have, therefore, usually written, printed and published most of what has been written and said. It has only been natural, then, for men to use the masculine form when speaking or writing in the third person. This practice has become so socially acceptable that even some women writers sometimes refer to the human race by using the word 'man' to refer to all of humanity. It is no wonder then, that we might hear one speak in such a parental way of God as 'My Father'. But in recent years, with the pace of our social Evolution quickening, there has been a movement to de-emphasize the maleness of everything, including what we call God."We're not trying to change the image of God from male to female," says Virginia Groehle, "but to expand the image of God to include the female." Most people don't reject the idea of God. "They just reject the images they've been given," she says.When speaking of referring to God, Richard McBrien tells us that we can use either the male or the female as long as we 'understand that God is not a person and has no human attributes whatsoever." So I have to ask myself a question; "What do I mean when I refer to God? If I pray, where do my prayers go?"The word 'god' comes from the Anglo Saxon. It means 'of one who is greeted' and is a verb, not a noun. God, we have always believed, is the mystery of Life and is in everything everywhere and is therefore limitless and indefinable. We would comprehend if we could, but we can't. Howard Weaver explains it thus, "Imagine there is this grasshopper sitting on a milkweed plant near the railroad tracks in Montana. And the Great Northern Railroad goes by and it creates a huge ruckus and the milkweed starts to bounce and bob and weave and the grasshopper looks around. Does he know why it's happening? No, he doesn't. This is the way it is with the Universe. There is obviously something happening, but it is beyond our comprehension"."We inhabit a Universe vaster than human comprehension, older than human wanderings, more wondrous than human conception," exclaims Leonard Pitts, Jr. "And in the face of that, we do the natural thing. We ask questions and seek answers."In the twenty-thousand-plus years of human history there have been human beings to numerous for us to number, somewhere in the centrillions, I suppose. We have evolved from the naked ignorance of our earliest ancestors [whatever they were] to the well dressed and knowledgeable mobile travelers of today's Space Age world, but still we look to the sky in an effort to find God. Realize this, though, that at any given moment, the sky above England looks out into Space in a completely different direction than the sky above, say, Kansas. Two people, on opposite sides of the Earth, would seem to be looking skyward into Space in infinitely opposite directions. Wouldn't this mean that God must be everywhere in the Universe?In every language there is always a word(s) for God. Every culture contains various interpretations for who and what God is. God, it must be said, is limitless and indefinable and completely beyond our [present] comprehension. God is a part of our heritage, part of the human tradition. The human race has had a great need for God, but in today's self-centered world it appears that most people profess a belief in something they call God, often because it is the socially acceptable thing to do (we are such conformists) or they would be embarrassed to admit to others that they don't believe in something most people say they believe in. This is akin to the way we all, at some time or another in Life, pretend to understand something in order to keep from showing our ignorance about it to others. This speaks of us all, at least of everyone I know. This is also what we do in our supposed relationship with God - we only pretend to believe in and trust in God - but when really put to the test by Life, we whine and cry, "Oh, why me? What did I do to deserve this?" And when put to the question of our own personal relationship with God, most of us cannot answer with any firm certainty. "It is the pressure of the crowd," says John Middleton Murry, "that keeps many men standing erect." The greater majority of the people alive today profess a belief in God. We may be a member of a church, a synagogue or mosque, or other religious organization. We may even attend services frequently, and we may pray or meditate constantly, but most of us do it out of blind tradition, rather than from a process of self education.As a general rule, we are what we are brought up to believe, what we have become as a result of the culture we have lived in, and in what our family beliefs are. For many, their religion is a very important part of their being.The various houses of religion have become the social/political organisms of today and while the purported belief in God appears to be strong on the surface, those who are really true believers are becoming fewer and fewer. This is happening because as we learn more and more about ourselves and explore farther and farther into Space, it becomes harder and harder to have faith and believe in the fact of God, especially when confronted with the physical facts. As we look at the photos taken from the Hubble Space Telescope and other deep space probes, we are beginning to understand the magnamity of the Universe. Here, in the early years of the twenty first century more and more people are beginning to question the basics of their traditional faith, though the search for spirituality is as strong as ever. The time has come, it seems, for some new categories of thought. This new thinking we are to do must include the way we look at the Universe, the way we look at the Earth, the way we look at God, as well as the way we look at ourselves. Now, while our knowledge of the outer world has vastly increased in the last century or so, our knowledge about who we are and why we are here has yet to get the attention it is desperately calling for.. "Men have learned many things in the last few centuries, but it is very questionable whether they have learned much more about themselves," again advises John Murry. As we learn about ourselves we will also learn about God.So what do we already know about God?"- - God as seen from the average church, synagogue or mosque is an all-knowing, all-powerful creative being - - if you're religious in the conventional sense.Then again, some people are religious in an unconventional sense. They kind of believe in a deity but wouldn't mind seeing some hard evidence; or they believe strongly in some kind of deity, but it's vague in form, open to any tailoring that scientific measurement may dictate," so writes Robert Wright in his Dec. 1992 Time Magazine article entitled, 'Science, God, And Man'. "God- - doesn't exactly refer to a giant photon in a white beard and robe, beaming down benignly on all creation," Wright continues."Still, some of the epic narratives of contemporary science, ranging from the birth of our Universe to the birth of our species, do lend themselves to religious interpretation. Indeed, one hallmark of 20th century science, as it draws to a close, is how much fertile ground it has provided for bona fide theological speculation; speculation about whether the Universe is a product of intelligent design, whether the human experience is part of some unfolding purpose, whether we were in any sense meant to be here.There is a giant paradox here.On the one hand, this century has seen the explanatory sweep of science advance relentlessly and encroach on once sacred turf. - - the most ethereal parts of life - the things that once seemed heavensent - have fallen steadily within reach of concrete explanation. - -In short, the works of modern science, taken one by one, seem enough to dampen a person's hopes for higher meaning. - - this is half the giant paradox - -The other half of the paradox comes from stepping back and looking at the big picture; an overarching pattern that encompasses the many feats of 20th century science and transcends them; a pattern suggesting, to some scientists, at least, that there is more to this Universe than meets the eye, something authentically divine about how it all fits together.One intriguing observation that has bubbled up from physics is that the Universe seems calibrated for Life's existence. - - If, at the Big Bang, some basic numbers - the 'initial conditions' - had been jiggled, matter and energy would never have coagulated into galaxies, stars, planets or any other platforms stable enough for life as we know it. And so on.Some physicists have tried to drain these coincidences of their eeriness with something called the 'anthropic principle', which dismisses humankind's perspective on the cosmos as inherently biased. It's no surprise, they say, that the Universe is conducive to Life. -There was a time when the emergence of Life wasn't thought too amazing. - - Presumably if you let simple molecules reshuffle themselves randomly for long enough, some complex ones would get formed, and further reshuffling would make them more complex, until you had something like DNA - a stable molecule that just happens to make copies of itself.But more recent, more careful analysis suggests that even a mildly impressive living molecule is quite unlikely to form randomly. Then where did it come from? This is one of the questions that drive an emerging interdisciplinary field known as 'complexity' - -One of complexity's main buzz words is 'self-organization'. Drab, lifeless physical systems, such as air and water, faced with increasing disruption, sometimes grow more structured.- - Chemist Ilya Prigogine sees a broad tendency for physical systems that are driven away from stability to regain it at a higher level of organization.(Blowing air becomes more turbulent until it finally turns into whirlwinds, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Water molecules heated from below grow wilder in their gyrations until they finally snap into a sweeping circular motion known as a convection cell.)A number of complexity theorists think self-organization is so basic a principle as to account for the origin of life. - - -- - Various scientists are pondering the prospect that a basic physical law lies waiting to be discovered, a law defining the circumstances under which systems infused with energy become more complexly structured. This law would carve out local exceptions to the general tendency of things to become more chaotic and bland - higher in 'entropy' - - Such a law, says Charles Bennett, would play a role "formerly assigned to God."- - Certainly, a Universe predisposed to create Life seems a more likely product of design than a Universe in which Life was a fluke.Still, Life itself doesn't strike the average person as all that impressive. - - It is highly intelligent Life that seems most to demand explanation. - - many, perhaps most, evolutionary biologists now hold this belief. - - they believe evolution was very likely, given enough time, to create a species with our essential property: an intelligence so great that it becomes aware of itself and starts figuring out how things work.Many biologists have long believed that the coming of highly intelligent Life was close to inevitable.Ever since Darwin, the idea of 'survival of the fittest' as an inexorably 'progressive' force has been misused to justify poverty, genocide and suffering in general. - - the idea of progressive evolution has encouraged some - thinking like that of Henri Bergson, who believed in an 'elan vital' - a Life Force, an immaterial essence - pushing evolution ever upward. - - Biologists, (however) insist on a strictly physical scenario: genes that aid survival and reproduction are preserved, and those that don't aren't - natural selection.- - over time evolution has pushed the envelope of complexity and intelligence outward; the trophies for 'most intricate species' and 'smartest species' have become harder to get. -- -look at the big picture that some people see being painted by 20th century science; a Universe all but destined to create platforms for Life; a still unknown but increasingly suspected physical law that all but destined some of these platforms to be populated by little living specks; an evolutionary process that was almost destined, given enough time, to turn those specks into thinking, wondering, self-aware beings. Suddenly the Universe seems almost designed to yield creatures that read articles about how they came to be here.Paul Davies puts it this way, "The very fact that the Universe is creative, and that the laws have permitted complex structures to emerge and develop to the point of consciousness - in other words, that the Universe has organized it's own self- awareness - is for me powerful evidence that there is 'something going on' behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming."- - 20th century science sketches a Universe - whose innermost workings may not be fathomable. The deeper our insight, the more baffling things become. - - Richard Feynman once prefaced a lecture by telling his audience not to worry about understanding - - "I think I can safely say that nobody understands (Quantum mechanics). Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?'....Nobody knows how it can be like that."This is indeed a good briefing for descent into the subatomic realm, a place where randomness reigns, where two flatly contradictory statements can both be true, where the course that events take depends on their subsequent perception -Naturally, the quantum world has provoked popular attempts to merge science and spirit, - - ... - the pioneering quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger, author of 'What Is Life', wrote about the hidden one-ness of all human minds. - - - - - …- - - - orthodox biologists believe that behavior, however complex, is governed entirely by bio-chemistry and that the attendant sensations - fear, pain, wonder, love - are just shadows cast by that bio-chemistry, not themselves vital to the organism's behavior, they are affected by the material world but don't affect it. Well, if that's the case and feelings don't do anything, then why do they exist at all?This is no trivial question - - feelings - the fact that we experience the world as well as respond to it - are what make Life meaningful. - - if subjective experience is a freebie, an optional feature thrown in at no extra charge by whatever or whoever created the Universe - one could call it another link in the argument for design; this Universe seems geared to create not just intelligent Life but intelligent, meaningful Life. - - although the existence of subjective experience may have no strictly scientific explanation, it could still have a 'metaphysical' one. - -With respect for metaphysics comes respect for an idea central to many religions; the unknowable. Agnosticism - reserving judgment about divine purpose - remains as defensible as ever, but atheism - the confident denial of divine purpose - becomes trickier. If you admit that we can't peer behind the curtain, how can you be sure there's nothing there?- - William Hamilton is the author of the ‘Theory of Kin Selection,' a landmark in evolutionary thought. - - the theory depicts brotherly love as genetic selfishness.Specifically, altruism toward kin - the kamikaze flight of a bee defending the hive, the fearless defense of a younger brother on the playground - has evolved because the genes that produce this altruism may reside not only in the animal that exhibits it but also within his kin; thus the genes get saved by the act of altruism, even if it is suicidal. Some find this reduction of love to selfishness deadening - - another assault by science on spirit.But kin selection has a seldom mentioned flip side - the very same logic explains why cells first got together to form multi-cellular organisms. Because nearby cells tended to be related, they shared genes, so increasing cooperation among them made evolutionary sense, and this trend eventually led to utterly cooperative communities of cells - .Hamiltion, then, is the biologist who first clearly discerned the force that propelled Life over the chasm between single celled and multi-celled. - - Kin selection is a vital link in the argument that the evolution of intelligent Life was very probable all along.To put the two implications of kin selection together; affinities among closely related organisms tend to evolve, given enough time, regardless of whether the organisms are cellular or multi-cellular. And in humans, at least, the subjective correlates of this affinity - are affection, compassion, love. Love, in this sense, seems to have been in the cards from the beginning.This is arguably good news, a welcome antidote to the obvious fact that hatred, too, is a likely fruit of natural selection's war of all against all.Apparently that august religious theme - good vs. evil, love against hate - has been in the script longer than one might have guessed.Hamilton agrees that the evolution of complex and intelligent Life was very likely from the beginning, given enough time. To be sure, it was hardly inevitable that the first highly intelligent creature would descend from an ape. "It might have been the descendant of a squirrel-like creature, or a dolphin-like creature," he says, but the chance of something very brainy eventually emerging from a process of natural selection is so high that he is 'quite favorably inclined to search for signs of intelligent Life on other planets."Speaking of extra-terrestrials; "There's one theory of the Universe that I rather like," says Hamilton. "Suppose our planet is a 'zoo for extra-terrestrial beings'; they planted the seeds of evolution on Earth, hoping to create interesting, intelligent creatures. And they watch their experiment, interfering hardly at all.So that almost everything we do comes out according to the laws of Nature". - - An extra-terrestrial zookeeper may not strike everyone as the ideal deity, but that's beside the point. - -The point is simply that one of the great scientific minds of our era believes that the ultimate questions remain unanswered, that science may be unable to answer them, and yet that science does help us mull them over, by illuminating the epic trajectory of cosmic and biological evolution on whose end we sit. "The theological possibility," Hamiliton says, "is still certainly alive.""The real choice," concludes Robert Wright "is not 'creation or evolution' at all, but ' purpose or accident'I passionately believe in a Universe with purpose, though I cannot prove it." ( End of Time Magazine article.)The cosmic evolution of the Universe is a purposeful accident which continues to baffle the mind of twenty-first century humans, though we are slowly beginning to open our minds to new ways of understanding how the Universe works. Unfortunately, we are doing a tremendous amount of damage to ourselves and the Earth by continuing to cling to all of our old traditions and by refusing to acknowledge the long established myth of God. This myth, in all of it's many forms, has been passed on from one generation to the next since humans became aware of themselves as mortal organisms. Immortality, we will learn, may actually be achieved, but only through our metabiological unity with the very Universe, itself.( At this point in this writing I am going to insert several passages from John Middleton Murry's 1929 book simply titled, 'GOD'. I have, without permission, condensed the entire book and will include it as it's own chapter later. The following paragraphs have been extracted and appear in order though there may be words, sentences, or paragraphs that have been deleted from what I have selected for use here.)""""""Our life-long concern," advises Murry, "is with our existence upon Earth. Here we are imprisoned, and here we are free. The organic unity of this universe of ours is no such tremendous supposition as is the organic unity of the Universe at large. And, if we feel that we must concern ourselves deeply with the Universe at large, it is still more our duty to remember that it is only by knowing ourselves that we can determine how much we know, or are likely to know, about the greater Universe.If we can establish our position in that scheme wherein we actually do live and move and have our being, we shall be well on the way to such human wisdom as we can attain. The scheme in which we see ourselves is, as Goethe said, a scheme of Life "in the broadest sense." Life, in this sense, stirs invisibly, we may be sure, throughout the whole inorganic world.There is an organic sequence of pre-biological life and biological life; to that sequence we now add metabiological life, which - - man has achieved and can achieve. Prebiological, biological, metabiological - such is the sequence in this organic Universe of ours.What distinguishes the metabiological phase in the sequence is, first, that it is peculiar and proper to man. With man, so far as we can tell, first but not suddenly appeared, in the sequence of biological life an element equally pregnant with potentialities of organic achievement and of organic disruption - namely, the inscrutable and indefinable mode of life which we call "consciousness." Wherein, precisely, this peculiar consciousness of man differs from the consciousness of the higher animals I leave it to others to presume to say. It seems to me quite probable that an intelligent visitor from another universe would find, as Keats did, little difference between the vast and busy congregation of humankind and a community of bees or ants.What we take to be the signs of conscious intelligence, he might take to be manifestations of instinct, save that he might have difficulty in believing that any works so seemingly ugly as many of the works of man could be the product of instinct. He would be inclined to suppose that some diabolical and perverting power had intervened to distort the instinctive process of Life.It would be ridiculous to maintain that the point in the organic process of Earth at which ugliness begins, is the point at which the specifically human consciousness emerges. Nature, when she had a free field, seems to have made a good deal of ugliness on her own. Most of us feel (though probably we are wrong) that, given the materials, we could have made a better job of the Diplodocus, or even of the Pterodactyl; so that we cannot say there is anything particularly unnatural in the ugliness with which man cumbers the Earth. On the contrary, they are as natural (in the really valid sense of the word) as anything else. A cretin is as natural as a Shakespeare; - -. The real peculiarity of the human consciousness is that it introduced an element which is able to observe these distressing discrepancies. With conscious man a further faculty of self-criticism entered into the organic process of Earth-life.Every crucial act in the long history of man, from the discovery of fire and tillage to the invention of the wheel and the creation of God, is an act of self-criticism by Nature.This self-criticism began by being half-conscious; man without thought, or ability to think, of the implications, was painfully at work to remedy the deficiencies of Nature with regard to himself, a part of Nature - therefore the deficiencies of Nature with regard to herself. What really went on in him during the epochs while he slowly hammered out the rudiments of a civilization was merely what had been going on in the aeons before his emergence. He was only the instrument by which the self-criticism of Nature became more acute. It appears - to have become quicker. But time depends upon the time-consciousness.To put our time-measurement back into the process as it was before man emerged from it is a fundamental mistake in proportion. What appears to us as an acceleration in the movement of self-criticism in Nature is only the movement becoming conscious of itself. Each successive creative act in the geological past belonged to the same order of self-criticism.The emergent intelligence of man was likewise of the same order as the emergent wing of the rudimentary bird; it consisted in an emergent capacity to use things in order to protect the vehicle of the emergent capacity itself. This emergence of human intelligence was continuous with the secular process that preceded it, and is in essence indistinguishable from it. The tool made and handled by man, as Samuel Butler first clearly saw, is as much an intrinsic part of the human organism as the hands which make and manipulate it. Nor is there any point in the advance of intelligence at which the continuity of the process is broken. The supreme artistic and intellectual creations of man are as intrinsic to his organic evolution as was the first handy stone which the Neanderthaler banged about into an eolith; so are the innumerable forgotten stupidities which he has created with the same gusto as his masterpieces. The difference between the stupidities and the masterpieces is simply that the latter have served the ends of Life. The masterpiece is an organ which has maintained itself in the vast organic experiment; on the whole the stupidities tend to become rudimentary and disappear.It is in such a context that we must regard the fact of consciousness. It is a name for a peculiar modality manifest in man of the inherent organic urge towards newness. The point at which human intelligence and human emotion differentiate themselves from animal instinct is not determinable, for the simple reason that the progress from the one to the other has been an organic sequence.And the truest way to regard human intelligence and human emotion is to regard them directly as manifestations of animal instinct. The most abstract speculations of the intelligence derive directly from the same impulse to manipulate external objects and to make them intrinsic to the organism which impelled the erect Pithecanthropus to assimilate a convenient stone. The part played by symbolic language in this strange evolution was prodigious. Instead of things themselves, sounds.No wonder that in the primitive mind, to possess the name was to possess power over the thing. By symbolic language man manipulated and assimilated the world. He made it organic to himself -, he infinitely extended his own field of existence, and security.But a moment came when this accelerated process of organic assimilation received a check. The world known was known as hostile to the knower. It was known as a world of pain, and terror, and accident - an unassimilable world. God was invented to make it assimilable once more. The unaccountable was focused into a point of fathomless inscrutability. But at last God also proved unassimilable. Man demanded that God should be as good as himself.For capacities of "goodness" had arisen in man. He had learned that two men need not necessarily fear each other; they could trust each other, and defend themselves the more securely thereby. The mother protected her offspring and the father protected them both. Security was the bliss of the primitive world, the halcyon moment in the incessant surge of fear. Security, which men could grant within a little ambit, God must grant within a great one. The order which men faithfully created about them, God must uphold in all things. Yet they suffered; as peoples, pestilence and defeat; as men, sickness and death. Since order there must be, they had done wrong; they had sinned against God. They looked for the sins, and they found them. There were plenty to find, and God got the credit for man’s striving towards newness. At every stage man’s progress towards inward order was projected into God.It was inevitable that at some point or other God should thus be endowed with virtues which, though achieved in the individual, were not manifest in the ordering of the world. The great question of Job was put: if the just man suffers, where is the justice of God? The vain appeal was heard for the evidence of moral order in the world. And that appeal, it is clear, could never be more than temporarily satisfied. For the simple fact was that man was forever passing beyond the God whom he had created, until the moment came when, in the rare emergent individual, man was higher and nobler, juster and more loving, than any credible author of the world order could be. In short, if God was to be credible at all, if he was to continue to serve his purpose of making the human universe assimilable, the time had come when a man must be God.He appeared: the just and loving man who was killed for his justice and his love. Men were on the verge of adoring a reality. But they glanced the full shock aside by resurrecting the dead hero, and making his resurrection the guarantee of their own. Still, the suffering God was a tremendous creation; it came nearer to the truth of things than any religious imagination had done before: nearer than any of the sublime speculations of the Greeks.The difference between a suffering God and a world in travail of its own perfection is very small; perhaps, if we have regard to the necessity of metaphor, none at all. Essentially, this amazing evolution of religion was the effort of man to find order in the world of his experience.It was the condition of order in himself, and that effort to find order in the world of his experience was, in origin, an effort to assimilate the world. Nor did it ever change its nature. The highest religious intuition reveals, to patient contemplation, the same primeval impulse to incorporate the world to himself, by means of an immediate experience of the biological unity of Life. Immediate experience of that kind was the only way available to him of obtaining the conviction that he needed. Not till eighteen hundred years after him, not until Goethe enunciated his surmises, was any radically different way of obtaining that knowledge open to men. Men strove to discover the order of science. But the bases of their science were bound to give them a world order which they could not incorporate into themselves. A mechanistic universe demands a mechanistic man to know it. The fundamental effort of Jesus, strange though the claim may sound to the man of science, was in truth more scientific. No less than the effort of science, it was an effort to discover a universal order. But unlike science it began with the assumption that the order of the Universe must be of the same kind as the order in man. Science assumed that the order in man must be of the same kind as the order in the Universe.Both were assumptions. But the assumption of Jesus had this in its favour; that, whatever the universal order might prove to be, man was a product and part of it. When Jesus demanded that the pattern of the Universe should be like the pattern of himself, he could not be wholly wrong. He alone knew the order of that part of the universal order which was himself. That knowledge he would not surrender. It was irreconcilable with his knowledge of the world: still, he would not surrender it. The discord was terrible, ultimate; still, he would not yield. Consciousness broke under the strain, and the unity which is beneath consciousness possessed him. He was right after all. The order of the world was of the same kind as the order in himself. A scientific discovery if ever there was one: confirmed by experiment and valid to this day.The assumption of science was not so firmly based: and it was an unconscious assumption. The assumption was that the order in man was of the same kind as the order in the Universe.That was well enough: but unfortunately this universe did not include man. Since man was left out of it at the beginning, he could not -get into it at the end. All that could get into it in the shape or semblance of a man was an automaton.The fact was that the universe of science simply was not the Universe. Today men of science are beginning to discover it; some to acknowledge it publicly, to the great distress of their colleagues. But Goethe told them so a hundred years ago; the universal order is not logical, nor scientific, but biological.Man can incorporate the Universe to himself, or himself to the Universe; which is the same thing. That is what Jesus discovered, and what many men following him have discovered. The discovery has been formulated in many ways, but its practical effect has always been the same. There is a self-integration. The biological organism which is man becomes an organism on a higher level. Consciousness becomes not merely formally, but actually, organic to the human being. Intelligence and emotion cease from their disruptive autonomy, and merge into organic consciousness. Through this metabiological organism Life can create, without hindrance, her own pure and inscrutable newness.It is, in short, man’s privilege and burden that he alone among organisms must learn, slow and painfully, to be an organism. The aim of human Life, once posited in these simple terms, seems obvious. Yet how difficult of attainment it is! Religion had its method: man was to do the will of God. But man found it too difficult to do the will of God. He needed to know what it was; he must have rules to tell him. But the will of God that is known beforehand ceases to be the will of God. The will of God is that which a man does when he has learned to be, and actually is, an organism.In (the) crucial matter of the mystical experience, we have been able at once to decline the transcendental and the pragmatic interpretation. The One of immediate experience is not a transcendental Unity; it is the unity of biological being. The value which attaches to that experience is not a pragmatic value; it is not that it enables the recipient to behave as if there were an ultimate Unity. It enables him, on the contrary, to behave as an integral part of an ultimate Unity that is real. Of course, it is easy to cavil at this blundering language, and to object that, if there is an ultimate biological unity, every man must inevitably be an integral part of it. That is true enough. But for man to be an integral part of the biological unity involves that he should become conscious of himself as an integral part of it. In other words, the biological unity of man must also be metabiological.This metabiological unity of man is organic, creative, and emergent. As value it is objective and real. It is the variation of proved maximum significance in the organic evolution of the whole during the period which most nearly concerns us. What will come after is not our business. Our duty is simply to help it to come; and our method of doing our duty is to maintain the variation in ourselves, by achieving our own metabiological unity. Only thus can we secure ourselves against the danger of becoming rudimentary or reversional in the organic process of the whole. We must become the vehicles, not of Life’s self-perpetuation, but of Life’s self-creation. - - -- - Finally, we cease to need God as the explanation of the immediate experience of an all-pervading Unity. The unity is real, the experience is real; but it gives, and demands, no God. God does not exist; but we shall never be able to do without him, unless we know in ourselves, the reasons why he was created. That knowledge is dynamic; for no one can know in himself the demands which God was created to satisfy, without determining that for his part, his Life shall be devoted to the perpetuating of those values which God was created to secure. If we deny God, as we must, then we must bear his burden. In him the contradictions of the Universe were reconciled; they must be reconciled, henceforward, in ourselves. In him the great values were incorporated; they must be incorporated, henceforward, in ourselves. In him, a new man emerged; he must emerge, henceforward, in us.We have not concerned ourselves with religion in the abstract: - - because there is no abstract religion. Religion is not, as many seem to suppose, the same as philosophy. - - - God - - is the means by which man seeks to make the Universe a unity which he can assimilate, or to which he can assimilate himself, which comes to the same thing. The assertion of the existence of God is the assertion that the Universe is not a chaos; it may be incomprehensible, but it is not a chaos. The continuous projection into God of man’s own highest achievements, or more strictly the achievements which were precious to men most deeply concerned that the Universe should not be a chaos, was the necessary means of asserting an ultimate unity. For among all the things for which God was responsible in the mind of any God-discoverer, he was certainly responsible for the God-discoverer himself. What he was God must be. God might be many things besides; but he must be that. God was thus the ever-growing repository of painfully achieved human perfection’s. He grew with man, and he helped man to grow.The deification of an actual man was the necessary consummation of the process of God-creation. Not any man could thus have been deified; only a great man, and a new man, and a man moreover whose greatness and newness should be perpetually evident.Christianity - - is more than the man Jesus; but without him it would be only a vaguely remembered philosophy. The new man who spoke words that testify his newness to all who have ears to hear them; the new man who was killed for his newness - this was the deity. Newness and the impotence of death against it manifest in a single man, and this man God.No God who enables a great man to accept himself can ever betray him; he has done all that a God can do. For men create their own Gods in their own image, and when they obey them, they obey themselves. Not the little selves of which they are conscious, and which would shrink from destiny and the unknown, but the self indeed, through which the unknown and uncreated emerges into beingIf a deliberate lapse into unconsciousness is possible, and if Life indeed requires it, then it is a variation that will maintain itself, and books like this, and men like me, and greater books then this, and greater men than I, will fall into oblivion.But if the deliberate lapse into unconsciousness is not possible (as we believe it is not possible) then those who proclaim it as necessity are self-deceived. There are two ways of annihilating in ourselves our concern for the purpose of Life; and they have chosen the wrong one. It is wrong, simply because it is impossible.The other way is to push on and on; to be still more concerned about the purpose of Life, to be God-deniers in the supreme degree. Others will pause on the path., They will accept something, which we will not accept. They will say: "Let this be God, or that be God." Or they will say: "Who cares now for Religion? Let the dead bury their dead." They will say these things, and they will believe them. It is well. We observe them as pure phenomena, and go our way. Whether we are the significant variations or they, time alone will show. We cannot help believing that Life is on our side, for we have only followed where it led. But we may be mistaken. Of course, but what then? Who cares? We are ourselves and not others. If Life chooses not to remember us, we shall not be there to grieve.We obey our destiny. We deny God, and we will to deny him utterly. Because we are truly so determined, we discover that we cannot deny him, unless we know what he is, and was. We discover that he was once the necessary means to make man obedient to his own newness; and we discover that the need endures.The need endures, but the means does not endure. What then shall we do? Shall we create a God whom we know to be no God? That is impossible. A God whom we know to be no God can never satisfy the need.There is but one way now. To see, directly and without means, that men are obedient to their own newness. They cannot help themselves. That is how Life works; that is Life. And we, who have struggled to reach so far, have simply been obedient to the newness of ourselves. That newness was not our own newness; it was the newness of many men before us, to which we responded, and which we could not but strive to perpetuate. The newness in ourselves was simply the blind resolution to perpetuate in ourselves newnesses which had not been perpetuated together before us. This new harmony of newness is our creation, and we can take no credit for it. To see that it is veritably our own is to see that it is not ours at all."Whose then is it?" some may say, "for the answer will be God." The answer used to be God, but it is so no longer. The answer is, if you will, the 'organic process of Life'. That may, for all we know, be only a metaphor. What if it be? It happens to be, at this point of time, the simplest description of the facts as we directly see them. If others can see them thus simply, then our description will have the appeal of an obvious accuracy; in the words of the old hymn, "Faith will vanish into sight." Admittedly, what we offer is either a tremendous simplification, or tremendous nonsense. To some, we hope, it will be childishly simple; to others, we are sure, it will be incomprehensible.Of course, if men insist on God, no matter what he means or is or does - and a great deal of modem "theology" seems to arise from this insistence - if, in short, they are content to stuff a venerable but now empty word, with the only kind of meaning the modem mind will allow it to bear, they can get God out of anything. Whatever their philosophy or their science allows for reality will be God.The more we are bludgeoned, the more we cry for a meaning. A painful life makes a man a God-seeker; let it be only painful enough, and he will assuredly become a God-finder also. - - I have been a God-seeker, a God-finder, and a God-denier. He becomes too vast to be my friend, too intimate to be my enemy.We must make the universe a unity; We must bear the burden of our own newness, without hope of reward; we must take responsibility for ourselves. (End of Murry selections}It is time for us to Change. We must give up the myth. It is unbelievably hard to do, but we must do it....... I, too, was raised to believe in God. That belief is part of me. The belief in God is so ingrained into the fiber of human Life that it may be all but impossible to purge him from our cultures. After all, it is the fear of God, of the possibility of either damnation or salvation, of hell or of heaven, and of death or eternal Life that has driven our system of values since the inception of the human social order.It is hard to believe that here at the beginning of the 21st century, with all that science and space exploration have shown us of the Universe, the majority of humans still say they believe in God, with some 2.1 billion of the Christian faiths and 1.3 billion Islamic. Here, Jonah Goldberg helps us understand when he writes, "In (an) issue of The Atlantic, Paul Bloom - offers an interesting perspective on the whole God thing.He makes a very powerful case that belief - or a tendency toward belief - in the supernatural in general and God in particular is hardwired into our systems from birth. His article is titled ‘Is God an Accident?’Citing among other things some very clever experiments with babies and young children - [he] argues that we come into this world preprogrammed to divide the world into spirits and objects, or minds and bodies. This - is an evolutionary adaptation designed for one thing - socialization - -which has made us susceptible to another thing; religion.We aren’t ‘supposed’ to believe in God. But in addition to our evolved tendency to split the world into spirit and object, our operating systems are also set up to want to believe that everything happens for a reason.Our brains don’t like randomness, so we assume that there is an intelligence or purpose behind events, something that requires things to happen the way they do".It has been our assumptions that have gotten us into the perplexing situation we are in. On the one hand, we say we believe in a Supreme Being called God, who created and controls everything and answers our prayers. On the other hand, however, we have evolved to the point that we know, in our heart of hearts, that this cannot be true. The astronomists have pulled back the curtain of the sky and we can now peer many light-years into Space in all directions but we have yet to find the body of God. Or have we ? We have found no god, but then we have found something ! ! !The Organic Process of Life is the progenitor of the evolution of all things and it not distinct from the Universe with which it was born at the Big Bang. The Universe, Itself, that is to say, all that exists, comprises the living, expanding, intelligent, ever-evolving Organism Universe. Whether we can comprehend this or not, it is true. The Universe, Itself, is the supreme organism. We humans are just a very minute part of the living whole organism, just as those microscopic mites that live on our skin are a very minute part of the human organism. And as the mite has no conception of it's living host, so the human has been incapable of comprehending the truth of its own existence. This is not really such a difficult concept to grasp, it is just a totally different way of looking at everything. We have not been able to see the forest for all the trees. The truth has been right in front of our eyes the whole time, but we have been to ignorant to recognize it. The continual processes of Creation, that is to say, the perpetual processes of the procreation and evolution of all things, that is, The Organic Process of Life, could well be said to be the very energy created by the heartbeat of the Universe, Itself, with all things created being a part of the Universe. If the majority of the members of human race have been able to have faith and believe in a god they could not actually see, how could it be difficult for an open mind to accept the visible Universe as the supreme organism. It is sort of one of those things that once you see it, it is hard to understand how you could have ever seen it any other way.... We Are One...." We usually assume that the Universe is a collection of things separate and distinct from one another" writes Vern Barnet, ". - - similarly we may think of ourselves as independent beings, but who would we be without the genetic inheritance from our parents, without nurturing we received or did not receive, without the society that provides water and credit cards and cell phones? Do we exist independent of the oxygen we breathe? Would we survive the extinction of the sun?The mystics say we are embedded in the world to such an extent that to think of anything as separate and distinct is illusory. Even a pen implies the anatomy of the hand that writes with it. And the writing implies the Phoenicians sometimes credited with inventing the alphabet. - - -The mystical sensibility is sometimes characterized as 'oneness,' but that is just as misleading as the everyday notion of separateness. The vision of the mystics is rather of mutual interrelatedness within what Nicholas Cusa called God or the infinite and what the Chinese Hua Yen Buddhist master Fa Tsang (643-712) called 'the void'.The Empress Wu Tse-t'ien asked Fa Tsang to explain the doctoring of interpenetration and mutual containment of all things in the void. He built her a room with mirrors on all walls, the floor and the ceiling. In it he placed a torch and an image of the Buddha.Taking her inside, he called her attention to the countless reflections, each image imparting the others. Producing from his robe a crystal ball, Fa Tsang showed the empress how the large mirrors and the small ball mutually generate and contain images of one another. The infinite number of images possible, simultaneously arising, was a metaphor for the mutual creation and interdependence of all things in space and time.Thus when we look at any other human being, we can imagine that he or she has struggled, as we have, with finitude, knowing little, desiring deeply, infinitely connected in ways we cannot imagine.We are kin. And recognizing how limited he or she is, and ourselves, embedded in a complicated network of circumstances, paradoxically opens the door to the infinite - - - ."Once we can recognize our true situation, then the whole of the Universe, with it's all-pervading Unity, takes on a new meaning. The Universe is, in fact, the body of the Organic Process of Life. No longer do we look through the tunnel-vision of self-centeredness and see ourselves as separated from the Universe, but conversely, we now see ourselves as a part of all that ever has been or ever will be, a part of that which created us. We are a part of the process, the Organic Process of Life, of which all things are a part. Even inanimate objects, ( i.e., rocks, dirt, etc.) are part of the Organic Process of Life, for everything has a beginning, and everything has an end, everything has a Life. Only the Organic Process of Life is infinitely eternal. The very Universe, itself, having had a beginning, must eventually have an end, for such are the purposes of existence and being. Remember, the Universe was born at the Big Bang when suddenly a tiny, unimaginably dense point exploded into being and it has been evolving ever since then.To paint the picture as clear as I know how, I will paraphrase the belief statement of the World Pantheism Movement, which begins by saying, 'We revere and celebrate the Universe as the totality of being, past, present and future. The Universe is self-organizing, ever-evolving and inexhaustibly diverse. Its overwhelming power, beauty and fundamental mystery compel the deepest human reverence and wonder. All matter, energy, and Life are an interconnected Unity of which we are inseparable. We are an integral part of Nature, which we shall cherish, revere and preserve in all its magnificent beauty and diversity. We should strive to live in harmony with Nature locally and globally. We acknowledge the inherent value (sanctity) of all Life, human and non-human, and strive to treat all living beings with compassion and respect. All humans are equal centers of awareness of the Universe and Nature, and all deserve a Life of equal dignity and mutual respect. There is a single kind of substance, energy/matter, which is vibrant and infinitely creative in all its forms. Body and mind are indivisibly united. Our physical death is the return to nature of our elements, and the end of our existence as individuals. The forms of "afterlife" available to humans are natural ones, in the natural world. Our actions, our ideas our memories, our metaphysical selves live on (or perish), according to what we do in our lives here on Earth. Our genes live on in our families, and our elements are endlessly recycled in Nature. We honor reality, and keep our minds open to the evidence of the senses and of science's unending quest for deeper understanding. These are our best means for us to come to know the Universe. Every individual has direct access through perception, emotion and meditation to ultimate reality, which is the Universe and Nature.'When Larry King asked Stephen Hawking, "Do you believe in God?", Hawking replied, "Yes, if by god is meant the embodiment of the laws of the Universe".'A religion (paraphrasing Carl Sagan) that stresses the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.'"This planet of ours is not an inertial body", Chan Thomas tells us, "it's a complex motor-generator system, as are the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, its parent Supergalaxy and the Universe in which we live."Astronaut Edgar Mitchell made this heartfelt observation "Instead of an intellectual search, there was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different. It occurred when looking at Earth and seeing this blue-and-white planet floating there, and knowing it was orbiting the Sun, seeing that Sun, seeing - rather, knowing for sure - that there was a purposefulness of flow, of energy, of time, of space in the cosmos - that it was beyond man’s rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a nonrational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience.There seems to be more to the Universe than random, chaotic, purposeless movement of a collection of molecular particles.On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of Space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the Universe as intelligent, loving, [and] harmonious."Indeed, there is a harmony, a harmony created by the All-Pervading Unity of the Universe. How Can You Not Feel It ???? Next: Forward to ;REFLECTIONS ON THE OSMOSIS OF HUMAN LIFE AND THE PROCESS OF ABSORPTION at http://www.mysticwizardmusings5.blogspot.com/ Or Back to; REFLECTIONS ON GOD, MYTHOLOGY, & THE ORGANIC PROCESS OF LIFE at; http://www.mysticwizardmusings3.blogspot.com/