The Living Universe (5 page)

Another remarkable discovery emerging from science is that we are not cut off from the rest of the universe. A core theme throughout this book is the idea that we each have an intuitive connection with
the cosmos, even though it may be largely unrecognized and undeveloped. The respected author and researcher Dean Radin did an exhaustive analysis of psi research involving more than eight hundred studies and sixty investigators over nearly three decades.
⁹
After weighing the collective evidence from all these studies, he concluded that we do participate in a subtle field, or ecology, of consciousness where we can both “send” and “receive.” These results are borne out in people's everyday experience. For example, surveys of the American adult population show that two-thirds say they have had an experience of extrasensory perception such as an accurate intuition about the well-being of someone who is far away.
¹⁰
In addition, about 40 percent report having had a “mystical” experience such as seeing the universe as alive and feeling a sense of great peace and safety within that aliveness.
¹¹
In keeping with these findings, a recurring theme of this book is that consciousness is not confined within the brain but is an infusing presence throughout the universe that enables us, in cooperation with the brain, to connect meaningfully with the world beyond our physical body.

Bringing these four areas of insight together already begins to awaken the possibility of a new sense of ourselves, the universe, and the human journey. We thought we were small creatures living in a vast material universe. We believed that our capacity for thought put us at the peak of the evolutionary wave, but we have now been offered a very different view:
We are giants, living in a mostly invisible universe, who are just getting underway in our evolutionary journey, and can reach with our consciousness into the larger universe
. These freeing insights liberate us from thinking we are small and insignificant. Not incidentally, they also free us from the arrogance of thinking that we occupy the leading edge of evolution's wave.

Imagine what would be required to create a cosmic system like ours. One of the most striking things about our universe is the extraordinary precision with which it is put together. The fine-tuning of dozens of key factors is essential because the most minute variation would have resulted in no universe at all. For example, had the rate of expansion after the Big Bang been even slightly faster, the universe would have evaporated—and no stars or planets would have formed. Alternately, had the rate of expansion been even slightly slower, the universe would have collapsed back upon itself long ago—and the Big Bang would have quickly become the Big Crunch! There are at least several dozen relationships in the universe that need to be precisely just as they are if life is to exist. From the strength of gravity to the charge of an electron—if any of these were different by even small amounts, life as we know it would not be possible. The extraordinary degree of fine-tuning in our universe indicates that a profound design-intelligence is at work (not to be equated with the theology of “intelligent design,” which negates evolution).
¹²

So what might be required to build and maintain, in good working condition, a universe like ours? Consider this: What if you are well known for your creativity and skill, and the Mother Universe says to you, “I really like your work. Would you like to build a cosmos? Think about it.” Then the Mother Universe hands you nine design and construction requirements.
¹³
Consider these playfully as a way to stretch your imagination and prepare for the inquiry ahead.

• First, you must create a transparent field with an invisible structure called
geometry
that will keep everything in its
proper place and time. Place the cosmos within that field and guarantee that this dimensional geometry will work flawlessly across trillions of miles for billions of years.

• Second, you cannot construct your universe from anything visible. You must build everything from transparent life energy.

• Third, instead of allowing the universe to emerge fully developed, you must engineer it so that it inflates from an area far smaller than a pinpoint and grows to contain a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion or more stars.

• Fourth, design
matter
. Take clouds of energy that are almost entirely empty space and have them flow around themselves trillions of times per second in order to present themselves as stable forms. Despite their completely dynamic nature, give these whirlwinds of energy the appearance and feel of solidity.

• Fifth, design
space
. Simple emptiness or the absence of matter won't do; instead, you must continually regenerate the transparency of space throughout the universe. The invisible fabric of space-time must be an opening process that continually unfolds to provide the transparent container within which matter, an equally dynamic process, can present itself.

• Sixth, design a cosmic information system that connects instantaneously across the entire universe. Anything that happens anywhere must be knowable everywhere, instantly.

• Seventh, design the potential for planetary-scale ecosystems to emerge that can grow billions of unique living organisms, such as plants and animals. Ensure that these organisms can feed off each other in a process sustainable for billions of years.

• Eighth, design the potential for self-reflective life forms that are able to self-evolve toward ever more complex and conscious entities.

• Ninth, design a process that enables the cosmos to be continuously regenerated in its entirety using the flow-through of stupendous amounts of energy. This flow of continuous creation must include the fabric of space-time, and all manifestations of matter, thought, feeling, and consciousness.

“If you can meet these nine construction requirements, you are ready to begin building a new universe,” says the Mother Universe. Although these design requirements are adapted from my book
Awakening Earth
, written more than fifteen years ago, each time I return to them it awakens my appreciation of the power, wisdom, and subtlety embodied in our cosmos. Our universe is a supremely elegant masterwork of ongoing creation. Recognizing the magnificent feat of design engineering it represents, we look at ourselves and the world around us with new wonder and appreciation. Stretching our imagination in this way is useful preparation for our inquiry as we turn to look at our mysterious universe through the lens of science and ask: Is it reasonable to regard our universe as a living system? The pivotal nature of this question is summarized in the following table, which contrasts the perspectives of a dead or a living universe.

Contrasting a Dead and a Living Universe

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science
becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws
of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of men. . .

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN
¹

This chapter applies the tools of science to explore the possibility that our universe, taken in its totality, is a living system. I am not seeking to
prove
that the universe is a living system; instead I will show that, by drawing insights from different areas of science, the available evidence
points strongly
in this direction and offers a compelling invitation for deeper engagement and inquiry.

In thinking about how the universe could be alive, we naturally turn to the living things already known. It is understandable that many of our theories on the nature of life are based on animals and plants; however, to confine our understanding of life to these familiar forms is to confuse the material expression of aliveness with the
energy of aliveness itself. The form is not the aliveness, but its container. We need to broaden our inquiry into the meaning of life.

As mentioned earlier, it is the very tools of science that are challenging the traditional scientific assumption that the universe is non-living at its foundations. The powerful instruments of science are allowing us to peer down into the realm of atoms as well as out to the realm of stars. What we are discovering is astonishing; the deeper and further we look, the more complex, subtle, mysterious—and alive—the universe appears to be.

At the outset, it is important to recognize that the idea that we live in a non-living universe is a recent invention. The next chapter makes it clear that, throughout most of human history, we humans did not question whether the world around us was fundamentally alive. Only in the last few centuries that science has made a great separation between ourselves and the rest of the universe, assuming the universe to be mostly non-living matter with only a few islands of life such as ourselves.

In launching our inquiry, it is important to recognize that, within the scientific community, there is no widely accepted definition of life. To illustrate the difficulty scientists are encountering, there is no clear demarcation between the living and non-living realms. There is considerable debate, for example, over whether a virus is alive. By itself a virus is a non-living entity but when it finds a suitable host—such as a human being—it can rapidly replicate itself (think of the common cold) and evolve into new, more contagious forms. Because the ability to replicate and evolve is fundamental to life, a virus hovers in the gray zone between life and non-life.

Since we barely understand the mysterious property that we call life, it is not surprising that there is no broadly accepted definition. Is life an invisible energy or is it inseparable from the physical container
of that energy? Many scientists focus on the container and say that living entities are carbon-based creatures that need water, get their energy either from the Sun or from a chemical source, and are able to reproduce themselves. Although this may be a fitting description of life on the Earth, it is such a narrow definition that it leaves little room for the possibility of alternative expressions.
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While many scientists apply only a few criteria for describing a living system, I propose a demanding array of six criteria—a composite taken from a range of sources—for considering whether the universe is alive:

Is the universe unified despite its great size?

Is energy flowing throughout?

Is it being continuously regenerated?

Is there sentience or consciousness throughout?

Is there freedom of choice?

Is our universe able to reproduce itself?

This is a very challenging list of criteria for our universe to meet if we are to regard it as a living system. Let's consider them one at a time, drawing insights from respected sources in mainstream science and cosmology. These discussions are not fringe science; rather, they draw from well-established sources within the scientific community.

A living entity is a unified whole, not a random collection of disconnected parts. How could our universe, which appears to be mostly empty space with widely separated islands of matter, be unified? On the surface, our universe appears to be composed of separate components, from atoms to people to planets. How is it possible to regard these pieces as parts of a unified whole? Reflect for a moment
on the scale of unity we are considering. Our home galaxy—the Milky Way—is a swirling, disk-shaped cloud containing a hundred billion stars. It is part of a local group of nineteen galaxies (each with a hundred billion stars of its own) that form part of a super-cluster of thousands of galaxies. Beyond this, astronomers estimate that there are perhaps a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe (each, again, with a hundred billion stars). How could this vastness be regarded as an undivided whole?

One of the most stunning insights to emerge from modern science has been described as
non-locality
. The basic idea is simple: In the past, scientists have assumed that instant communication cannot take place between two distant points; instead, it takes time for a message to travel from one place to another, even at the speed of light. For example, it takes light about eight minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth, which means that something could happen on the Sun and it would take eight minutes before we would know about it on Earth. Because other galaxies are millions of light-years away from us, they seem so remote as to be completely separate from our own existence. Yet scientific experiments show that, despite these vast distances that seem impossible to bridge, in reality everything in the universe is deeply interconnected.
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Experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that subatomic particles are able to communicate
instantly
with one another, regardless of the distances that separate them.