A Sentient Cosmos
"Something deeply hidden had to be behind things." - Albert Einstein
The atoms in your body are ancient and you were never not here. The Cosmos is but energy dancing around in different forms (people, planets, stars, etc.) and transforming constantly. In John Dobson's cosmology the whole Cosmos, like human beings, directs a stream of negative entropy upon itself. Every living organism takes energy from its environment to live. The plants absorb energy from the Sun and then produce the oxygen that we breathe. In turn, the carbon dioxide we breathe is absorbed by plants, very symbiotic. Without the fusion reactions in our Sun where hydrogen is being converted to helium we would not be here. The Sun needs the energy from the hydrogen gas to keep those beautiful warm rays showering down on us and to exist itself.
"It's alive, the whole Universe is alive." - John Dobson
It's all connected. As Lynn Margulis once put it, life is a "Sentient Symphony." A mingling and interaction of everything from the rays of the Sun which maintains and grows life to the microbes and plants that keep humans alive. This interdependency of ecosystems, the ocean of gases in our air and how the environment influences the survival or conditions for life creates this symphony.
"Living matter is not an island, but part of the Cosmic matter around it, dancing to the beat of the Universe." (Lynn Margulis)
"Everything that exists has Being, has God-essence, has some degree of consciousness. Even a stone has rudimentary consciousness; otherwise, it would not be, and its atoms and molecules would disperse. Everything is alive. The sun, the earth, plants, animals, humans - all are expressions of consciousness in varying degrees, consciousness manifesting as form. The world arises when consciousness takes on shapes and forms, thought forms and material forms. Look at the millions of life forms on this planet alone. In the sea, on land, in the air - and then each life form is replicated millions of times. To what end? Is someone or something playing a game, a game with form? This is what the ancient seers of India asked themselves. They saw the world as Lila, a kind of divine game that God is playing. The individual life forms are obviously not very important in this game. In the sea, most life forms don't survive for more than a few minutes after being born. The human form turns to dust pretty quickly too, and when it is gone it is as if it had never been. Is that tragic or cruel? Only if you create a separate identity for each form, if you forget that its consciousness is God-essence expressing itself in form. But you don't truly know that until you realize your own God-essence as pure consciousness."
- Eckhart Tolle (Power of Now)
Our bodies and the entire Universe is made of atoms. The carbon atom exists in us, all plants and animals, diamonds and coal on Earth. Somehow when a combination of different atoms, some of which are carbon, are put together in the right conditions life is produced. We don't how this happens. We theorize that it happened at least once and that there may be an ancient universal organism that all life on Earth is related to and tied to in time. It is a Cosmos that follows the laws of physics and chemistry, but why? Such design, beauty and detail are found within this Universe such as the shape of spiral galaxies for example. A swirling drain of spiral arms each containing millions or billions of planetary systems.
Sentience... the ability to feel or perceive. As humans we have the ability to think but so do monkeys, and microbe colonies (ie: Physarum polycephalum). If matter is not sentient would we be intelligent? How can people like Albert Einstein or Hieronymus Bosch have these gifts of genius to give to the world if matter is not sentient?
The things we see in life reveals sentient matter/energy all around us and in us. Biochemical signaling is how our bodies communicate at a molecular level to the systems of the body which regulate things like homeostasis and the immune system. Another example is how a flower responds to the Sun by bending towards its light. We feel those Sun rays too don't we? We feel them because of the melanocyte skin cells we have tell us. Your heart beats and you breathe without thinking about it. What is this wisdom of the body that heals itself and maintains autonomic functioning?
On a deeper microscopic level, DNA is constantly working (even as I type this) to identify and repair damage to the DNA molecules in my body, with remarkable precision I might add! The DNA does all of this on its own. Bioluminescent Dinoflagellates have biorhythms in sync with the Sun so that in a lab they will luminesce (light up) after the Sun has set just as if they were still out at sea, right on time! The Dinoflagellates do so without being able to physically detect the Sun inside the lab.
"...in the development of any physical system there may be billions of years between the creation of the most primitive form of energy and then the arrival of intelligent life. That billions of years is just the same thing as the trip of the current around the wire... it takes a little time... But it's already implied, it takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak. But the oak is already implied in the acorn... And so in any lump of rock floating about in space there is implicit...human intelligence. Sometime, somehow, somewhere - they all go together. So don't differentiate yourself and standoff against this and say 'I am a living organism, in a world made of a lot of dead junk - rocks and stuff' ....it all goes together. Those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails....you need rocks ....what are you going to stand on?" ~ Alan Watts
“Fear not what is not real, never was and never will be. What is real, always was and cannot be destroyed.” - Bhagavad Gita
How would you classify atoms that respond to their environment - completely dumb inanimate matter or something aware of other atoms and gravitational fields? Remember, we and the entire Universe are but a collection of atoms in space time. The cesium atoms used in our atomic clocks vibrate when exposed to microwaves. A frequency is emitted from the atoms due to the energy (microwaves) absorbed. This excites the outermost electron in a cesium atom and causes it to jump ("transition") from a lower to a higher orbit. It moves in response to stimuli! Everything in the Universe is always moving and responding to the forces in its environment. Even the rocks on the ground at your feet have electrons that on the subatomic level are cruising around in their orbitals! Those rocks are also are cruising around the Sun on the Earth just like you.... Rocks are important for life - what is it that you think you're standing on?
"All phenomena from the planet we inhabit to the oceans, clouds, forests and flowers that surround us, arise in dependence upon subtle patterns of energy."- Dalai Lama
We are all energy that is just taking different forms as we travel through space time. We are made of the ancient matter/energy which is all around us which is never destroyed (Law of the Conservation of Mass). In this light death is an illusion. Death is more of a natural transformation of energy that goes from one form to another. In a way it's giving your life back to the world and other life forms which we take energy from while we are alive to survive. Supernovae can be seen as just the death of stars from one point of view. But, to those that peer a little deeper they see that for every end there is a new beginning. After all, these supernovae explosions is the stuff that became planets like Earth in time and the atoms that were produced inside of them exist within us today.
"Each thing has Beingness and is a temporary form that has its origin within the formless one Life, the source of all things...all bodies, all forms." - Eckhart Tolle
The Universe is pure Energy and 4 dimensional, the forth dimension being time, with transformations and evolution of energy in various forms. What shows up in nature as evolution, extinction and experimentation is the nature of the beast of creation. Like the god Shiva it is both a destroyer and creator, two sides of the same coin. Like Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, a deity of endings and time. This two-faced god looks into both the future and the past.
Let's take a moment to talk about energy. First, it is one thing that the Universe is not making any more of: The Law of the Conservation of Energy. Does this look familiar? I just mentioned a few paragraphs ago the Law of the Conservation of Mass. The Cosmos does not make energy - it has energy and what it does over time is transform energy into things, into forms of matter. So you see Energy=Mass or Matter, just like Einstein's equation E=mc^2, but you drop the c in this instance as it relates to the speed of light (the ratio of space to time). Energy is the underlying existence showing up in space time as matter, as you, me, the planets, gravity and the rest of the Cosmos. Our Universe is also a system that is a great recycler of energy. For example, when supernovae explode they pepper the interstellar medium with stardust and from this material new generations of stars will in time form and continue to do so in this continuous cycle. Our Sun is a third generation star born from larger stars that exploded. If the Universe was not a great recycler of energy then the conditions needed for life such as ourselves to sprout up here on Earth would have never happened. Evolution takes time and an environment with the right "cosmic mix" for life to grow and thrive.
Forms of energy: Gravity, nuclear forces, electricity and magnetism (twins in nature), radiation, and kinetic energy. Nuclear forces will be neglected here in this cosmology as "the energy released to other forms could only account for one percent of the rest mass of the matter." (Beyond Space & Time by Dobson). So we have 5 key forms of energy that we'll be working with.
Let's look at heat as an example of kinetic energy. Temperature is just the measurement of the movement or speed of molecules (the faster=the hotter) in a given space. The mercury in a thermometer responds to the heat from the environment that surrounds it and when it reaches equilibrium you get a steady "temperature reading." When an object is at a different temperature from another object or its surroundings, heat flows between them so that the two reach the same temperature. This is known as thermal equilibrium. This balancing act reminds me of our bodies ability to maintain temperature - homeostasis.
The Van Allen radiation belts are doughnut shaped regions surrounding Jupiter that contain high-energy electrons and ions which are trapped in its magnetic field. Visible light and radio waves are also forms of radiation. When we fix our sites on the Andromeda Galaxy under dark skies with a telescope and peer into the eyepiece the light that hits your eye took 2.5 million years to reach you at that moment. You are seeing it in the past, 2.5 million years ago and not in its present. A real cool way to travel through time without the need of 1.21 gigawatts (from Back to the Future) and a Delorean - just a telescope.
Electricity and magnetism - Dobson has also mentioned the idea of the electrical and gravitational fields being features of the fabric of space time which "winds up" the particles, as one would wind a clock for potential energy. This potential actualizes into kinetic energy which is what we see playing out through our telescopes with the swirling motion of spiral galaxies like merry-go-rounds.
The radiation from stars like our sun is picked up by the leafs of plants and trees which is then converted into electrical and magnetic forms. When we see the northern lights or Auroras it is the energy from the sun, electrons and protons, that interact with the Earth's magnetic field which gives us a grandiose light show!
This aurora was over Whitehorse, Yukon on the night of September 3, 2012. Image Courtesy of David Cartier, Sr.
Gravity is the invisible force in nature that is the architect of galaxies, planets and stars. It shapes our planet by its energy that brings matter together. It's why we have large moons that are round and small moons like Deimos of Mars which are not big enough for gravity to "round out."
From the hydrogen atoms that form stars we can get all the elements of the periodic table. From the hydrogen we can have transformations of energy which is the same thing as saying transformations of matter. New molecules can form, the building blocks of life can form from the hydrogen. At this point most scientists are in agreement; however, when we begin to look for causation, for where the hydrogen came from, the theories come out of the woodwork!
The biggest arguments in Cosmology seem to be the Big Bang (the something from nothing argument), the Steady State Theory, as well as theories of a multiverse and parallel Universes. As I've said before we are a very creative species, so many ideas. But the nature of the Universe and its history can only be one way, so everyone cannot be right. My spin on this is continued on the StarStuff page.
Filament Universe - Source: Australian National University
We live in a Universe of transformations running on ancient energy which by its own nature of balances and opposites exists. Ours is an infinite and eternal Universe, or at least with time/space scales so big that it would seem that way to us. Change is part of life and a characteristic of the Universe. All chemical reactions in nature are just matter transformation. Take two elements -> Sodium (Na+) and Chloride (Cl-) and mix them together to get salt (NaCl). Salt is safe to eat. But, consuming chlorine by itself is not good as it's toxic to us. This is an example of the chemical wizardry of what happens all the time in the world at work. Because we live in a Universe like this chemical reactions are possible, the evolution of life is possible, and a Universe of transformations is our reality. This Universe we belong to has this characteristic of sentience. Living beings did not have to arise to have our Cosmos exist. Gravity would still work and the Sun would still shine on Earth without humans and plants. But it did arise.....matter is sentient.
I do wonder about our Universe stemming off from another, the idea of a Multiverse. Perhaps the observable Universe with its vast Cosmic sea is but a leaf on a tree of the true complete, unified Cosmos. The filament Universe image above represents observations of the structure of our galaxies. In a Multiverse I can imagine such structure representing many Universes, being like the roots of a tree, hidden underground....awaiting discovery by those who walk above it.
The Big Electron Flora and Fauna Michael Faraday Antoine Lavoisier James Clerk Maxwell
Magnetism and Electricity Feynman on Physics James Lovelock & Gaia The First Flowers
Jellyfish Rocks Chemistry of Life Ecosystems Plasma Cosmology How Bacteria Talk
Plants can genetically adapt Plant defenses by touch Do Plants Think? What Plants Talk About
The Living Matrix Absolute Zero Zero Point Energy Controlling Genes with Thoughts
Bacteria network for food self-organization properties of DNA