Either nature is perfect, or else dark, snakelike patterns slither menacingly through the universe’s appointment calendar, its pages redolent with random heartbreak. Buddhists and Hindus have it both ways. Their pundits declare that fascinating theatre is at play, creating a seductively realistic chimera projecting natural ups and downs while a deeper narrative lurks in the galaxy’s marrow. Wheels within wheels.
The solar system brims with paradoxes that even include planetary losers. Venus is just 30% closer to the Sun than Earth, yet that’s enough to make it the most stifling hellhole in the known universe. Going the other way, a fifth planet beyond Mars never quite formed because of insistent gravitational meddling from massive outer planets. Thousands of debris shards called asteroids fill that orbital space. What memorandum can be gleaned from one of the solar system’s children being stillborn?
And the good news? Well, water, that giver of life, has managed to dominate the surface or interiors of numerous nearby worlds. Fluvial channels reveal that Mars once had countless whitewater rapids. At least four satellites orbiting Jupiter and Saturn show surface ice sheets or geysers hurling watery snowballs into space. Earth isn’t the only fecund place in the ’hood.
When observing nature, even casual inspections reveal an underlying theme of alternating rhythms. The day’s coldest darkness routinely precedes the glories of dawn. An azure sky gives no hint of an imminent hurricane. Catastrophic supernovae generate star birth and, as a bonus, alone possess the heat to produce the heaviest elements, including several life-critical trace substances that flew all the way here to circulate in our blood. So Nature displays contrasting layers of terrestrial and celestial splendor coexisting with cataclysms.
Even our conclusions about alternating rhythms — thoughts racing at 400 mph through impossibly labyrinthine neural pathways — reveal nature’s obsession with paradoxes. Because the same architecture of a hundred billion brain cells are just as frequently nourished and maintained so a few millivolts of electricity can slither through their numbing complexity to make a teenager apply lipstick. Grandeur harnessed for triviality.
Years of this inspire many to try to ascertain nature’s deeper meanings or maybe even the perennially sought Grand Narrative. We do better when we look out a window. Or open a physiology book to the page describing the liver’s architecture. Then it’s not hard to decide whether nature is really as dumb as gravel as kids are globally taught in science classes, given randomness as the presumed underlying cause of all phenomena. Few nowadays consider an alternative, which is that this whole cosmic setup — including biomes that function cooperatively as if James Lovelock’s Gaia is really true — which suggests a single savvy biosphere occupies our planet’s surface. And that such intelligence may not be limited to our world, since we also observe that cracks in asteroids harbor amino acids and protect them from damaging UV before delivering them by crash landings to surfaces of previously sterile planets. Are such mechanisms manifestations of an overarching architecture that gradually populates the universe with living creatures?
In the early 1950’s Fred Hoyle, who coined the phrase “Big Bang,” considered abiogenesis — the mainstream belief that life begins through random accidental events – to have statistical odds of being true as being akin to a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and randomly assembling a working 747 jetliner.
Many biologists lost no time rebutting Hoyle, usually by misapplying evolution. Evolution does indeed explain how existing life — say an ungulate on the Savannah who’d love to reach the fruits that hang from higher branches — would develop a long neck over time thanks to random mutations and natural selection. But evolution can’t explain how life could begin in the first place. Obviously, no selective advantage was possible on a sterile Earth four billion years ago. In any case, those wanting greater science underpinnings for a natural intelligence or pre-existing consciousness can turn to the biocentrism books with their math equations, or else read the conclusions of Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg, supported even by Max Planck, the originators of quantum theory. They experimentally observed how mere knowledge in a human mind changed the physical nature, location and motions of physical objects such as photons and electrons, and realized that consciousness plays an integral role in nature — conclusions increasingly accepted by physicists today.
But when they tried to get at the heart of what consciousness was, they found it fundamental but mysterious. Fundamental because it exists independently of matter and energy. Indeed, consciousness, meaning awareness or experience such as the smell of newly cut grass, cannot be created by any known process nor is derivable from matter, including electricity or brain tissue. Thus, they concluded, it has its own reality independent of the universe’s particles, energies and four forces.
In any case, if there’s truth to an overarching hypersmart Intelligence underlying all of nature, it contradicts the current, near-universal assumption that “I” am simply “my body,” along with its components like my memory track, which is mine alone and shared with no one else. Instead, it implies that the real “me” may more closely resemble the concept of “self” propagated by the Greek Stoics, philosophers such as Emmanuel Kant, the Quantum Theory originators and the tenets of Buddhism and Hinduism — which is that “I” am a deathless parade of experiences encompassing everything from thoughts to smells to love. Toss in the growing cosmological realization that consciousness is pre-existing and eternal since it’s not derivable from matter, energy, or anything else, and the whole ball game is profoundly changed. Although, granted, it’s a major nonintuitive switch to become unattached to the organism that supposedly has the experiences, and to acquire the perception that awareness is a stand-alone property rather than a possession.
But is this science or philosophy? Is an “intelligent universe based on consciousness” a provable idea? If it’s not, then it’s no more science than the stuporously silly idea that you and everything else are computer simulations and thus not even part of the real universe.
Here’s how it differs. First, millions of humans, this author included, have, without drugs, experienced a state of consciousness wherein the dualistic thinking mind is extinguished — in my case for three weeks — leaving solely an awareness characterized by an unshakable sense of familiarity, a “being back home after a long absence,” and a rock-solid certainty in which the true nature of the cosmos stood revealed as an ecstatic, eternal oneness immune to dissolution. It is this direct experience of reality by people through the ages (usually by so-called mystics, but also by scientists such as those quantum theory originators), augmented by compelling recent math and physics, that makes it a worthy worldview for those who, decades after smoke-induced dorm room speculations, still ponder the nature of existence.
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