by Duane Elgin
• 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
Chapter 2
The Science of 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. . .
—ALBERT EINSTEIN1
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.2 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 Unified Universe
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.3 Experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that subatomic particles are able to communicate instantly with one another, regardless of the distances that separate them.
The highly regarded physicist David Bohm explained this phenomenon by portraying the universe as a gigantic hologram that is regenerated at each moment. In Bohm’s view, the entire cosmos is a dynamic projection from a deeper common ground that is holographic in nature. At every moment, every part of the universe contains information about the whole. Analogously, if you take a holographic picture of a person and then cut the plate in half, when each half is illuminated, it will contain the entire original image, although more faintly. If each of the halves is cut in half again, each of the pieces will contain a smaller but complete version of the original. The whole is in every part and every part is in the whole.
Nonlocality exists, not because of extremely fast messaging back and forth at the subatomic level, but because separation does not exist. Bohm said that ultimately we have to see the entire universe as “a single, undivided whole.”4 Instead of separating the universe into living things and non-living things, he viewed animate and inanimate matter as inseparably interwoven with the life force that is present throughout the universe. For Bohm, even a rock has its unique form of aliveness, because the life force is dynamically flowing through the fabric of the entire universe.5 The eminent physicist John Wheeler expressed the unity of the universe in this way:
Nothing is more important about the quantum principle
than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as “sitting
out there,” with the observer safely separated from it. . . . To
describe what has happened, one has to cross out that old word
“observer” and put in its place the new word “participator.” In
some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe.6
In the earlier view of a universe composed of separate objects, we could regard ourselves as independent observers; however, in the new understanding of the universe, everything participates with everything else in co-creating reality, moment by moment. As stunning as it seems, non-locality means that we each participate in the totality of the universe. In the words of the physicist Sir James Jeans, we may think that we are “. . . individuals carrying on separate existences in space and time, while in the deeper reality beyond space and time we may all be members of one body.”7
An Ocean of Background Energy
A second key property of living systems is that energy flows through them. What about our universe? Despite the vast reaches of seemingly empty space, is there evidence of energy flowing throughout the totality of the universe?
Nearly 14 billion years after the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, as we would expect with a mechanical explosion; instead, it started picking up speed roughly 5 billion years ago. Trying to account for this expansion, scientists were shocked to discover that phenomenal amounts of energy are present throughout the universe and are pushing it apart. As mentioned in the opening chapter, it is thought that invisible or dark energy is causing our universe to expand at an increasing rate. Recall that scientists estimate dark energy comprises the majority of our cosmos—an estimated 73 percent of the universe.
Scientists also know that throughout the universe there exists a sea of background energy called zero point energy. It is called “zero point” because it is found at the lowest temperature that can exist in the universe—absolute zero. We cannot see zero point energy because it is everywhere and through everything and, as a result, it does not stand out. Although it is not yet clear how zero point energy is connected with dark energy, it is evident that stupendous amounts of background energy constantly flow through the universe. While we are just beginning to understand the nature of these remarkable energies, their existence is not disputed.
Whatever we call it, the background energy of the cosmos is shockingly large. Physicist David Bohm calculated that a single cubic inch of “empty” space contains far more than the energy equivalent of millions of atomic bombs!8 Empty space is a dynamically constructed transparency requiring immense amounts of energy to create and sustain. This underlying ocean of energy is the primary reality. This is not simply a theoretical abstraction; a number of scientists are working to invent technologies that can utilize this background energy.9
In recognizing the immensity of background energy in the cosmos, Bohm said that “. . . matter as we know it is . . . rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea.”10 In a similar way, Sir James Jeans suggested that we think of the world that we see with our senses as the “outer surface of nature, like the surface of a deep flowing stream.” He said that material objects have origins that go “deep down into the stream.”11
A Continuously Regenerated Universe
Another key characteristic of living systems is continuous regeneration. To illustrate, consider how your body is being continuously renewed: The inner lining of your intestine is renewed roughly every five days, and the outer layer of your skin every two weeks. We receive a new liver approximately every two months, and the bones in our body are fully replaced about every seven to ten years. Clearly, an important attribute of any living creature is continuous regeneration. When we look for evidence of regeneration in the universe, what we discover is so stunning as to be virtually incomprehensible, even to the modern mind accustomed to great marvels. Simply stated, it appears that the entire universe is being continuously regenerated at an incredibly high rate of speed.
Until recently, the dominant cosmology in contemporary physics held that, since the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, little more has happened than a rearranging of the cosmic furniture. Because traditional physicists thought of creation as a one-time miracle from “nothing,” they regarded the current contents of the universe—such as trees, rocks, and people—as constituted from ancient, non-living matter. This “dead-universe” theory assumed creation occurred only once—billions of years ago, when a massive explosion spewed out lifeless material debris into equally lifeless space; “life” then somehow mysteriously emerged as non-living atoms inexplicably organized and grew themselves into ever more complex forms (molecules, cells, organisms).
In striking contrast, the living-universe theory views creation not as a one-time event but as an ongoing process. The entire universe is maintained moment-by-moment by an unbroken flow-through of energy. A regenerative perspective suggests why there is so much energy flowing through the universe—it is needed to continuously recreate the entire universe, including the fabric of space-time and matter-energy.12
If we go to the heart of an atom, for example, what we find is almost entirely empty space. If the central core or nucleus of an atom were expanded to the size of a golf ball, the electrons that circle the core would extend outwards a mile and a half. The electrons that circle the nucleus of the atom are moving so fast—several trillion times a second—that they manifest as a blurred cloud of motion. Beneath the solid surface of material objects, an extraordinary flow of activity is occurring. If you were to look at a yellow dress for just one second, the electrons in the retinas of your eyes would vibrate with more waves than all the waves that have beaten upon all the shores of all the Earth’s oceans in the last 10 million years.13 Physicist Max Born writes, “We have sought for firm g
round and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.”14
The deeper we look into the heart of matter, the less substantial it seems. Upon close inspection, matter dissolves into knots of energy and space-time whose dynamic stability gives the appearance of enduring solidity. It is amazing that this hurricane of flowing motion comes together to present itself as the ordinary world around us. As giants, it is easy for us to overlook the ongoing miracle that is taking place at a microscopic level.
If we go into the heart of space, what we find is dynamism, energy, and structure. Space is not a pre-existing emptiness waiting to be filled with matter; rather, like matter, it emerges anew at every moment. Space exists as actively as does matter. Both are infused with the all-sustaining life force. Empty space is a dynamically constructed transparency filled with immense levels of energy and motion. Einstein wrote, “We have now come to the conclusion that space is the primary thing and matter only secondary.”15 Erwin Schroedinger, father of quantum theory, stated it this way:
What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just appearances . . . Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down . . . for this barrier does not exist.16
Physicist John Wheeler has used the following analogy to suggest how, upon closer inspection, the fabric of space-time comes alive with motion. He imagines an aviator flying several miles above the ocean who looks down and sees what appears to be a flat and uniform surface. When he flies lower, he begins to make out rolling waves moving across the surface. Diving still closer to the water, he sees smaller waves and crests forming on the swells. Looking even closer, he sees the surface of the water boiling with foam. In a similar way, the closer we look into the fabric of space-time, the more it appears as a complex symphony of waves and patterns; the smooth fabric of reality breaks down into “quantum foam” and our usual ideas of space and time disappear.