The Living Universe

by Duane Elgin

  One of the denser concentrations of Indian populations in North America—the Ohlones—lived in the fertile region that now extends from San Francisco to Monterey, California.34 The Ohlones, now extinct, lived sustainably on this land for roughly 5,000 years. Like the Lakota, their religion was without dogma, churches, or priests because it was so pervasive, like the air. Their religion was found everywhere, as nature was seen to be alive and shimmering with energy. Because everything was filled with life, power was everywhere and in everything. Every act was a spiritual act because it engaged the worlds of power. All tasks—hunting an animal, preparing food, or making a basket—were done with a feeling for the surrounding world of life and power.35

  The Aborigines of Australia believe the universe has two aspects. One aspect is ordinary reality and the other aspect is the “Dream-time” reality from which the physical world is derived. In Aboriginal cosmology, the everyday reality of people, trees, rocks, and animals is “sung into existence” by the power of the Dream time—and the Dreamtime needs to continue unabated if the ordinary world is to be upheld and maintained.36 The Dreamtime for Australian Aborigines “. . . is an ongoing process—the perpetual emerging of the world from an incipient, indeterminate state into full, waking reality, from invisibility to visibility, from the secret depths of silence into articulate song and speech.”37 Like the Aborigines, the Kalahari Bushmen have a saying that, “There is a dream dreaming us.”38

  The Koyukon Indians of north central Alaska live “in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes.”39 They believe wherever we are, we are never truly alone because the surroundings, no matter how remote, are aware of our presence and must be treated with respect. A clear theme emerges: Indigenous peoples have long recognized the aliveness at the foundation of the universe. They understand that we are not, and never have been, disconnected from the larger universe. With a cosmology of a living universe, a shining miracle exists everywhere. There are no empty places in the world. Everywhere there is life, both visible and invisible. All of reality is infused with a vital presence and this creates a profound relatedness among all things.

  Western Views

  Although not a religion, Western thought is an integral part of the world’s wisdom and has had an enormous impact on human development. Here again we find the idea of a living universe running like a bright thread through the complex tapestry that is Western thought. More than 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Plotinus declared, “This universe is a single living being embracing all living beings within it.”40 In a similar manner, the ancient Greek philosopher and mystic Heraclitus said of the universe that “everything flows, nothing stands still.” “All things are in a state of flux,” he wrote, and “Reality is a condition of unrest.”41 Heraclitus also declared that, “For those who are awake the cosmos is one.”42 He wrote that life is an eternal becoming and the universe is continually “flowering into deity.”43

  Giordano Bruno (1548—1600 C.E.) was a visionary priest and philosopher. He maintained that a spiritual force is found in all things, and that even the most minute body contains a sufficient portion of spirit to animate itself. Bruno felt that God was present throughout the world—a life force that permeated the universe and gave all material things some measure of life. No matter how small something might be, he believed it would strive to organize itself into an animated body of some kind, whether plant or animal. Bruno’s views of an infinite universe infused with an animating life force was seen by his contemporaries as undermining the authority of the Catholic Church, and he was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.

  The idea of a living universe surfaced again by the mid-eighteenth century as the industrial revolution was getting underway in Europe and America. This revolution was accompanied by a new sense of dynamism, particularly in Western thinking. No longer was life anchored in the seasons, going round and round in an ever-recurring circle, progressing not at all; instead, life was seen as moving forward as an ever-unfolding expression of the divine. The philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775—1854) wrote, “History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute.” His contemporary, the influential German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770—1831), viewed humans as vehicles for the universe to become conscious of itself. In Hegel’s view, spirit seeks embodiment in matter as much as matter seeks transformation in spirit.

  Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was a professor who lived in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His writing powerfully expresses the idea of a living universe, infused with a divine life force that he termed élan vital and that animates, not only human life, but also the entire cosmos. He saw the whole universe as a pulsating, participatory reality. According to Bergson, the reach of our identity is not limited by our physical body, but extends as far as our conscious perceptions. Our body provides a manageable island of stability as we grow in our capacity for conscious knowing and expression of the life force that animates the universe. Beyond the power of our intellect, says Bergson, we have the power of our intuition, which is our connection with the “ocean of life,” the cosmic vitality from which we draw energy and insight.44 The “essential function of the universe” says Bergson, is nothing less than “the making of gods”—or human beings who are fully conscious expressions of the élan vital.

  The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), developed a process view of reality in the late 1920s. In his view, what we consider the concrete reality of the universe around us is, in fact, a series of “occasions of experience.” The overall universe is the totality of all of these occasions and, because free will is inherent in the universe, each occasion is always different, new, and alive.

  I have only touched upon Western views, but this is sufficient to show there has existed a stream of thought that, for more than 2,000 years, has regarded our universe as deeply alive. In contemporary Western philosophy, this view is sometimes called pantheism, meaning that a divine life force both pervades the world and extends beyond it. This life force is both immanent and transcendent—including all that is in our universe and extending infinitely beyond.

  Harvesting the Wisdom of Human Experience

  Harvesting the wisdom of human experience is like watching a picture gradually come into focus and seeing an extraordinary image of the universe emerging before our eyes. There are common streams of experience being described by wisdom traditions around the world. Within each major tradition—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Indigenous, and more—we can find remarkably similar descriptions of the universe and the life force that pervades it: Christians and Jews affirming that God is not separate from this world but continuously creates it anew, so that we live, move, and have our being in God; Muslims declaring that the entire universe is continually coming into being, and that each moment is a new “occasion” for Allah to create the universe; Hindus proclaiming that the entire universe is a single body that is being continually danced into creation by a divine life force or Brahman; Buddhists stating that the entire universe arises freshly at every moment in an unceasing flow of interdependent, co-origination where everything depends upon everything else; Taoists stating that the Tao is the “Mother of the Universe,” the inexhaustible source from which all things rise and fall without ceasing; Confucians describing our universe as a unified and interpenetrating whole that is sustained and nourished by the vitality of the life force or ch’i; Indigenous peoples declaring that an animating wind or life force blows through all things in the world and there is aliveness and sacred power everywhere; and a stream of Western thinkers portraying the universe as a single, living creature that is continually regenerated and is evolving toward higher levels of complexity and consciousness. Overall, beneath the differences in language, a common reality is being described—our life is part of a larger life.

  Despite humanity’s great diversity and historical differences, when the world’s wisdom traditions penetrate into the experienti
al depths of existence, a common understanding emerges that is in accord with insights from science. This understanding is utterly stunning: We live within a living universe that arises, moment-by-moment, as a unified whole. The universe is a living entity that is continuously sustained by the flow-through of phenomenal amounts of energy in an unutterably vast and intensely alive process of awesome precision and power. We are beings the universe inhabits as much as we are beings who inhabit the universe. The unity of existence is not an experience to be created; rather, it is an always-manifesting condition waiting to be appreciated and welcomed into awareness. The “power of now” derives from the fact that the entire universe arises in the Now as an extremely precise flow. When we are in the now, we are riding the wave of continuous creation. Each moment is a fresh formation of the universe, emerging seamlessly and flawlessly.

  We still have further to go in this inquiry—as far as we can possibly open in our imagination and experience. We have seen that the visible universe is only the smallest fraction of the known universe. We have also seen that our universe emerged from “nothing” roughly 14 billion years ago and is sustained by stupendous energies, moment-by-moment. The understanding that most of our universe is invisible and all of it continuously emerges from nothing visible points to the existence of an extraordinarily powerful, generative ground. We turn to explore the infinite beyond our universe, the deep context that gave birth to and sustains our cosmos—the “Meta Universe” (as described by many scientists) and the “Mother Universe” (as described by many wisdom traditions). In the following chapter, I speak of the “Mother Universe,” but what is being described is beyond words or concepts and beyond the space and time of our particular universe. The Mother Universe is nothing other than the infinitely subtle and creative ocean of aliveness in which we are immersed.

  Chapter 4

  The Mother Universe

  We bear the universe in our being as the universe bears us in its being.

  The two have a total presence to each other and to that deeper mystery

  out of which both the universe and ourselves have emerged.

  —THOMAS BERRY1

  Reflecting on the birth of our universe from nothing nearly 14 billion years ago leads us immediately into the depths. When we further contemplate that creation did not end with the Big Bang, but is a continuing process that even now sustains the entire universe, we are led into the realm of wonder and awe. How amazing: An invisible life force is creating our universe and then holding it within its spacious embrace for billions of years, while growing ever more conscious forms of life that are eventually able to look back and appreciate their origins. This is an ongoing miracle of such staggering proportions that there is a natural tendency to pull back from a full encounter with it. Let’s not pull back, but dive into the depths and explore the deeper foundations of our existence.

  What is the reach of our aliveness? How far and how deep do we extend? Might our aliveness connect with an even deeper ecology of aliveness within and beyond us? When we look through the double lens of science and spirituality, what answers come back about this foundational question?

  It is helpful at the outset to acknowledge that, historically, we humans have been extremely self-centered. Until recently, we thought the entire universe revolved around us! So, it is an exercise in humility to ask: If the universe is a unified, living entity, then what is the larger context within which it exists? Where is our relatively young cosmos located? Although we encountered the grandeur of our living universe in the previous chapter, here we open into an even greater immensity and ask: What is the nature of the generative ground that is able to hold and sustain multiple universes? This is much more than a conceptual question because we are not separate from this spacious context, but live within it and are an integral part of it.

  The Meta-Universe in Science

  When our universe blossomed into existence from an area smaller than a pinpoint nearly 14 billion years ago, it emerged out of somewhere. In reflecting on this, mainstream scientists such as astronomer Carl Sagan have put forth the increasingly accepted view that our universe “may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of separate closed-off universes.”2

  Modern physics is now actively exploring the nature of the generative ground that is at the foundation of our universe and, likely, countless others. As I noted earlier, scientists consider space to be the basic building block of reality. The distinguished Princeton physicist John Wheeler agrees, and explains that material things are “composed of nothing but space itself, pure fluctuating space . . . that is changing, dynamic, altering from moment to moment.” Wheeler goes on to say that “Of course, what space itself is built out of is the next question. . . . The stage on which the space of the universe moves is certainly not space itself. . . . The arena must be larger: superspace. . . [which is endowed] with an infinite number of dimensions.”3 What Wheeler calls superspace, other scientists have called the “Meta-Universe” and “Multiverse.” I call it the Mother Universe.

  We can glimpse the Mother Universe and her great power when we recall the enormous energies required to generate and sustain our universe. As mentioned in Chapter 2, empty space is permeated and sustained by unimaginably immense amounts of energy. If our cosmos were ancient matter floating through pre-existing empty space, then it seems reasonable that relatively little underlying energy would be required to sustain it. However, because the entire universe, including the fabric of space-time, is being regenerated at every moment, it is understandable that this requires phenomenal amounts of energy. A similar theme is developed by philosopher-scientist Ervin Laszlo, who has written, “The primary reality is the quantum vacuum, the energy and information-filled plenum that underlies our universe, and all universes in the Metaverse. . . . The universe we observe and inhabit is a secondary product of the energy sea that was there before there was anything there at all.”4

  From the Hubble telescope to the electron microscope, everywhere we see an astounding intelligence, refinement, subtlety, and design becoming progressively manifest. What is the nature of the deeper container that can hold this intensity and refinement of consciousness and creativity as well as our expanding universe? Many cosmologists now hypothesize that an innumerable number of universes exist—all experimenting, evolving, and leaving their learning to their offspring universes. To reiterate a key idea from physics, a black hole in our universe can be viewed as a potential doorway or wormhole into a new, baby universe, enclosed in its own bubble of space and time. Then, as the newly born universe grows to maturity, it will produce countless black holes that lead to the birth of other baby universes. Whatever we call this larger space, cosmology now provides us with a context—a hyper-dimensional ecology—from which we can regard our universe as one among many unified, living, and growing systems.

  The Mother Universe in Wisdom Traditions

  Turning from science to spirituality, what do the wisdom traditions say about what lies beyond our universe? The idea of a superspace or Mother Universe whose transparent body extends into infinity and lives in eternity is found throughout the world’s major religions. The eminent scholar Joseph Campbell summarized a core theme in the world’s wisdom traditions, saying “There is a life pouring into the world, and it pours from an inexhaustible source.”5 All of the world’s religions attempt to speak, in their unique way, of the unspeakable ground out of which the visible world emerges at each moment.

  Except for gender, the idea of a Mother Universe is very close to the Christian biblical description of God mentioned in the last chapter: “In him we live, and move, and have our being. . . . We are his offspring” (Acts 17:28). The Islamic tradition also points to a deeper, generative ground as the source of our continuing existence. Recall that the Koran says: “At any moment, if God wills, the entire creation could sink into non-being. . . . At any moment, if God wills, the mountains could disappear and become as clouds vanishing. . . . At any moment, if God wil
ls, we could be as if we had never existed.”

  In China, more than twenty centuries ago, the Taoist sage Lao-tzu described what is called the Mother Universe in this way:

  There was something formless and perfect

  before the universe was born.

  It is serene. Empty.

  Solitary. Unchanging.

  Infinite. Eternally present.

  It is the mother of the universe.

  For lack of a better name,

  I call it the Tao.6

  Here is an evocative portion of what the Chinese monk, Shao, has written in describing the Mother Universe:7

  If you say that It is small,

  It embraces the entire universe.

  If you say It is large,

  It penetrates the realm of atoms.

  Call It one; It bears all qualities.

  Call It many; Its body is all void.

  Say It arises; It has no body and no form.

  Say It becomes extinct; It glows for all eternity.

  Call It empty; It has thousands of functions.

  Say It exists; It is silent without shape.

  Call It high; It is level without form.

  Call It low; nothing is equal to It.

  Recall from Chapter 3 that, in the Hindu tradition, Brahman is the supreme cosmic spirit and beyond the grasp of human senses, intelligence, and imagination: “Wise, intelligent, encompassing, self-existent, it organizes objects throughout eternity.” Hindu cosmology views the all-pervading energy-consciousness of Brahman as the source and creator of multiple universes—an idea that is close to modern scientific thought. Hindus believe there are innumerable cosmic eggs, each of which is able to grow into a universe. Countless universes float like bubbles in an infinite ocean. This boundless ocean can be viewed as the Mother Universe.