The Living Universe

by Duane Elgin

  Suffering will not be shared equally. Although every aspect of our lives will be challenged, not everyone is equally vulnerable. The world’s poor will face greater hardships than ever coping with climate change and energy shortages. While energy shortages are inconvenient for the wealthy, they are catastrophic for the world’s poor. Climate disruption, crop failures, and rising food prices create extra difficulties for the wealthy but disaster for those living at the margins of existence.

  We are moving into a time of steel-gripped necessity, a time of intense planetary compression. In this generation, the world will become a superheated pressure cooker; the human family will be crushed by unrelenting forces so unyielding, and the stresses they place upon our world so extreme, that human civilization will soon either descend into chaos, or ascend in a spiraling process of profound transformation. On the one hand, if humanity is unwilling to work for the advance of all, then the world will collapse into a spiral of resource wars, and misery, poverty, and calamity will descend on the planet. On the other hand, unprecedented suffering may awaken humanity by burning through the unconscious denial, greed, and fear that now divide us. In encountering ourselves so directly and powerfully, a new human alloy may emerge from the furnace of these superheated decades. Our time of fiery transition may fuse the human family together with a new sense of identity and purpose that is strong enough to support the rebuilding of our lives to create a sustainable and meaningful future.

  The challenges we confront are so great that we are called to move beyond our personal awakening to our collective awakening—as communities, as nations, and as a species. I do not view the emerging world systems crisis as a problem to be fixed. It seems natural that we would attempt to grow beyond the limits of the Earth to sustain us. Because nearly every organism works to exploit the surrounding ecology to the fullest extent, overshoot and collapse are common occurrences in natural systems. Since we have never before had the ability to exploit the entire Earth so completely, we have no experience in exercising global restraint. We learn through experience and, never having encountered an endangered Earth before, we should not be surprised if a great challenge or tragedy is necessary to awaken the evolutionary intelligence of humanity. However, once we collectively recognize the extreme urgency of our situation, the human community could awaken quickly and create a future of unimagined opportunity—or we could hesitate and drift into a future of unimagined tragedy.

  The suffering, distress, and anguish of these times will become a purifying fire that burns through ancient prejudices and hostilities to cleanse the soul of our species. I expect no single, golden moment of reconciliation to descend upon the planet; instead, waves of ecological calamity will reinforce periods of economic crisis, and both will be amplified by massive waves of civil unrest. Instead of a single crescendo of crisis and conflict, there will likely be momentary reconciliation followed by disintegration, and then new reconciliation. In giving birth to a sustainable world civilization, humanity will probably move back and forth through cycles of contraction and relaxation. Only when we utterly exhaust ourselves will we burn through the barriers that separate us from our wholeness as a human family. Eventually we will see that we have an unyielding choice between a badly injured (or even stillborn) planetary civilization and the birth of a bruised but relatively healthy human family and biosphere. In seeing and accepting responsibility for this inescapable choice, we will work to discover a common sense of reality, identity, and social purpose. Finding this new common sense will be an extremely demanding task. Only after we have exhausted all hope of partial solutions will we be willing to move forward with an open mind and heart toward a future of mutually supportive development. Ultimately, in moving through our initiation, we can grow from our adolescent ways as a species into our early adulthood and consciously take responsibility for our relationship with the Earth, the rest of life, and the universe.

  Humanity’s Journey of Return

  As we open to this new understanding of the universe, aliveness and awe return to the world around us. Where the existential mindset of the industrial era bleached the life out of nature and left a machinelike cosmos filled mostly with dead matter and empty space, the consciousness of this new era awakens the intuition that a living presence permeates the universe that—with equanimity spanning billions of years—sustains the unfolding of all life, including that of the human species.

  Our return is not only to the Earth that supports us, and to the community of life that surrounds us; it is also a return to the living universe that sustains us. After maturing through the fire of our collective rite of passage, the human community can choose a path of learning to live in greater harmony with the Earth, peace with one another, and communion with the living universe. Ultimately, we seek to relax into the natural peace of communion with the totality—the Mother Universe. Recognizing this, we can look at everyday life in a new way. We catch glimpses of the interwoven fabric of the cosmos and our intimate participation within the living web of existence. Less often is reality broken into relativistic islands or fragments. Even if only for brief moments, existence will be glimpsed and known as a seamless totality. Touching the aliveness of the universe, even momentarily, transforms our lives. The renowned Sufi poet, Kabir, wrote that he saw the universe as a living and growing body for fifteen seconds and it made him “a servant for life.”5

  In this new era, we will regard the universe as the nurturing body of the Cosmic Feminine. Moment by moment, over billions of years, she sustains this cosmic garden as her offspring grow to consciously recognize and participate in her magnificent work. The Cosmic Feminine is not remote. We are immersed within, and created from, her body. We are She. Science strips away superstition and finds the miracle of a living universe. The sacred returns to the world.

  The wisdom culture of the next stage is more ordinary and accessible to us than we may think. During the stage of the awakening hunter-gatherers, our ancestors would have been incredulous if someone suggested that millions of people could learn to live and work together in the manner now considered ordinary in advanced industrial nations. They would have been amazed to see us living in massive cities, driving cars on freeways, operating computers and television sets, and working in enormous organizations. We now take our urban-industrial way of perceiving, living, and working for granted. But, to the ancient hunter-gatherer who had yet to establish a village way of life, the thought of people able to function in a manner common to the industrial era would have seemed utterly impossible. In a similar way, attaining our initial maturity as an awakening species may appear unreachable; however, we seem to be designed with the capacity for successful realization of our species-maturity.

  Overall, a key test of our maturity as a species as we move into this next major phase in humanity’s evolution is how well we manage to integrate the many polarities that currently divide us. Unity and diversity, being and becoming, rich and poor, women and men, the eternal and the momentary, transcendence and immanence—the ongoing integration of these and other polarities will produce a strong and dynamically stable world civilization.

  The Second Axial Age

  The human family is making a pivotal turn from a long evolutionary phase oriented around a spirituality of separation to another long phase that is oriented around a spirituality of communion. A spirituality of separation is seen most clearly in what has been called the first axial age of religion.6 The phrase axial age was used by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to describe the relatively brief period of time—roughly seven hundred years—when the great religions of the world arose: Hinduism and Buddhism in India; Confucianism and Taoism in China; and monotheism in the Middle East.

  The period from 900 to 200 B.C.E. is referred to as an axial age because it set the orientation or direction for spirituality for more than 2,000 years into the future. Around the world, the axial age marked the growth of trading networks, the rise of large cities, and large armies equipped with iron-age weapons. Thi
s was also a time of extreme violence and widespread warfare. The response of axial-age religions was a countervailing revolution in spiritual growth that put compassion at the forefront.

  The word religion comes from the Latin root “religio,” which means to “bind together.” During the long path of increasing separation and differentiation, the role of religion was to bind people, both to one another and to the sacred universe. People were not only leaving nature for urban settings but also, increasingly, disconnecting from the invisible field of aliveness. Here is a powerful summation of the first axial age by D. H. Lawrence: “For two thousand years man has been living in a dead or dying cosmos, hoping for a heaven hereafter. And all the religions have been religions of the dead body and the postponed reward.”7 As people saw themselves less as within the universe and more as separate observers of it, the binding role of religion became more important.

  Historically, all of the world’s great religions have understood that humanity is moving along a path of differentiation and individuation, and that a core challenge of religion has been to moderate the extreme consequences of our perceived separation. Despite great diversity of culture and geography, there is a common understanding in the world’s wisdom traditions that is summarized in the Golden Rule.

  As you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.

  —CHRISTIANITY

  What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the law: all the rest is commentary.

  —JUDAISM

  No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.

  —ISLAM

  Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.

  —HINDUISM

  Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.

  —BUDDHISM

  Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you.

  —CONFUCIANISM

  Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.

  —TAOISM

  In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self.

  —JAIN

  The heart of the person before you is a mirror. See there your own form.

  —SHINTO

  All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves.

  —NATIVE AMERICAN

  As you see yourself, see others as well; only then will you become a partner in heaven.

  —SIKHISM

  Like different facets of a single jewel or different branches of a single tree, the human family shares a common experience at the core of life, and from this has emerged fundamental wisdom about how to relate to each other. In the first great phase of differentiation—a prolonged time of growing separation from nature, one another, and the Mother Universe—it was only natural that religion would become a vehicle to bridge or connect people back to the sacred universe. Therefore, a core message of religion in the first axial age was that of compassion—treating others as we would like to be treated. In a world of growing individualism and separation, religion served as the bridge between the secular and the sacred.

  A second major phase with a very different axis is now opening before us. Religions of separation will become religions of communion as we realize there is no place to go where we can be separate from the ever-generative womb of the Mother Universe. At every moment, the entire universe is her revelation and celebration. The second epoch begins with the collective recognition that we are already home—that the Mother Universe already exists within us.

  As the world moves into spiritual communion and empathic connection with the living universe we will see the role of religion differently: Less often will people look for a bridge to the divine. Increasingly, people will seek guidance and community in the journey of awakening within the living universe. People will want to know there are others on the journey of soul-making who look in the mirror of consciousness and confront their potentials for awakening and maturation. People will want insights about this journey from others who have been down this path before. They will want to know that there are guideposts along the way to support the awakening of their unique potentials. Less and less will people seek only religions of belief. Carried along in this great cultural project of awakening, we will increasingly seek religions of direct experience—religions of communion with a living universe.

  Awakening into the Living Universe

  We are moving through a great turn in human history. In making this turn, we are halfway home in our journey of return to a living universe. On the second half of this journey, we understand that we no longer require a bridge to the first miracle. No longer feeling a sense of separation, what we seek is not a bridge to the great alive-ness but conscious guides within it.

  All of the world’s wisdom traditions recognize that if we are to experience the subtle aliveness of the universe it is vital that we consciously develop the arts of attention with tools such as meditation, contemplation, and prayer. Recall that we are giants in the cosmic scale of things and that it is easy for us to overlook what is happening at the more refined levels of existence. Happily, a literacy of consciousness is central to who we are as a species—we have a distinct aptitude for seeing ourselves in the mirror of consciousness. Whatever we may name our capacity for reflective knowing, the importance of cultivating this core capacity is recognized by every major wisdom tradition.

  Throughout this book, the world’s wisdom traditions have described enlightening or awakening experiences that emerge as we come into a more conscious and intimate relationship with the living universe. When our aliveness consciously connects with the aliveness of the universe, a current of aliveness flows through us and an “enlightening” experience occurs. At that moment, when life meets life, a direct connection between the universe and ourselves is realized and we have an awakening experience. We no longer see ourselves in the universe, we experience that we are the universe. Because the deep fabric of the universe is infused with its orchestration of qualities (light, love, music, knowing), we do not need to create or imagine awakening experiences. Instead, we only need to experience directly what is already true about the fundamental nature of the universe. Ultimately, when the conscious knowing of ourselves becomes transparent to the reality of our participation in an ever-flowing universe, we become beings of cosmic dimension and participation. Importantly, this means awakening is not a process that is confined within the physical body and brain; instead, it is a process that involves opening to an ever more conscious and intimate relationship with the living universe.

  Awakening to the living universe seldom happens all at once; instead, it involves a demanding process of learning and discovery, often over a period of many years. There are three major steps in this awakening process that are recognized in different ways by all of the world’s spiritual traditions.8 Stated simply, our conscious relationship with the universe moves from reflection, to communion, to flow. The accompanying figure presents patterns of words to help describe the nature of these three stages of consciousness.

  Let’s consider these three stages of awakening more closely.

  Stage I: Reflective Consciousness

  Whether an individual or an entire species, the first step in awakening is to stabilize our capacity to pay attention by cultivating a reflective or witnessing consciousness. The word consciousness refers to our “knowing faculty”; therefore, to bring a reflective consciousness into our lives means to live in the mirror of our own knowing. When we are standing and talking with someone, we see ourselves/ know ourselves while standing and talking. When we are sitting and eating, we see ourselves/know ourselves while sitting and eating. This is a completely simple and straightforward process. We all have the capacity to consciously reflect upon and observe ourselves as we move through life. Despite the simplicity and directness of paying attention to ourselves, this is a very demanding and difficult t
ask. We can easily get lost in the flow of our thoughts and the busyness of our lives. A brief moment of self-remembering is often followed by distraction and forgetfulness. Yet, with practice—with meditation—we gradually learn the skills of being present in our everyday lives. This is not a mechanical process, but organically observing and consciously tasting our experience as we move through life.

  Three Major Stages in Awakening to the Living Universe

  In cultivating our capacity to live more consciously, it is important to develop two qualities of conscious attention that balance one another—concentration and mindfulness. Concentration is the ability to focus on the precise center of our unfolding experience. Mindfulness is the ability to be aware of the panoramic totality of life. Concentration without the balancing influence of mindfulness results in the mind sinking into an activity, getting lost in the details, and losing perspective. Mindfulness without the balancing influence of concentration results in the mind becoming so diffuse and expansive that we feel “spaced out” and unable to be present within the precise center of the flow experience. With a dynamic balance, each acts as a corrective against the excesses of the other. Nothing is left out of our experience, as both the details and the spacious context of our lives are embraced in our consciousness.