Columnists
More Thoughts on Cosmic Spirituality
John Shields, Victoria
Volume 30 Issue 1, 2 & 3 | Posted: April 5, 2016
My intention in sharing this material is to share my conclusions about cosmic supported spirituality. For me the new revelation from the universe has confirmed that spirit is a quality of the universe and is universally present on Earth. This has opened a door for me to the sacred in the secular.
My intention in sharing this material is to share my conclusions about cosmic supported spirituality. For me the new revelation from the universe has confirmed that spirit is a quality of the universe and is universally present on Earth. This has opened a door for me to the sacred in the secular.
For twenty plus years I could easily characterize myself as a wanderer on a parched spiritual wasteland as I searched for an answer to my quest to find spirituality that was not dependent on religion or dogma. My longing to find an alternate source of spirituality kept running into the prevailing dominance of consumer and scientific materialism. Belief in Materialism has dominated the scientific and academic world. In brief, Materialism holds that the only real things are what can be held or measured. Since the 1600s when Descartes, in rebellion to the pietism of the Church, declared that spirit was an illusion and relegated it to the teaching of the Church, the influence of spirituality outside religion has been on the wane. The secular world has thoroughly embraced materialism as the explanation of life. The growth of consumerism as the main driver of modern economies is central. Materialism as the prevailing worldview seemed irrevocably entrenched. “Shop till you drop” had taken hold in mainstream North American culture.
The only countering worldview that I could find other than that of the ancient religions was in indigenous culture. On Vancouver Island where I live, I encountered First Nations who lived close to nature and held an age-old conviction that ‘All is One’. They consider themselves part of the forests and the ocean, and live in harmony with their environment as the have for ten thousand years. But indigenous communities have been isolated in reserves and remote villages along the coast, and their beliefs about the world have minimal influence on the settler population.
In Canada, as in the United States, commerce and the economy were, as they are now, the most featured elements of national life. Jobs, profits, the standard of living trump all other aspects of human enterprise. These are the focal points of our materialistic culture. Finding spirituality among the artifacts of corporate and business activity seemed like a lost cause. As hard as I looked, I found no alternative to the concentration on property, trade and commerce.
I was becoming reconciled to not finding evidence of spirit. Then, by chance, I attended a weekend talk that introduced the emergence of a completely new worldview. Brian Swimme, a young cosmologist from California came to Victoria to talk about recent discoveries in his field.
Swimme presented relatively new information from the American space agency, NASA. It had very recently announced that the data that they collected from the COBE satellite, a five year probe of the sky, confirmed a revolutionary finding: cosmic background radiation, the remnant of the initial flaring out of the energy had caused the universe to unfold to become what it is today. NASA had mapped the energy field and proved that the universe had a beginning. Albert Einstein was correct when he theorized that all the energy of the Cosmos flowed forth in a single moment. Everything in the universe, including the human species owes its being to the first outpouring 13.7 billion years ago. As recently as the early 90s, NASA had introduced this evidence to the world.
When the universe began by pouring out all its energy in a single flash of light and heat it set in motion an unbroken chain of cause and effect that over time gave rise to everything from galaxies to butterflies. In our time, cosmologists and quantum physicists have looked at the near infinitely large expanse of space and the infinitely small subatomic particle world. At both ends of the spectrum, energy is the fundamental constituent. Scientists have confirmed that matter is constellated energy. We are all energy. Solidness is an illusion, because our senses are unable to perceive the atomic level. If we could, we would behold the constituents of matter as particles that are not things but whirling dynamic building blocks, made up entirely of energy. At that level, everything in the universe are interconnected, no matter how great a span of space that separates them.
With the onset of this new revelation coming from the universe through our most brilliant scientists, the fundamentals of materialism are shattered and eclipsed by the principles of interconnection and oneness at the core level. From these newly revealed truths I have drawn my own conclusions about the spiritual foundations in everything.
The universe in its entirety is made from the same energy. That energy, which constituted the galaxies, is what constitutes us. Energy is but one dynamic entity, though it manifests in different ways, sometimes as wave and sometimes as particles.
All the creatures of Earth are made of light and star stuff. Carbon, a basic constituent of life comes to Earth from the stars. Photons and other particles make the atoms of our bodies, in turn forming molecules, which organize into cells. Our cells form into greater complexity creating organs and systems. Our brains have evolved over eons and are the result of the merging of complex biological systems. And all are pure energy. Everything, living and inert, shares the same creative energy.
One of the names that humankind has given to animating energy is soul. From ancient times people experienced the moment when a living being ceased to be animated. They called that moment death, and described it as the moment the soul left the body. In all life there is a moment of death. In humans, we concluded that at that moment consciousness ceased, but evidence points elsewhere.
In the materialistic era, consciousness and mind were thought to be exclusively the function of the brain. Any creature without a brain was thought to lack consciousness. The narrowness of this definition became a problem for science in the age of the microscope as observers found smaller and smaller entities interacting independently with their environment, making choices about food and alien forms.
Now it is widely accepted that every creature that is alive freely interacts with its environment is aware of what threatens or enhances its survival and is conscious. But even that broadened understanding of sententiousness does not go far enough. The energy that has been identified in the subatomic world is doing the same interactive behaviour. The molecular structure of stone is also sentient. Everything in the chain of being participates to some degree in the sentience of the universe.
John Shields, Victoria