species, and being aware of the existence of “others” at different levels. The argument that only human beings possess sentience is hollow—it’s a basic attribute of consciousness itself. 3. Cosmic consciousness has the urge to build upon the old to create the new. This behavior is called evolution. Confining evolution to life on Earth is a narrow perspective. The entire cosmos exhibits evolution as a basic trait. The alternative—a universe operating randomly for more than 10 billion years, only to hit upon evolution when planet Earth appeared—is unreasonable. What brought the planets into existence if not evolution from simpler collections of matter? 4. Cosmic consciousness operates locally through separate events that are too far apart to be considered in touch with each other, but at the same time it holds these events together at a deeper level where nothing is separate. This trait is called veiled nonlocality. 5. Cosmic consciousness sets up the universe so that our way of viewing, whether through physics or biology, isn’t violated. Each perspective justifies itself. No matter how many stories we tell about reality, the whole story is kept from view. This trait is called cosmic censorship. 6. All the parts of the cosmos are structurally similar or can be seen as having likenesses at deeper levels. Two observers looking at different levels of nature can communicate and understand each other because of repeated patterns and forms that share resemblances. This principle is known as recursion. Cosmic consciousness mirrors the observer’s state of being. There is no privileged point of view, even though in the past religion claimed to have a privileged point of view while today science does the same. But each story is provided with evidence to support it, because our state of being interacts so intimately with reality that observer, observed, and the process of observation are inseparable. What we’ve just outlined are the behaviors of every aspect of nature;
they aren’t metaphysical dreams. Cosmic consciousness produced the universe as a living, self-organizing system. At every instant since the big bang, nature keeps repeating the same behaviors at every level. In biology it is undeniable that living things organize themselves, using DNA as a basic template. Horses create baby horses; horse livers create new liver cells; each cell sustains the process of eating, breathing, excreting, dividing, and so on. This selforganization is dynamic, and when necessary, it has the flexibility to adapt to new conditions. A horse can live high in the Andes Mountains or below sea level in Death Valley because its cells are adaptable. A horse can run or stand still. It can be pregnant or not. These are massive changes of state, but the horse’s body, from the level of its DNA upward, regulates itself. If it didn’t adapt to changing conditions, it would die. This ability to adapt is reflected in how a molecule is organized and an atom and a quark. In all cases there is adaptation in the face of change, and the whole system participates. If we scrutinize a horse at various levels, we see atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, and finally the complete creature. But the horse is more than a collection of its parts, as a cathedral is more than glass, stone, marble, metal, cloth, and precious stones. If a horse’s liver cells opt out, there can be no horse. If the DNA inside a cell decides not to divide, there is no horse. Why don’t all kinds of things opt out? There are trillions of participating parts in a living horse. Cars and trucks have numerous parts, and much to our frustration, a few always seem to be breaking down or threatening to. But so far as nature is concerned, a horse is only one thing, a species of awareness, and at the level of awareness, all participation is unified. For any living creature—a blowfish, fruit fly, or horseshoe crab—there is interconnection at each level. Each level retains its own integrity while meshing into the next level. This dynamic stream of cooperation is the modern equivalent of the religious notion of the Great Chain of Being, which held that God seamlessly wove together every level of creation. In nonreligious terms, we say that complex
systems organize themselves through the natural behavior of consciousness, the behaviors we’ve just listed. The following is a grand summation of the things that put human beings foremost in the universe. To understand this, you don’t have to look through the Hubble telescope. Much closer to home, a heart, liver, or lung cell behaves like the universe itself. The matchup is perfect. HOW EVERY CELL MIRRORS THE COSMOS Complementarity: Each cell preserves its individual life while maintaining a balance with the whole body. Even cells that seem like opposites, such as a bone cell and a blood cell, are necessary to each other. They are necessary to the whole. Creative interactivity: Each cell produces chemical products to fit specific situations, such as how much oxygen is needed in the blood at very high versus very low altitudes. Genes adapt creatively to change all the time by creating new mixes of chemical products in the cell. Evolution: All cells begin with the same DNA as well as the same general stem-cell structure. In the womb these stem cells re-create the entire evolution of life on Earth, going through specific stages until the final evolutionary stage, becoming human, is reached. Veiled nonlocality: Each cell has perfect knowledge about the events it controls, but the wholeness of the body is invisible and concealed. It has no physical fingerprint, even though the wholeness of the body is the whole point of every event taking place in a cell.
Cosmic censorship: Every cell mirrors the laws of biology, which cannot be violated—otherwise the cell would be unable to exist. What “censors” nonlocality or wholeness is the appearance of almost infinite events taking place all around us, seemingly following established reality but in fact veiling or clouding what lies “underneath” ordinary perception. In duality, even the mind can’t know its own wholeness through thinking. Recursion: As different as cells look when gathered into kidney, bone, heart, or brain tissues, they are basically the same. They follow the same patterns. (At the deepest layers of physicality, all electrons are the same, prompting Richard Feynman to state that there is really only one electron.) Recursion allows understanding to be built up from familiar patterns. We can understand one another and communicate. This is made possible by repeating the same processes in each cell and linking all of them back to DNA.
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