THE BIGGEST OF THE BIG QUESTIONS: WHERE DID WE COME FROM? WHY ARE WE HERE?
These are perhaps the biggest of the big questions thinking people have ever asked about themselves and the world around them. Today we can offer a better, more reliable answer to them than we could before.
WHERE DID WE COME FROM?
When it comes to inquiring into our deepest origins, evolutionary science joins mystical intuition to give the same basic answer. We were not created as we are now: we have evolved into it. But the concept of where we had evolved from is different in science and in mysticism. It is different in explication and formulation, though not in meaning.
According to quantum cosmology, we have evolved from the primordial “ground state” of the universe. In quantum cosmology, this state is best seen as a sea of coherent vibration. The manifest universe is the ensemble of the vibrations that emerged in this sea. The emergent vibrations “excited” the quantum sea: they brought it into what physicists describe as the excited state. The excited state is the basis for all possible vibrations in the quantum sea. These are given in potential; and in the excited state some of the vibrations become actualized. The clusters of vibrations that constitute the observable universe are vibrations in the excited state of the quantum sea: they are the manifest state of the universe.
This abstract physics-assessment of the origins of “things” in the universe has been intuitively anticipated in the wisdom traditions. The creation stories of the world’s spiritual systems speak of a primordial domain out of which the manifest had emerged. In some Eastern metaphysics, this domain is a cosmic egg, whereas in the Old Testament it is a dark and formless sea—a void. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:1–2) From this spaceless and timeless void God created light, the firmament, day and night, and all the things that have come to exist the universe.
This account of our cosmic origins is also given in Taoist cosmology. There it is said that all things originate in the Tao, and all things return to the Tao. The Tao is both the source and destination of all things. It is not observable, and not even nameable. It can be defined only negatively, by what it is not. As the literature of Tao emphasizes, Tao cannot be seen by our eyes. Tao cannot be heard by our ears. Tao cannot be touched by our hands.
The recognition of a primordial ground occurs and recurs also in the history of philosophy. Plato called the ground the sphere of Forms and Ideas, and identified it as the seat of the Soul. The Hellenic philosophers gave it various names: Pythagoras called it “Kosmos,” and Plotinus “The One.” In our time, quantum physicist David Bohm identified it as the “implicate” (enfolded) order, the seat and origin of the manifest world: the “explicate” (unfolded) order. We live in the explicate order, but this order, and all things in it, is shaped and molded—as Bohm would say, “in-formed”—by the implicate order.
The implicate order is the long-intuited and now rediscovered deep dimension of the world. We, as all things in the manifest “explicate” order, originate as in-formed clusters of coherent vibration in the excited state of the quantum sea that manifests as the universe.
This is the answer of cutting-edge cosmology to the query regarding our origins. In the perspective of spirituality, we come from the nothingness that is also a fullness that preceded and still underlies the manifest universe. This nothingness is the “void” of the Bible, the “Tao” of Eastern mysticism, the “quantum vacuum” of mainstream physics, and the “implicate order” of quantum physics.
The above answers have a major feature in common: they speak of progressive “creation,” or self-evolution, from common origins. The evolution of the world is not a mechanical, preprogrammed sequence of events, but a creative process inspired and in-formed by a fundamental spark: the seed of life, of mind, and of the order of nature. These seeds are potentials, and they were present already at the beginning and became actualized—and continue to be actualized—over the course of time.
The beginning of this process of creative evolution is traced by most cosmologists to the cosmic singularity popularly known as the big bang. This event took place an estimated 13.8 billion years ago. It injected staggering energies into the preceding ground state of the universe, “excited” it, and gave rise to the formative processes that created quarks and quanta, atoms and crystals, molecules, stars, stellar systems and galaxies, and living organisms and ecologies of such organisms on Earth—and conceivably on milliards of other planets orbiting energy-radiating active stars in this galaxy and in countless others.
WHY ARE WE HERE?
I am alive, I live day after day. Until one day I live no more. Why did I live—why do I live now? Is there a meaning or reason for my life—for life altogether?
Of course, it may be that there is no need to spend time on the question of the meaning of life, since the answer is simple and straightforward. There is no higher or deeper meaning: the meaning of life is just to be alive. That would accord with what we surmise about the experience of other living things around us. When spring comes, grass grows and birds sing and they don’t worry about deeper meaning. They don’t ask why they are alive. Perhaps they are alive just to live. Life itself is a great miracle and being alive could be an end in itself. My best friend, Nikki, greets me in the morning, we look each other in the eye, and we go for a walk. He is happy. He doesn’t ask what his life means. Perhaps he would if he could, and he would say: to live and to be happy. But in his present condition as a dog, he cannot ask.
But you and I, who have been born as humans, we can ask. Is there a deeper meaning for our being alive, and if there is, what is that meaning? I cannot with good conscience disregard and dismiss this question. It may be that it is by more than by a lucky fluke that I have been born somebody who can ask this question. Perhaps the capacity for asking it is the answer. Could it be that I have been born a human being so I could ask what it means to live?
On a purely pragmatic level, asking about the meaning of life is an exercise in sophistry. It doesn’t contribute to my physical existence on the planet. To stay alive as a biological being I don’t need to contemplate sophisticated questions posed by an evolved consciousness. But I have such a consciousness, and I also have the capacity to use it. Is this just a fortunate (or perhaps not so fortunate?) consequence of my being at a relatively advanced stage of evolution? Pragmatic thinkers often say that consciousness is an accidental by-product of the workings of the brain as it seeks to ensure the organism’s survival and reproduction. Could they be right—could my evolved consciousness be a mere side effect of my biological existence?
Here we come to the end of the wisdom offered by the physical and biological sciences. If my consciousness is something more, or at any rate something other, than a side effect of the workings of my brain, that something is no longer a physical and biological phenomenon. Consciousness beyond the level where it serves the functions of survival and reproduction must be more than the by-product of a survival-and-reproduction-serving brain. If there is such a “something more” it would not be produced by my brain, and would not be limited to my brain. It would be something that my brain receives and processes, and perhaps transmits. But not something that it creates.
In contemplating this possibility, we pass from the physical-biological concept of wisdom to the level of a higher wisdom. The wisdom we can derive from a consciousness that is a side effect of survival-and-reproduction-oriented cerebral functioning is strictly pragmatic: How do I ensure that I have enough to eat, have a place where I can rest, and find a mate with whom I can reproduce? Important, even essential as these queries may be, my brain-created consciousness cannot produce anything beyond them; the rest, in its perspective, is but imagination and sophistry.
There may be a higher wisdom in the world. And that wisdom derives from a consciousness that exists beyond the brain—one that my brain can capture and process, and ultimately transmit. This is the wisdom offered by the great religions and spiritual systems of the world, and it is supported by the new paradigm emerging at the cutting edge of the contemporary sciences.
THE MIRACLE OF “EVERY-THING”
There are just two ways to live your life, Einstein is said to have told us: as if nothing is a miracle, or as if everything is.
The wise way to live your life is as if everything is a miracle. Because everything is. This is the logical and valid conclusion from the insights we gain from the quantum sciences regarding the ultimate nature of the world. Everything—more exactly, every “thing”—is astoundingly coherent. It could not exist if it was not. A “thing” is not a bit or a combination of bits of material things. It is a coherent cluster of vibration in the ground state of the universe. If it was not coherent, it would not be a thing: it would not exist. It would be an indistinguishable part of a non-thing-like sea of oceanic vibration. What there is is a cluster of coherent vibration where the component vibrations share the same frequency, are in phase, and have a compatible magnitude. Only on this condition can the vibrations constitute “things.” Whether they are truly things is not the question. The fact is that only in this condition do they appear thing-like to us.
Where is the miracle in this? The miracle is that every-thing we can perceive is coherent: the universe is full, actually composed, of coherent “things.” This is the miracle that sages have been contemplating for ages: the miracle of there being “some thing” in the world rather than “no-thing.”
The universe is a coherent “thing” made up of other coherent “things.” More precisely, it is a coherent supermacrovibration composed of coherent meso- and microvibrations. This is a miracle. If the universe were a passive, soulless mechanism, as the mainstream physics of the modern age has envisaged, it would be a random sea of incoherent vibrations. There would be “no-thing” in it. But now there are many “things” in it, and if not arbitrarily subverted, they prove to be highly, indeed amazingly, coherent. This truly is a miracle. Ours is a miraculously coherent universe.
THE MIRACLE OF COHERENCE
Coherence is a state of being throughout the sphere of life; it hallmarks all species and populations and ecologies. It is not unique to the sphere of life; it also characterizes the physics of the universe. The universe is coherent from the smallest assembly of quanta to the vastest structure of galaxies. If the universe was not so coherent, it could not have evolved from its initial semichaotic structure into the supreme architecture it exhibits today.
We have gained a better understanding of the nature of the universe, and of the things that emerge and evolve in the universe. We now know that the universe is not a mechanical aggregate of atoms and molecules. The systems that appear in it are not lifeless chunks of matter but coevolving, interlinked systems of energy and information. In all its domains, the universe is coherent, and ultimately, it is one. This is a timeless insight, and its relevance to the world around us is becoming more and more evident.
We are an integral part of a coherent universe, linked in countless ways to one another and to our planet. In a remarkable resurgence of interest in timeless wisdom, more and more people are rediscovering this perennial insight.
With the new discoveries in physics, cosmology, and the life sciences, our very identity is changing. We are recognizing that we are not skin-enclosed, mechanistic parts in a vast machinelike universe, but highly evolved elements in an organic, evolving, quasi-living cosmos. Nature’s penchant toward structure, order, and complexity has reached a pinnacle in us, unparalleled on this planet, and possibly in this entire region of the galaxy.
We may not be the only, or even the most evolved, beings in the universe, but we are surely one of the comparatively evolved ones. Thanks to our brain and consciousness, we are an eye through which the universe is coming to know itself. This is a unique privilege: it allows us to rediscover ourselves in the natural order of things. And when we rediscover ourselves, we can comprehend our role in the order of things—we can seek to regain our coherence with one another, and with the whole universe.
Copyright © 2021 by Ervin Laszlo. Foreword copyright © 2021 by Deepak Chopra. Introduction copyright © 2021 by Neale Donald Walsch. Afterword copyright © 2021 by Gregg Braden
