Breathing With a Bang

The big bang - a spectacular explosion of existence, all from a single moment in time. As best we can tell, everything in the observable universe originated from this one event. Pretty impressive, to say the least.

Humanity is just a collection of primates on a bit of rock floating around a single star, one of a hundred billion dots of light in our galaxy alone. Our guess at the number of galaxies is also in the hundreds of billions. When you do the math on the staggering number of galaxies, stars and planets, perhaps it's a bit ambitious to think that humans, with our tiny little monkey brains, are capable of actually taking it all in and understanding how the universe works. Even so, many scientists spend their lives analyzing, measuring and calculating to give us answers about the wonders around us.

Much of what they come up with is well founded and easy to prove. That works fine when you turn your gaze to Earth, and even when our wandering droids sample the soil on other celestial bodies. Once we move beyond the confines of our solar system, however, the best we can do is make educated guesses based on data gathered from distant sources. We're also limited by how far we can actually see, both physically and with our instruments. You can't measure what you can't perceive, and the universe is a big place.

I enjoy watching the boundaries of our understanding expand with each new discovery, and I love the close up pictures of the planets and moons in our solar system. The geek in me marvels at the fact that a vehicle the size of an SUV is actually wandering around on the surface of Mars. An engineer at NASA wiggles a mouse and a six-wheeled robot 40 million miles away drives off into the Martian sunset to execute a new set of tasks. It's all incredibly cool. And yet, in the grand scheme of things, sniffing the dirt on our nearest neighbor is a very small thing when compared to the immensity of the universe.

I'm no scientist, and given the way I drive it's probably a good thing that they don't hand me the joystick for an interplanetary rover. It's true that I develop software for a living, and I've even contributed to the terrestrial air traffic control systems, but I'm not the guy to design satellites or wandering probes. I'll leave that to the rocket scientists. I do, however, love to ponder the infinite. Since I can't create magical starships capable of visiting distant galaxies, I amuse myself by playing “what if.” You work with what you've got.

One of the things I've always been drawn to is patterns. If you're able to take a couple of steps back and view our existence with a wide angle lens, there are a great many to see. Because I'm every bit as ambitious as the next moderately evolved monkey, I often start at the beginning, with the big bang itself.

A scientist will observe the expansion of the universe and ponder its ultimate end. There are several scenarios, one of which is that it will eventually collapse back in on itself. It may also expand until it just fizzles out, like fireworks dying away in the night sky. Or perhaps there's some series of explosions, everything ripping apart at a subatomic level. I would imagine there is a lively debate going on in that regard, with each group presenting their ideas of the ultimate demise backed up by lots of research and data.

Since I don't even own a long, white lab coat, I'm not constrained by the rules of the game. Consequently, I can just pick whatever ending suits my philosophical musings, and the collapse works nicely in many regards. I can easily see the universe as a living organism in its own right, breathing out and then breathing in, much as we do. Expand, experience, contract, assimilate, rinse and repeat.

We see this pattern everywhere we look. Glance out your window in the early morning and you'll see flower buds open to the warmth of the sun, only to close again at day's end. Mammals breath in and exhale, as do many aquatic life forms. All life on Earth takes in nourishment of some kind, then expels the waste. Up in the heavens stars are born and die, only to have new stars born from the remnants of the last. Everywhere you look, you can see these cycles in creations large and small.

In the vastness of space, a sphere seems to be a highly desirable shape. While not always perfect, the solid as well as gaseous planets adopt this form, as do their moons. Another common pattern is the disk. From the rings of Saturn to beautiful spiral galaxies, nature seems to love a flat, circular organization of things. When I see the same thing being repeated over and over, it strikes me as pattern that I should pay attention to, which allows me to see it in many other guises. Breathing in and out feels like one of these patterns.

Scientific exploration deals with the physical world and does a good job of staying in its lane. We have equipment to measure the mass of an object, but if you were to ask the lab tech to measure its soul it's a good bet security would escort you out the door. Ethereal considerations such as the spirit world have no place in the realm of science. However, since I'm musing about the nature of existence, I don't have to worry about proving anything, and the security around here is lax at best. With that in mind, what if I assume that everything surrounding us is alive and has a spirit or soul of some sort?

Even for the hippie side of my brain, this wasn't something that I could easily contemplate for many years. Eventually I realized that most of our spiritual constructs were very human-centric in nature. At best, we're willing to concede that all biological life has some kind of indefinable magic to it. At worst, it's all about the humans and no one else really counts.

When you grow up with these assumptions baked into your subconscious, it's understandably difficult to even consider that a rock, for example, might have a soul. It just seems downright silly. In a similar manner, it would appear equally foolish to assign any kind of sentient consciousness or spiritual attributes to a planet. After all, they're just really big lumps of rock, right?

Part of the problem is our definition of a soul. This puts us squarely in the realm of religions, and a lot of them revolve around humanity as the star of the show. If there's an afterlife, it's reserved for those who have a soul, and of course that's just the humans. Some may contemplate whether there's a doggie heaven for when our beloved Basset Hound reaches his inevitable end, but for the most part paradise is reserved for us. I'm fairly certain there aren't many people lobbying for a cockroach utopia.

Eventually I came to see this perspective as a form of prejudice, no different than assumptions about some guy sitting next to me on an airplane because his skin is a different color than mine. If I thought him inferior, I would rightly be deemed a racist. I guess when it comes to matters of the spirit, most of us could be viewed as having a similar prejudicial view. If it's not human, it just doesn't count. That's arrogant enough when applied to the staggering variety of life on Earth. In the context of the entire universe it becomes almost amusing in its simplicity.

The problem is that we see through our own eyes and have difficulty relating to things that are different. I can look at the guy on the plane, see that he's typing on a laptop, and easily relate to him since I'm probably fooling around with a computer as well. If he happens to be a programmer, even if we work in different programming languages, we'd probably be able to establish a common vocabulary and find many things in common.

That's all fine and good, but how am I supposed to relate to the consciousness of a planet? A human has a brain attached to a number of sensory organs, and we're used to how that works. I have no idea how a planet would think. That said, we're fortunate that the world is not limited to just those things that I'm capable of understanding.

With that in mind, I'm willing to take a leap of faith as I ponder the nature of existence, being open to the possibility that the larger constructs I see in the night sky might have a consciousness of their own. I wouldn't in a million years expect that I could speak their language or understand their perspective on life. My tiny little human brain would probably hit overload and suffer a similar fate to that of a star going supernova, though perhaps not as pleasant to observe. Nonetheless, what if life, complete with a soul of its own, existed at all levels of the universe?

In some ways it's not even that hard to imagine. My body is made up of a gazillion cells. Those cells organize into tissue, and the tissues organize into organs and other bodily systems. Wheels within wheels. That sounds an awful lot like a galaxy, or even a universe, but of course I wouldn't think of my heart as having a soul of its own. And yet, for all I know, it might.

If you shift your gaze from the larger constructions of the human body and instead borrow a microscope from one of our scientific friends, you might be horrified at the number of living things swimming around in your body. What about bacteria, or a good old fashioned virus? Are they alive? Well, certainly not in the same way as a human, or even a Basset Hound for that matter, but they're certainly not dead. In fact, we pay doctors good money to help us kill them. Why would you kill something that wasn't alive in the first place?

Some who share my inclination to ponder the infinite look in the opposite direction as well. What if there was a spirit, an over soul if you will, for the entire human race? Maybe there's one for each species of animal. There are also Earth based religions who worship the spirit of our planet. That might just be the spirit of the biosphere, since it's the sum total of life as we know it. Perhaps the biosphere is, in turn, an organ of sort for the planet, which has a consciousness of its own. Wheels within wheels.

Why couldn't these patterns repeat themselves all the way out to the universe as a whole? If the bacteria swimming around in my body have a consciousness, I have no way of relating to it. This isn't terribly surprising since I don't usually have much success communicating with a Basset Hound, either. Just the same, the fact that I don't know how to relate to something or perceive it in a way that makes sense to me doesn't limit the nature of existence. It might be that the bacteria does have a spirit of some sort, and those patterns work their way up through the hierarchy of ever more complex constructions.

In eastern spirituality, there's a common concept of energy centers that are positioned in a line down our bodies. The most common thought is that there are seven of them, and one is located level with the heart. If these energy centers are real, it makes me wonder if a heart does indeed have a life and a soul of its own, operating in the context of my body just as I exist in the context of the biosphere.

The meaning of life is an elusive thing to chase, but many think that it's all about learning and growing, taking what you experience and then becoming something greater as a result. Philosophies based around multiple lifetimes align nicely with this, with our souls somehow merging what we've experienced back into the greater consciousness of the planet, and building on that in our next incarnation.

My thinking is, if that's possible for a human, why not a universe? If we see the same patterns repeating in ways large and small, and each life in turn contains many lives within it, what's true for a human could be true of a universe. The life cycles are different in duration, but the concepts could be the same. We breathe out and experience all we can, then breathe in and return to the source, only to breathe out again as an even greater creation.

Is it possible that everything around us, from what we consider inert matter to the vastness of the universe, is actually alive with a consciousness and soul of its own? Are we all participating in one grand exercise, each experiencing, learning and growing at our own level? Is all of existence just part of a universal body that's breathing in and out? Or am I just barking at the moon?