THE LEARNING UNIVERSE
- From: jak1949@xxxxxxxxx (Jack McKinney)
- Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:39:34 -0500
A Scientist's Thoughts about Redefining our Concept of God
Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.
In my dialog with Willis Harman, published as Biology Revisioned (North
Atlantic Publishers, Berkeley 1998), I reversed the scientific story I
was taught from seeing consciousness as the end product of evolution to
seeing consciousness as the source of evolution. In other words, the
universe, to me, is fundamentally Consciousness -- alive, aware and
intelligent. This Consciousness is non-local, i.e. everywhere, and is
what different cultures variously personify as God, under many names. It
is also what physicists now call "zero point energy" -- the infinite
energy existing at every point in space. They are discovering that it is
conscious and that it non-locally records all information ever produced
in the universe. This Conscious non-timespace energy is vaster than our
local universe. It can and does transmute itself into electromagnetic
energy, and, in turn, matter, in the creation of universes such as ours,
though it can also create itself into other pure energy patterns in a
myriad ways (they include angelic realms, for example, and all the
"worlds" we exist in between lives, and eternally). This All-That-Is
God Source is perceived as I-Am from the perspective of the local
consciousness created in beings such as you and me, when we go into
meditation, expanding our little consciousness into the Great One we are
all part of. In this state we not only perceive union with God, we
transcend our local selves such that we recognize ourselves as God.
Our universe appears to be a learning universe. I like to say its basic
principle is "Anything that can happen, will happen," and so it learns
what works well and what doesn't. Evolution is an improvisational dance,
keeping the steps that work and changing those that don't. As I cannot
separate God-as-Cosmic-Consciousness from
God-transmuting-into-material-universes, I believe our learning universe
implies a learning God -- God learning to know the nature of Self
through exploring its possibilities and learning to reflect on that
Self. Exactly as we, God's human reflections, learn to do! In other
words, Cosmic Consciousness begins as Unity and divides into Complexity
a stage at a time -- at least from our human linear time perspective --
as it embodies itself in vast varieties of energetic and material forms.
In non-timespace, which physics now knows to be the more fundamental
nature of the universe, all possibilities exist together in complexity
inconceivable to us humans.
I believe we exist as non-physical beings which incarnate intentionally,
according to particular intentions for learning in each life, but that
our "higher selves" are present non-physically throughout our lives. We
weave our birth-to-death lifelines through the endless possibilities by
the choices we make from moment to moment, each constraining the
succeeding choices. From the perspective of non-timespace, all our lives
together are like a kind of lotus flower, with each life one petal, one
way of playing out a theme chosen by our soul entity or higher self.
Some of our incarnations may be simultaneous in the linear timeframe,
others are a historical sequence. Each "petal" is in soul communication
with each other; thus our many lives can influence each other. Recall
that early Christianity included the belief in reincarnation; I believe
the Church changed that to gain more control over people's lives, just
as Jesus told us we could reach God directly and the Church made priests
not assistants but necessary channels to God. All nature is thus
conscious in my worldview, and all of it has access to non-timespace;
all of it is an aspect of God. The acorn knows the oak tree it will
become. Only we humans of western culture have played the game of
cutting ourselves off from the Great Conversation that our very cells
can still hear! Soils, waters, organisms, ecosystems, Earth, even DNA
itself, all know their composition and that of the Whole as the cells of
our bodies know each other and our whole bodies, behaving intelligently
to maintain themselves and that whole (that's why our bodies work!).
Our human task now is to wake up and recognize ourselves as parts or
aspects of God-as-Nature and behave accordingly. All are One, all harm
harms each of us, all blessings bless each of us. What a guideline for
choice! The ancients knew it and taught it. But God, through us, is
trying out the most dangerous game of all -- the game of truly
forgetting our nature. A great risk, but it had to be done to try all
possibilities!
.. I pray that scientists, who have been given the role of priesthood --
the right to tell us "how things are" -- will soon officially recognize
that there is one alive, intelligent universe in which spirit and matter
are not separable. I pray the indigenous people who never separated
science and spirituality will be honored for that. It is time for the
true communion which alone can save our species and all others, which
alone can bring about the perfectly possible world we all dream of -- a
world expressing this understanding of ourselves as-the creative edge of
God!
Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. is an internationally known American/Greek
evolution biologist and futurist, author, speaker and consultant on
Living Systems Design. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts
and M.I.T., was a science writer for the HORIZON/ NOVA TV series, a
United Nations consultant on indigenous peoples and is a member of the
United Religions Initiative. Her current focus is on evolution biology
as a model for organizational change; her recent books are Biology
Revisioned, co-authored with Willis Harman, and A Walk Through Time:
From Stardust to Us.
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