seemingly precise figures, complete with decimal points, create a verisimilitude of credibility. The models are then stated repeatedly, and this repetition itself endows them with a substantive aura. But this doesn’t mean that they are, in fact, hard truths.
Happily, the preceding, gloomy-seeming overview of our present state is not the end of the story. It is actually only the beginning. Because there exists an alternative model for What All This Is.
The alternative is necessary because modern cosmology, in its attempts to explain the cosmos, keeps committing an odd oversight: It scrupulously holds the living observer at a distance from the rest of the universe. It asks us to accept a dichotomy, a split.
In this corner stands us, the living—the perceivers of it all. And in the other corner lurks the entire dumb universe, slamming into itself via random processes.
But what if we are linked? What if the whole insensible model can suddenly make sense by putting everything together? What if the universe—nature—and the perceiver are not stand-alone entities? What if one plus one equals . . . one! And indeed, what if the past century of scientific discoveries point compellingly in this very direction—if only we are sufficiently open-minded to see what it tells us?
In reality, the clues never stop arriving. In February 2015, the New York Times ran a story on “Quantum Weirdness,” which it subtitled, “New Experiments Confirm That Nature Is Neither Here Nor There.” Yet neither the clearly puzzled author, nor many readers in all likelihood, smiled to themselves and thought, Of course! That’s because nature is indeed both here AND there. When you try to locate it solely in either place, you end up with paradoxes and illogic.
Quantum theory found a connection between consciousness and the nature of particles nearly a century ago. Yet we’ve ignored this, or come up with dizzying explanations involving an infinite number of alternate realities.
Discovering what’s real is actually a happy endeavor. It requires us to walk the labyrinthine hallways of the most intriguing twenty-first-century science concepts and to examine existing ones afresh. Exploring astounding things like time and space and how the brain works would promise to be an enjoyable excursion even if it were a mere aimless diversion, a Sunday stroll.
But as we shall see, both the voyage to a clearer picture of the cosmos, and the ultimate destination itself, are more than eye opening. They are fun.
THE SEVEN-MILLENNIUM
QUESTION
2
The day which we fear as our last is but the
birthday of eternity.
—Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “De Brevitate Vitae” (c. 48 c.e.)
In attempting to tackle the fundamentals about ourselves and the universe, we usually turn to the science of cosmology, although some continue to embrace religious explanations. But those who find neither avenue leading to their desired destination can consider a very different model of reality. This fresh paradigm, far from abandoning science, uses discoveries published since 1997, and reexamines others that unfolded even earlier.
Before we plunge into this new adventure, however, it’s helpful to see what the great thinkers have already come up with through the ages. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel if it’s already there.
This requires that we overcome our biases of ethnocentrism and modernism. That is, we often reflexively assume that our Western culture, and people alive today, have a superior grasp on deep issues compared with foreign civilizations and those who lived before us. We base this on our advanced technology. Those poor slobs a century ago had no indoor plumbing, window screens, or air conditioning. Could anyone have deep insights when sweating in a sticky bed and beset by droning mosquitoes? Could they conjure profundities while tossing their night wastes out the window each morning?
Thus it may surprise anthropology students to learn that vast areas of human knowledge commonly grasped by the educated classes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are greeted today with blank stares. It’s therefore not true that twenty-first-century teenagers have more knowledge than their nineteenth-century analogs—just different knowledge.
Every farm boy in 1830 knew precisely how the sunrise shifts its weekly rising and setting points and could identify the songs of birds and the detailed habits of the local fauna. By contrast, very few of our friends or family members today are even dimly aware that the Sun moves to the right as it crosses the sky daily. Confessing such ignorance about something so “sky is blue” basic would have been met by disbelief in the nineteenth century.
To be sure, some areas of knowledge have thoroughly eluded all humans, present and past alike. For example, we’ve proven ourselves chronically deficient at foreseeing the future—even anticipating conditions a few decades ahead. No genius of the classical Greek period, no great writer in global literature, no passage within any religious text ever suggested that there exist tiny creatures too small for the eye to perceive, let alone that such germs are responsible for most of the diseases that plague us. Before 1781, no one suspected that perhaps there might be additional planets beyond the five bright luminaries known since the Neanderthals. Until just a few centuries ago, no one suggested that blood circulates through the body, or that the air we breathe consists of a mixture of gases rather than a single substance. Thus, for all the New Age or religious malarkey extolling the supposed accuracy of ancient “prophecies,” the actual track record is worse than dismal.
We have done no better in modern times. The futurists who helped prepare the 1964 New York World’s Fair depicted typical homes of the year 2000 as having flying cars and personal robots. In popular literature and cinema, the 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey showed lunar colonies in the year 2000, and a Jupiter voyage with a human crew a few years later. The 1982 cult favorite Blade Runner depicted Los Angeles in 2019 as being relentlessly rainy from an implied climate change that turned California into a chronically wet place. That city was also crammed with ultra-tall buildings and flying police cars. No futurist during the hippie years foresaw today’s ubiquitous cell phones, body piercing, or the super-fast modernization of China.
The point is, our present level of perspicacity seems no better than it was a few centuries ago. Nor is it worse. And when it came to pondering our place in the universe, our ancestors were at least as obsessed as we are. So, given that the vast majority of humans who ever lived are not alive today, it would be an oversight to ignore their insights.
Rather than assuming our ancestors were too backward to think deep thoughts, or going the other way and idolizing past civilizations as being supernaturally in sync with nature, let’s look at the actual written record.
It is not necessary to summarize the bedrock beliefs of every civilization. Certainly in the Western Hemisphere, if we’re to begin our account seven thousand years ago, even before the invention of the wheel, the worldview was consistently dominated by a time-based obsession with the afterlife. This in turn revolved around appeasing the gods—like the Egyptian sun god Ra, creator god Amun, and mother goddess Isis.
Here, the earliest writings showed no interest in solving nature’s mysteries through observation or logic. Instead, magic and superstition ruled. One of the authors found a primitive hieroglyphic example from forty-seven centuries ago, inscribed on the subterranean walls of the lonely pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara in Egypt. This 2006 visit had been guarded against terrorists by a jeepload of heavily armed troops—all to observe glyphs that were not exactly Deep Thoughts.
They were magic spells featuring a “mother snake.”
