information.
And consider the significance of human near-death experiences (NDEs) in which the patient’s biological organism, his or her body, is dead on the operating room table and yet the consciousness belonging to that body is somewhere in the room observing and is later able to recount the events that led to the body’s resuscitation? Is that discarnate consciousness a life form?
There are no simple answers to our questions as to what qualifies as life.
The Universe
Let’s review what we know about the forces of life in the universe. When I look up into the starry night sky, I am in awe of its beauty—but I am also moved within myself, as if there is some personal connection that I have with that heavenly vista. Ancient cultures taught that we were once part of that wondrous unending realm, and we will eventually return to it. Scientists tell us that a part of the vast starry scene is in our bodies for we are composed of stardust! Physicist Lawrence Krauss explains it this way, “Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than the atoms in your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about the universe: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars had not exploded, because the elements—the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the things that matter for evolution—weren’t created at the beginning of time, they were created in stars. So forget Jesus. Stars died so you could live.”1 Of course, Krauss is speaking of our physical bodies whereas Jesus’ death and resurrection was about our souls. But the point is that when we are looking at the stars, we are looking at a kindred creation, a portion of which is in the very composition of our bodies—or as Cayce put it in this reading from 1935, “ … there are the energies in each atom even of the physical body that are the shadows of the whole universe.” (633-2)
In looking at the universe, there is at least one observation upon which theologians and scientists can easily agree, and that is its extraordinary large-scale uniformity. Whatever the first impulse for creation, it clearly intended to be expressed orderly. Despite the complexity of the cosmos, it clearly reveals uniformity, order, and fundamental laws, such as gravity and electromagnetic dynamics. And, despite evidence of a “Big Bang” creation, there is an even distribution of energy throughout the universe, indicating that the “Bang” had to have erupted with such a force as to have spontaneously leapt in size, distributing energy equally in that first split second.
Einstein’s famous formula, E (energy) equals m (mass) times c (speed of light) squared, reveals how the physical world of mass (matter) is simply a condition of energy. Inside material matter, there is a tremendous amount of energy, and that energy can be released, as it is in our Sun. But energy can also produce matter! If two beams of pure light were to come together, solid particles would come into existence! In the beginning, the universe was filled with light, which carried enormous amounts of energy from which matter could and did come into existence. This brought forth atoms, stars, planets, and eventually human bodies!
Using satellites, scientists have studied the cosmic heat radiation and gained detailed facts about the universe. At present, the universe is believed to have begun roughly 14 billion years ago. A percentage of the static on our TVs is caused by Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation that still remains from the Big Bang! CMB falls on Earth from every direction with uniform intensity. It is a faint glow of the light that fills the entire universe—the “afterglow” of the Big Bang. It is the oldest light we can see, beginning long before the Earth or even our Milky Way Galaxy existed. It is a remnant of the universe’s birth—a time when it was not the cold dark place it is now, but was instead a firestorm of radiation and elementary particles. The objects that we see today—stars, planets, and galaxies—were formed from these primordial particles as the universe expanded and cooled.
What existed prior to the Bang? That is a challenging question to answer. We find some answers in the most ancient of philosophies and religions, and other answers in the latest findings by modern Quantum Theory. Obviously some form of “law and order” pre-existed so that the Bang exploded according to those existing regulations. Energy of some sort likely pre-existed, because all of the created matter is composed of energy.
Curiously, it is unlikely that the Big Bang could have been an isolated event given the realities of energy and relativity, so there have been other Big Bangs, each producing other universes. This is called the “Multiverse” theory, and scientists now believe there could be an infinite number of universes. These universes may be going through an evolutionary cycle much like our own—bang, expansion, contraction, and ultimately, a return to pure energy. We see this pattern in the birth, evolution, and death of individual stars.
Fascinatingly, there is the same amount of energy in the universe today as there was when it all first began! How is that possible? Energy just keeps shifting its condition, transferring itself from one impulse to another. For example, if you throw a baseball, energy leaves your muscles and is transferred to the ball as it moves, and when it arrives at the catchers’ glove, that energy is transferred to the catcher. If you push against the ground to get some thrust behind that throw, then you’ve just shifted the Earth in its orbit; but it will rebound upward by exactly the amount needed to counter your push, giving you the thrust you sought. However, scientists have recently found that there are places in the universe where new energy appears to come from out of nowhere! These places are the breeding grounds for stars. And a counterbalancing amount of mass disappears as the new energy comes forth. Here on Earth we simply move the existing energy around; there is no new energy.
There are also varying degrees of energy. For example, wood has energy to fire up a boiler and give us heat and locomotion; charcoal has even more stored energy than wood; coal has even more energy than charcoal; and oil, well, the current world runs on oil. Natural gas has more than oil and is cleaner to burn. The key is how much hydrogen is in the fuel in relation to how much carbon—the more hydrogen, the more energy is available to be used. The evolution of civilizations has corresponded with the evolution of fuels used by their societies. We may have begun with the sugar and sweat of human muscle to build villages. Wood fires were then used to heat water, to produce heat for more and bigger homes, and even to run mighty steam engines for transportation and construction. Then coal did it even better. Of course, oil is even better than coal—producing electricity, heat, lights, and moving personal vehicles as well as powerful mass-transportation and construction vehicles. Fuels foster larger civilizations, because the energy output is increasingly more powerful, giving the society more energy with which they can do what they desire. These fuels have been stored on and in the earth over millions of years, but they have not been in use for that length of time. We know there are even better fuels coming—some have likely not even been discovered yet.
The magnitude of the universe is amazing. Daily Mail science editor Michael Hanlon wrote, “In July 2003, scientists at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Australia announced their latest estimate of the number of stars in the Universe—70 sextillion. That is 7 followed by a mind-boggling 22 zeros … The new estimate means that the number of stars in the visible Universe is larger—quite a bit larger, actually—than the total number of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth …”2 Add to this information that there are 275 million new stars being born every single day!
It is a truly unimaginably enormous universe, with light and energy throughout! And we should be prepared for new discoveries revealing that it is more than what we presently know.
The Human Body
As amazing as the universe is, the human body may be more amazing. For example, each of our eyes is composed of 130 million photoreceptors, and our bodies contain about 100 trillion cells—that’s more than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy! And our cells are constantly regenerating, so that about 50 million cells in your body will have died
