BODY & SOUL: Picture the cosmos, teeming with life

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Body & Soul is a regular column exploring the interplay between spirituality and psychology. Pythia Peay is the author of”Putting America on the Couch,”to be published by Riverhead Books in 1997.) (UNDATED) Science, for many of us, has been strictly a secular pursuit _ disciplined, rational and devoid of God, […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Body & Soul is a regular column exploring the interplay between spirituality and psychology. Pythia Peay is the author of”Putting America on the Couch,”to be published by Riverhead Books in 1997.)

(UNDATED) Science, for many of us, has been strictly a secular pursuit _ disciplined, rational and devoid of God, religious faith or spiritual content. But times have changed.


Some scientists are discovering a surprising symmetry between space-age theories and ancient mystical concepts, albeit with a slight twist.

In their view, the creation of life is not just an act unique to Earth’s history, but a continually occurring event. Space is not the vast and sterile emptiness we have sometimes imagined, but a cosmic garden teeming with constantly evolving life-forms.

Picture the universe through the eyes of physicist Fritjof Capra, whose decade-long research into biological life systems will be published this fall in”The Web of Life”(Anchor). To fully capture the billions of planets scattered throughout the universe, he says, imagine grains of sand along a beach, or water molecules in an ocean.

If life had evolved on only one planet in a million, Capra says, and if each of those life-bearing planets were represented by a rose, there would be enough flowers to carpet the surface of the Earth.

Against such a lush and life-filled backdrop, our everyday struggles seem humblingly small. Yet the revelation that humanity may be just one tiny flower in a hotbed of exotic blossoms is likely to raise a host of problems on a cosmic scale.

For though Copernicus”disabused us of the notion 500 years ago that we were the geometric center of the universe,”says former astronaut Edgar Mitchell,”we still cling to the belief that we are the biological center of the universe.” Mitchell is no stranger to the kind of shock that results from a cosmic shift in perspective. He recalls his own epiphany as he returned through space from the 1971 moon landing:”To see Earth as this tiny dot, in this average solar system way out in the hinterlands of a mundane galaxy, completely transformed my world view.” It was a turning point that led Mitchell to become consumed with life’s big questions: How did we get here? Where are we going? From his altered vantage-point, it seemed to him that”science was incomplete with regard to our cosmology,”while religion’s gods were”too small.” To help bridge the gap between science and spirituality, Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, Calif., an organization devoted to the study of consciousness. In his new book,”The Way of the Explorer,”(Putnam), he describes how for centuries, science and religion have maintained separate kingdoms. To science, consciousness was a by-product of the physical world. To religion, matter was secondary to the spirit.

But with the advent of quantum physics, there emerged theories that united, rather than divided, the two realms. Among them, was the discovery that our perceptions interact with the material world. To Mitchell and other thinkers, this indicated that consciousness was the bridge between the material and the mystical.


The mystics’ idea that all life is interconnected, was reflected in the physicists’ theory of”non-locality”: there exists an unbroken wholeness that transcends time and space. Thus like the”particle and wave”theory of quantum physics, consciousness is both here and everywhere _ or, one could also say, in Earth and in heaven.

In this new vision of reality, mind and matter are inextricably linked, each influencing the other. The universe, says Mitchell, is not empty matter, but”a self-organizing, intelligent and interactive living system”that is constantly evolving.

Capra speaks similarly of a creative”evolutionary force”inherent in all living systems. Contrary to neo-Darwinian theories of evolution that hold that natural selection emerges from random mutation, recent research reveals a highly patterned order implicit in the chemical processes out of which living cells emerge.

As these chemical compounds exist in abundance throughout the cosmos, it is likely, says Capra, that life has repeatedly emerged in other galaxies. Thus creation, he says,”is not an act that happens in the distant past of the Earth, but is pervasive and continuing throughout the universe.” He speculates further that all the different stages of evolution _ from bacterial cells to highly evolved creatures _ may currently exist on different planetary systems. However diverse these life-forms are, he says, they are united by the common thread of cognition. For though the tiniest cell may not possess abstract thinking, it still responds to stimuli.

In Capra’s view, this is the manifestation of a divine intelligence that permeates all levels of existence. Gaia, the ancient goddess of life, represents the living being that Capra believes the universe to be.

Capra’s and Mitchell’s theories may place them on the outer boundaries of both science and religion. But their vision of a cosmos that is not just the product of random processes, but a network of living systems guided by an overall intelligence, is uplifting.


For to the faithful of many religions, what they describe sounds like the hand of God at work _ both here and throughout the universe.

MJP END PEAY

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