The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  One must admit that there remain deep pockets of prejudice, even occasionally of deadly discord, in places like northern Ireland, the Near East and southern Africa, not to mention communist areas, but by and large the ups and downs of spiritual evolution average into a long-range ascent. I know that many people assume the sixty million people slaughtered in the two world wars and sixty-five lesser conflicts of the first half of this century prove spiritual deterioration on a vast scale, but I submit that, although those wars were statistically disastrous, in long-range planetary perspective they may well have been vital sparks in the germinal explosion that is progressively arousing mankind to spiritual maturity. Without them, we might not know either the computer age or the space age, to say nothing of the atomic age, nor enjoy the bounty of relative peace and understanding, especially in Europe and the Americas, that has so far prevailed through the second half of the century, in which war casualties worldwide are less than 3 percent of what they were before 1945 among the then much smaller population.

  If you hold a contrary opinion, you may also argue that the modern "increase" in crime is a mark of moral regression, but shouldn't you judge the matter in the perspective of the changing definition of crime and its incidence relative to the growing opportunity for it, the rising wealth, increasing population, easier communication, spreading permissiveness, ubiquitous power and freer, more self-serving markets?

  And even though our current germinal times have been punctuated by all sorts of gruesome and trying problems, it is obvious that Earth's general level of education and awareness is rising rapidly (as we have seen), largely because of the greatly increased outpouring of information through books, magazines, TV, universities, travel and communication of every kind. And as people have become aware of people and their potentialities on a world scale, inevitably a feeling of global oneness has grown. It involves the conscious mind and, even more importantly I think, the spirit. One gets clues too in the rising rate of generosity by which people extend sympathy and help to others in need - even on the opposite side of the planet. Government figures indicate that although the average American evades about 3 percent of his taxes, he actually gives more than twice that much to charity, the amount of which totals more than ten times his donations of a generation ago.

  Summing up spiritual evolution to date, may I gently philosophize that if the carefree young woo or wine too much, or otherwise offend nature, it is still nature they must learn from. And whatever the "mistakes" of life at any level, evolution is still evolving, still varying and selecting for future generations, testing species, winnowing souls ... And, so far as I know, nothing that can happen is inconsistent with the pervasive and germinal forces Boris Pasternak must have sensed when he wrote to an editor in Uruguay: "I have the feeling that an epoch with fundamentally new goals, both of the heart and human dignity - a silent epoch that will never be proclaimed in a loud voice - has come to birth and is growing day by day all unnoticed around us."

  15. TRANSCENDENCE OF ORGANISM MAN INTO SUPERORGANISM MANKIND

  The consciousness of mankind is now rapidly unfurling a new dimension as Earth becomes aware of herself for the first time. Our home planet, in other words, is becoming self-conscious. Or, to put it another way, the organism man is evolving into the superorganism mankind. And this transition can be usefully compared, I think, to a fish in a school or a bird in a flock engaged in mass maneuvering. For such a fish or bird inevitably loses his individuality and independence and, to some degree, becomes a "cell" in a greater "body." He must also, in effect, submerge his "self" beyond the equivalent of an ant or bee in order to resurface collectively as an anthill or a beehive. And this means, in the case of man, that he not only transcends individually, each in his own mind and soul, from finitude toward Infinitude, as we have seen, but he also transcends collectively from men and women to mankind, while Earth herself (whose consciousness is primarily the mind of man) must ultimately transcend (beyond space-time-self) into what may be described as the divine essence of the universe.

  All in all, transcendence could hardly be called an obvious phenomenon, though most of us can sense the superiority of the hive over the bee. And the triple aspects of transcendence outlined above and described in Chapter 19 remain at best controversial. Yet the more I see and study the world, the more I am convinced it must be transcending. In fact transcendence, particularly germination, is the great happening of Earth in this "time of the end." For we are rapidly reaching the critical mass of spirit and awareness that makes "cosmic consciousness' possible.

  I have borrowed the phrase "cosmic consciousness" from Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D., who wrote a classic book under that title at the turn of the century, in which he recounted many instances of spiritual "illumination" experienced by people ranging from Buddha and his Nirvana to Walt Whitman and his "gleam divine." Typical of them was the experience of "C.M.C.," a woman whose sufferings reached a crisis in 1893. In her own words: "At last subdued, with a curious growing strength in my weakness, I let go of myself! ... losing my identity with a sweet terror ... Now came a period of rapture so intense that the universe stood still ... In that same wonderful moment of what might be called supernal bliss came illumination ... I became aware that the flowers were alive and conscious ... I saw with intense inward vision the atoms ... rearranging themselves ... What joy when I saw there was no break in the chain ... worlds, systems, all blended in one harmonious whole ... The great truth that life is but a passing phase in the soul's progression through spiritual evolution..."

  Bucke estimated that these cases of "cosmic consciousness" have been accelerating in frequency in recent centuries, being about five times commoner in 1900 than in the Middle Ages. Although research in this field is imprecise, there are indications that the frequency rate is accelerating even faster in the twentieth century and that, as Bucke surmised, a new spiritual race "is in act of being born" within the human species "and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth."

  How this fits in with earthly germination is not easy to know, because much of what is going on upon our planet is only intuitively observable. It isn't just a matter of population. It isn't merely speed of travel or communication. Neither is it only education, knowledge, understanding or liberation - but more a transcendent compend of all of these. And it comes at a time that must appear dreamlike to many earthlings as wonderful things keep happening: acorns turning into oaks, sperms and ova into people, molecules into transistors, swamps into airports, jungles into metropolises. And more and more clearly we see coming: exotic collisions in deep space involving fundamentally unknown laws of nature and kinds of matter or antimatter never seen or theorized on Earth, international conventions attended not by traveling to them but entirely by multicommunication systems between people at home in all parts of Earth using such advanced holographic and TV equipment, that they can forget they are not in the same room, and the miracle of genes being synthesized in a laboratory so perfectly they actually grow into forms of life not previously conceivable, possibly including (as surmised by French biologist Jean Rostand) an approved, standard eugenic DNA manufactured to implant "the most desirable physical and intellectual characteristics" into human embryos, something that would change all resulting children from being the offspring of a particular couple to being the offspring of mankind.

  The fantastic potentialities of space technology have long been described by science fiction writers and now by such physicist engineers as Gerard K. O'Neill of Princeton, who has designed gigantic cylindrical "pieces of earth" capable of sustaining colonies of thousands (eventually millions) of people, using cheap, plentiful, nightless solar power. And, it occurs to me, there also could be assembled a saturnian superstructure or ring around the earth, eventually extending outward from the equator for some 50,000 miles. This would best be begun at the altitude of about 23,000 miles, where "fixed" satellites already orbit the planet at the exact speed of her rotation in zero gravity. Thus a planate gossa
merlike netting could be formed of relatively fine cables floating under minimal tension and to which bubble-shaped living and working capsules could be attached or any other desired buildings. Of course the cables would have to be stronger for the parts of the structure closer to Earth, where normal inward gravity would prevail, and also for everything beyond 23,000 miles, where gradual transition to outward gravity or centrifugal force could be felt and might serve (if permissible) as a natural route of excretion. But the whole thing could eventually be made strong enough, and perhaps extensive enough in the north-south dimension, to greatly expand the living volume of Earth, develop her resources, control her weather (using filtering screens to regulate sunlight, meteorites, cosmic rays, etc.) and facilitate her communication and traffic with other worlds.

  More ambitious, in the sense of looking ahead not just thousands but actually millions of years, is the elaborate proposal of another Princeton physicist, Freeman Dyson, of the famous Institute for Advanced Study and former chairman of the Federation of American Scientists, who believes that an advanced planetary race like man must, in time, redesign and rearrange his entire solar system, not only commandeering its moons and asteroids and reorbiting or towing them about with powerful "space tugs," but even dismantling the giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn and steering asteroid-sized chunks of them into orbits nearer the sun where they will soon warm up and be made to fall together into moonish spheres that can be tailored into hospitable annexes for expanding man, eventually forming a kind of doughnut belt of small, inhabited "planets," using appropriate asteroids as mines for needed minerals, fertilizing some as nurseries or laboratories, rigging others for solar energy.

  Still more ambitious and remote, if you can abide it, is the concept of domesticating whole galaxies of stars to serve their present civilizations of intelligent life, doing things like triggering supernova explosions or even quasars with celestial laser beams to reap the heavy elements they "sprout," perhaps ultimately directing the 'fruit" to stellar "barns" for storage.

  As for the establishment of federal order back on Earth, democracy will likely have to compromise with more efficient forms of leadership for, as one governmental critic was heard to ask, "Why should ten fools outrank nine sensible men?" Another complained that democracy lacks vision because the farthest-seeing individuals are always outvoted and by the time the majority learns the score and votes for it, it is too obvious to require vision. But it was historian Arnold Toynbee who said a few years before he died that humanity's only remaining choice is between a world federation with an Alexander at the helm and annihilation.

  There are even voices behind the Iron Curtain saying something similar: Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, Peace Nobelist, member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and leading research physicist, in 1968 published an extraordinary paper predicting a world government by the year 2000. His central argument was that "both capitalism and socialism are capable of long-term development, borrowing positive elements from each other, and, since the capitalists are already using the principles of socialism with real advancement for the working people, the two systems will be steadily drawing closer to each other in essential aspects. More important ... on any other course except progressive collaboration between the superpowers, annihilation awaits mankind!"

  A key to understanding such global transcendence is the realization that civilizations do not just circle round and round in one place, forever repeating the same experiences, reliving the same old mistakes. Instead their orbits know a component of obliquity, so each cycle traces a different path, veering slightly sideways into a spiral, cutting new ground, making new mistakes, learning new things as, by natural law, they spiral, spiral - and the prophets of science and religion fulfill each other - and we learn to consume our own smoke, to think mankind.

  What I am saying is that, in its deepest essence, the world is a soul school - and is bound to be recognized as such more indubitably with each passing decade, each unfolding century. To me at least, Earth is a profoundly mysterious and bountiful place, a place that is, like the Universe itself, unfathomable in its glory - containing more food and drink than can be consumed by the cherished, more lovable people than any man or woman may love, more beautiful music than any audience will hear, more good books than any reader can read and more wisdom than all mortal beings anywhere may ever totally comprehend.

  In this age of Psyche's unbinding, it is more and more appropriate to ask whether it is we who are dreaming the world? Or the world that is dreaming us? Or does it really make a difference which pole we choose? Either way, the dream is a "consciousness" that somehow gets smuggled into finity on Earth, presumably to help prepare our minds or souls for whatever degree of Infinity lies beyond. It also adds dimension to all being, both individual and collective, not least by raising critical questions. Is the dream's imagery in any sense a scaffolding for shaping the soul toward the unimaginable in the way a gantry guides a rocket? Does anyone really know who looks at whom in the mirror of spiritual mystery? Who actually is the Dreamer dreaming unknown worlds that spin out their golden stories from afar? Who sees the track of the world's mind, or the moiling wake of the Universe's flowing spirit?

  Even as my own musings are constantly interwoven with those of the more influential thinkers and writers whose books I read, who can know what reflections in other minds my contributions may provoke in turn or the lengths to which any new ripples from anywhere may extend down the increasingly turbulent river of human or inhuman thinking? And why need one expect that all this will remain even within the confines (if there are any) of human knowledge - for, as the past of consciousness may well reach beyond the antiquity of lungfish and trilobites and intergalactic spores, so must its future encompass ages in Olympian continuums we have not yet, and may never, learn to imagine.

  If such appraisal seems rhapsodical to an extreme in the face of Earth's approaching ordeal of overpopulation and reorganization, just consider, if you will, that man has mounted a bigger, wilder steed than he yet knows how to ride. But that his spirit of adventure, his eagerness to risk his neck if not his soul, may be exactly what it takes to tame not only the mount but also, in time, even the unruly rider.

  Chapter 23

  The Seventh and Ultimate Mystery: Divinity

  * * *

  AS I PEER DARKLY outward and inward from this mortal tapestry of life, it comes to me more and more that the most fundamental facts of existence are the ones I am least sure of. Indeed about all I know is that we seem to be surrounded and imbued by mysteries and immensities. And, beyond them, more mysteries. But what whole are we part of - if that is a reasonable question - I know not. Nor to Whom, if anyone or anything, we belong? Nor even Who, if not What, runs the universe? And, in the name of sanity, I don't see how we can ever find out.

  Imagine, if you were a red blood corpuscle and flowing through human veins and arteries, what an exciting life you might lead: now squeezing your disk-shaped body through narrow capillaries, now grabbing oxygen molecules from lung tubes to deliver them to tissues all over, now tumbling through the wildly flapping valves of the heart. Yet how would you, or could you, possibly even begin to know what you were inside of: the organism you were helping to operate, the thoughts of the brain you nourished, the dreams of the soul you sustained?

  To put it in scriptural terms as in the Book of Job, if we were not around when the foundations of creation were made, how could we possibly know "Who laid the cornerstone thereof, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Surely the light that spans the universe as easily as it spans the atom was not kindled at a human forge. But whence came it? And what of the nearer heavens, the wind and the clouds? "Hath the rain a father? Or Who hath begotten the drops of dew?"

  Is there a plan behind the daisy, the hummingbird, the whale, the world? Who conceived the eye back in the primeval darkness of early evolution? Who designed the fish's air bladder in the ancient deep, as if foreseeing its future
as a breathing lung upon the dry land? And out of what beginning evolved the mind?

  All these questions of course pertain to the most profound mystery the human mind is capable of contemplating, the mystery of why we are here and just what the world is about. Despite all its wondrous discoveries, I haven't heard that science has yet found a complete answer to the Voice out of the Whirlwind Which asked Job, "Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds ... or Who hath given understanding to the heart?"

  Could the earth really be drifting along without pilot, as some say, steering herself automatically, running her own affairs at random? Could the Universe, just conceivably, have created Itself?

  THIS NONRANDOM UNIVERSE

  I am told by mathematicians that the randomness of large, complex numbers, generally speaking, is not provable. Therefore, any process involving as many billions of creatures for as many billions of years as is the case in earthly evolution is liable to be influenced by something besides blind chance. Of course we have all heard the old suggestion (clearly lay in origin) that if enough billions of chimpanzees were somehow set to typing manuscripts for enough billions of years chance alone would ultimately enable them to write all the great works of literature. But it is easy to show the absurdity of the notion, for, if there are 50 possible letters, numbers or punctuation marks that might be put in any of the 65 spaces in the average line of the average book, a chimp would have one chance in 50 of getting the first one right. Then, for each of the 50 possible symbols, there would be 50 different possibilities for the second space, giving him one chance in 50 times 50 or 502 of getting both spaces right. Thus his chance of getting all of the first three spaces right would be one in 503 and of getting all 65 spaces right: one in 5065.