Towards The Unified Cosmology
With that, Hawking signaled his shift from pure cosmologist investigating the laws of creation (how) to modern mystic seeking to divine it’s purpose (why). Of course, he’s not likely to find the answer through even the most powerful telescopes or computer simulations. The search for meaning is essentially a personal, spiritual quest. Ultimately, each of us must discover the purpose for existence, as we know it. The way to do this has always been something of an open secret in esoteric science.
The Mind of God
The conventional Western view of cognition has been that it is some kind of epiphenomenon of biology; it resides in the brain, evolved along with life on Earth, and the chances of finding it elsewhere are slim to none. In the new, unified cosmology, and (as the ancient Eastern sages taught) Mind/Awareness, is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent (everywhere, all-knowing, all-powerful). It always has been and always will be permeating everything, including every region of space, and every atom of your body.
This universal super-conscious awareness has been called God and many other names (all insufficient, of course). It permeates and transcends all space-time, but among its infinitely unlimited properties is the ability to “condense” around planets like ours, in the form of biological life, and even individual beings. The ultimate slight-of-hand is having those individuals forget they are cosmic consciousness incarnated, so that they (we) could view creation from an infinite number of finite viewpoints, and rediscover our universality/divinity over time.
The Non-Dual One
The late Zen philosopher Allan Watts used to say, we are not born into the universe, but out of it, in the same way that an apple tree produces fruit. We are the both the manifestation and source of Life. If the universe is whole, by definition, you are none other than its creator, albeit most likely in cleverly convinced denial. The answer to the ageless, burning question, why, just may be, for the thrill of it!
Far from being just teeny incidental, hapless organisms stuck to a lonely little planet orbiting an anonymous star in the outer rim of an average galaxy floating among billions, we are also creative expressions of Universal Life Itself, growing our bodies and evolving our world in every moment of existence. The very reason each one of us has the uncanny feeling that we’re at the center of it all, is because we all are! There is no center; which is precisely the radical conclusion reached by Einstein (when he said there is no privileged frame-of-reference in physics), and confirmed by the father of modern cosmology, Edwin Hubble, upon discovering that all galaxies are speeding away from each other.
Through the marvelous orbiting observatory named after Hubble, we now know that habitable planets like ours probably abound, the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and massive black holes reside at the center of most galaxies. The center of a black hole, in turn – called a singularity – is the absolute densest concentration of space-time, and a possible door to other dimensions or even other universes! The very start of our own was from just such a singularity..
