INTRODUCTION:
Presented in the pages under this title you will find my always-evolving best current working version of our collective Origin Story—how we came to be, the context in which we find ourselves, what it means, and what holds it all together. But it doesn’t stop there. It is a complete story, making a projection of how humans and life might evolve far into the future—we’re talking about trillions of years here, at least. Our sun won’t be around. Our universe won’t even be around by then. But we will—a ‘collective we’ in the form of living structures that … wait … no spoilers here!
Always this Song of Everything strives to be a balanced mix of three elements of a dynamic trinity of our ‘way of understanding’ the world:
1.) Science: the scientist’s gleaned knowledge—repeatable, as objective as possible, meaning that it is supposed to be independent of the biases of any individual,
2.) Sense: the intuitive stories our physical senses tell us, generally filtered through our life experience and cultural ‘common sense.’ This is the kind of story that an average person who could be your neighbor might tell, and
3.) Spirit: a far-reaching vision …
Wait ... What?
Be patient. Let me double-down on this and explain.
In modern parlance, it’s called a hypothesis, which distinguishes it from the mysticism associated with, say, the visions that are thickly strewn throughout the Judeo-Christian Bible and most other religious faiths going back to Shamanic traditions.
In today’s world, a good ‘vision’ uses Imagination and Creativity in conjunction with the best known ‘facts’ about a particular matter to build a structure (a mental model) that describes some extension of the facts that is not yet known or recognized. Einstein could be said to have had such vision—viewing the world in a new way that led to his theories of Relativity—Special Relativity in 1905, then General Relativity ten years later.
In ancient times such people were deemed ‘Prophets;’ and the ones that got it right (or the ones that had good PR—Public Relations) are the ones that are remembered.
The old way of talking about this process of developing hypotheses, which are truly nothing but ‘visions,’ has value.
The stories/theories/hypotheses – the ‘Songs’ that I present in this series of posts present ideas beyond the limits of current knowledge, both on the smallest and largest spatial scales and on the distant past and distant future time scales. It’s really an attempt to cover Everything.
That is the Spirit part of this ‘trinity,’ and it is, of course personal to the teller. That’s the part that that makes any story robust and complete—the telling, with a speaker and an audience—the part that gives life to words and information—puts it on a living substrate!
Think of a closed book sitting on a dusty shelf high in the stacks of some forgotten library. What does that book say? Nothing … until somebody takes it off the shelf, dusts it off, and reads it. Suddenly, an inert collection of atoms organized in the form of symbols becomes a ‘vision,’ simply because of a choice to ‘observe’ the atoms made by a person who has had some training in the interpretation of those symbols. Sounds a lot like magic. Or quantum mechanics.
Taking the magic and turning it inside out: that ‘training in the interpretation of those symbols’ exists in another library—the observer’s mind—and in this story I aim to use the term ‘mind’ in the broadest sense. Every mind is, itself, like that dusty library full of stacks and stacks of closed books.
Open your books, people! Share them! As the prophet Mohammed was told (three times) by the Archangel Gabriel in his seminal vision in the cave of Hira in 610AD:
“Read!” “Recite!” “Proclaim!”
The Malian scholar, writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900-1991) tells us:
“In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns, an entire library disappears, without the need for the flames to destroy the paper.”
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| Amadou Hampâté Bâ, staunch advocate of the oral tradition, member of UNESCO’s executive Council, 1962-1970. |
Song 1:
Let it begin with a trilogy of notable quotes.
1.) Science: Physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll coined the term Poetic Naturalism about fifteen years ago. It was a brilliant creation. It invites all of us—the average Jane, John, or Jo—to participate in the big-picture dialogue about the meaning of existence:
“I like to talk about a particular approach to Naturalism, which can be thought of as Poetic. By that I mean to emphasize that, while there is only one world, there are many ways of talking about the world. ‘Ways of talking’ shouldn't be underestimated; they can otherwise be labeled ‘theories’ or ‘models’ or ‘vocabularies’ or ‘stories,’ and if a particular way of talking turns out to be sufficiently accurate and useful, the elements in its corresponding vocabulary deserve to be called real.”
Yet, it seems to me that Sean maintains a radically biased perception of the natural world. He confidently points to the ‘unbroken patterns’ in nature that have allowed physicists to make astounding progress over the last 400 years or so, particularly in the last century; and he seems to globalize that view, as if it could (even should?) apply to Everything.
Fine. That’s his story, and he’s certainly entitled to it.
2.) Sense: Long before Sean Carroll, in 1887, Professor Thomas H. Huxley (grandfather of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley) chose to offer a much more “Big-Picture” story that I find exquisitely ‘accurate and useful’:
“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, …”
Think of the space scales of things we know about. There’s a biggest (the whole observable universe) and there is a smallest (individual particles such as the electron, the quark, and the photon). The range of scales between them covers everything we can talk about—Huxley’s Islet. Yet beyond those limits, in both directions, the scales are illimitable, inexhaustible, and utterly inexplicable. That’s Huxley’s great mysterious ocean—roiling, chaotic, feral.
3.) Spirit: Here’s where Martial Artist, poet and actor Bruce Lee comes to our aid. In about 1970 he said:
“If you want to learn to swim, jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.”
He also said
“Be the water, my friend”
and this adds profound depth to his story. It is not enough to leave the comfortable Islet and jump into the water. To truly experience the full truth of the unknown, we must strive to become it.
One may begin with pure mysticism, seeking some sort of paranormal experience. Poetic Naturalism permits this, and I believe it is vital. But it is also essential to regain the focus on Naturalism at the end of the day.
This is the art of returning to the realm of the “accurate and useful” (i.e., to Huxley’s dry land) carrying the newly gleaned understanding with you—this is the art that I have been striving to master for 77 years. This is the product that I hope to offer in this series of posts.
Song 2:
To that end: here is a prime example of, or elaboration on, the idea of ‘Learning to Swim the illimitable ocean of inexplicability.’
You will hear authors, when asked where their novel plots come from, explain that the stories sometimes seem to “write themselves.” The flow almost feels organic, as if emerging from some external source. This, in my view, is a completely subjective claim—it’s not that the ideas are coming from some greater ‘cosmic consciousness’ or something metaphysical. It’s more likely that our brain’s amazingly sophisticated mental “Chat GPT” is just working on auto-pilot—roughly working the way Large Language Models work but drawing not just on not just simple prompts and applying the most likely next words, but by sub-consciously adapting experiences and ideas stored in our memories to the current story being told. I’ve had that reaction to my own writing, and I think every one of us, whether we are writing or just recounting an anecdote orally to a friend, have this built-in ability. Not everything has to pass through the processing center we call ‘consciousness’ before it spills out into words.
(I believe this is how the language, quoted in the next section, from three ancient faith traditions came about.)
In my case, the focus has been on improving upon all the origin stories via my own world-building project—putting my own twist on things where I think there’s a ‘better way,’ trying to blend and merge them into a single coherent tale (or song).
I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager. It has always been more than a ‘Mythopoeia’ such as fantasy and science fiction writers develop for their novels. I’ve always strived to keep it consistent with everything I have learned about the way the real-world functions. Yet I also strive to take the story far beyond the bounds of other stories, building projections far into the future and reflecting the deep unobserved past—both time and space scales that extend beyond what we have observed. Loosely described, it is a balanced model of our real world that takes the form of another trinity:
1.) The found path: a big-picture model of the multiverse and ‘beyond,’ strongly rooted in science—both in what has been established as ‘fact,’ but also considering diverse and subtle clues based on careful observation of the assumptions and simplifications and presently unsolved problems that science has encountered, weaving the known and unknown together using big-picture “unbounded-by-any-box” thinking,
2.) The way forward: Speculating about where the path could lead using best-guess extrapolations of modern theory
3.) The path behind: Speculating about where the path came from, beyond memory and record. Here again, we invoke the basic trinity:
A.) Science: The deep roots of physics, beyond what has thus far been observed: i.) Quantum Mechanics, ii.) General Relativity, and iii.) The unappreciated or underappreciated importance of the unknown and the unknowable. Neither quantum mechanics nor general relativity are described by equations that can be solved, except for highly simplified situations. Most importantly, science still provides no consensus on how quantum fields translate into the picture of the world that our senses detect …
B.) Sense—the deep roots of chemistry and biology, which contains its own trilogy: i.) The origin of the natural elements, ii.) The origin of interaction of life and its ongoing interactions with the inorganic environment, iii) The myriad things that we, as a species, know and feel in our heart of hearts, as coded in the DNA of every cell in our being.
C.) Spirit: The deep roots of thought. This includes its own trilogy: i.) The Science of thought: Philosophy and logic as practiced from antiquity right up to the present. ii.) The Senses that interrogate the abstract realm—mathematics! iii.) Spirit inspired thought: Traditional models of our world that very often contain deep insights into reality, yet come to us couched in supernatural language. A large part of this rich resource is found in our religious traditions.
All three of these trinities of foundational paths are going to get plenty of attention here. But, for reasons that will quickly become clear, we’ll begin at the very end: with item 3.) C.) iii.) (Spirit-Spirit-Spirit) and introduce yet another trinity: three of the most ancient texts: Hindu, Taoist, and Judeo-Christian …
Song 3:
In ancient times it was the role of religion to sort and explain the mysteries that confronted us. So many things in our daily lives seemed to be driven by supernatural forces—the rising and setting of the sun, the wind and rain, illnesses and suffering.
Science did not yet exist, with its rigorous, organized approach to understanding cause and effect. In human pre-history our tribes and communities relied instead on Sages, Shamans, and Oral Traditions. The first efforts to organize and codify the mysteries of our origin and place in the world were naturally Spiritual in their approach. Here are three of the best early efforts:
First, from the Rig Veda, 10:129, from about 1000 BCE, here is the Nāsadīya Sūkta—the Hymn of the ‘Not Non-Existent,’ more loosely translated in English as the Hymn of Creation:
“There was neither non-existence nor existence then;
Neither the realm of space, nor the sky which is beyond;
What stirred? Where? In whose protection?There was neither death nor immortality then;
No distinguishing sign of night nor of day;
“The One” breathed, windless, by its own impulse;
Other than that, there was nothing.Darkness there was at first, but it was hidden by darkness;
Without distinctive marks, this all was water;
That which, becoming, was covered by the void;
“The One,” by some force of heat, came into being;Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?
The Gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence “The One” has arisen?Whether the will of God created it, or whether S/He was mute;
Perhaps it formed itself, perhaps it did not;
The Supreme Brahman of the world—all pervasive and all knowing—that indeed knows.
. . .
Or if not, no one knows.
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| A personification of Brahman, which is actually not a being, let alone a person, with the Om symbol in upper left. That symbol is representative of the Brahman concept, which is the diverse and ancient Hindu faith’s manifestation of ‘God.’ Brahman is described as the ultimate, unchanging, all-pervasive cosmic principle—the source and essence of all existence— formless, infinite, and beyond human comprehension; and yet it is the goal of spiritual seekers to achieve unity between their individual soul (Atman) and the universal spirit or absolute truth that is Brahman. |
The second quote is from the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 25, by Lao Tzu, ca. 600BCE.
“Before the universe came to be,
There was something formless
yet mysteriously complete—
Silent, without substance,
Depending on nothing, unchanging
Yet ever-present, ever in motion, unfailing,
And capable of being the mother of universes.
“Its true name is not knowable.
‘The Tao’ is the name that we give it;
And we can describe it as 大(ta)
which means ‘Great,’
But it also means ‘far-reaching;’
And having gone far, it returns.
…
Thus the way of the Tao follows what is natural.”
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| Lao Tzu riding his ox
through the Han Valley Pass. The legend tells that he was a curator of the imperial archives for the Zhou Dynasty and a contemporary of Confucius. Over the years of his service, he grew increasingly weary of the political corruption and declining morality of the time. One day he resolved to leave it all behind. He climbed on his ox (or water buffalo) and left civilization behind, heading west. When he reached the Han-ku Pass, he met a Gatekeeper named Yin Xi, who recognized him and begged him to write down his teachings so that they would not be lost. This, he agreed to do, and that is the origin of famous Tao-Te Ching. Lao Tzu then continued on west and disappeared from history, never to be seen again. |
Lastly, we have the quick and simple version from the Judeo-Christian Bible—the Book of Genesis, chapter 1, verses 1 and 2, from about 500 BCE:
“In the beginning … the universe was without form, and void: darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit (also translated Wind) of God was moving over the face of the waters.”
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| The Six Days of Creation by Hildegard of Bingen, 1152 CE. |
With their very common themes and enduring philosophical stance, these three most ancient wisdom traditions are as good a place as any to start prying open that “mysterious gateway into the streaming wonder of existence,” as it is called in the Tao Te Ching (from Chapter 1).
I have styled this gateway in three ways (of course).
First, I simply call it “Big P Paradox” and there is a long post on this site covering that angle in great depth.
In the second rendering, I’ve called it the “Portal to the 0th dimension”—a gateway that requires no mystical key or supernatural conjuring to enter. It is accessible from Everywhere and Anywhere at any Time.
And so, lastly, I style it the “Great Empty Everything”—a lawless virtual realm that hovers on the very edge of being. It is somehow neither there nor not there, yet it is naturally capable of engendering the actualization of the stuff all around us. An initial actualization is optional, since no law demands it, yet in any ‘Everything,’ stuff naturally forms simply because no law exists to prevent it. And some of it finds ways to persist. Voila! The pathway is revealed.
You are cordially invited to walk with me! Let’s Go!
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| My own work, etched in sandstone: Wyoming, USA, 11 July 1971 |
Song 4:
Out of the Great Empty Everything, a seed formed, a current stirred, the raw fibers of being twisted together into the first coherent thread. Gathering, gathering, growing, growing, blending and weaving—hard at work for far longer than we know—the tiny seed has grown to a sturdy oak; the currents have merged into a mighty river; a vast and elaborate tapestry has been woven.
Here is the core of our story. The oak sheds its leaves in due season, and the unneeded branches fall away. A multitude of backwater eddies and side-currents have been left behind and fallen still, until now a mighty central current carries us swift and sure. All the kinks and knots have been shaken out of the weave-work.
So much has been prepared for our arrival, you and me! As a result: We do not need to sweat the small stuff hidden beneath. We are free to tend to our affairs.
170 years ago, the American poet Walt Whitman, in his life-work epic poem ‘Song of Myself’ put it wonderfully:
“We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.
…
“Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
…
“Long was I hugged close—long and long.
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me.
“Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid; nothing could overlay it.”
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| Walt Whitman, age 68, George Collins Cox photo from 1887. |
Song 5:
Look up! Nine Thousand Stars we can see across the nighttime heavens using the eyes that nature gave us. The faint dust of the Milky Way hints at millions more. Three other Galaxies also show themselves to the naked eye—great giant Andromeda, twice our size, with a trillion stars, and two little cousins of our galaxy—the star-clusters called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
These days, with science’s best glasses on, we know of 100 to 400 billion stars in our home galaxy, and we can recognize at least 2 trillion, perhaps as many as 20 trillion other galaxies in the great beyond.
Looking yet deeper into the far reaches of the cosmos, putting on our microwave-sensitive glasses, we see the primordial flood of light from the great cataclysm that begat the stars and galaxies—the Cosmic Microwave Background (the CMB). Here is literally the ‘smoking gun’ that explains much about how we came to be; and it was not discovered until I was in the tenth grade (in 1964)!
The CMB is a window into deep time. When our sun gathered out of a swirl of dust and fired up its thermonuclear furnace, when our planet Earth was just settling into its orbit, the light of the CMB had already been traversing the universe for ten billion years. Its glow is now so distended and time-shifted that if a copy of me had been born out there at that cosmic frontier 85,000 years ago during the time of the earliest migration of homo sapiens out of Africa, the real me here on Earth would just now be seeing that alter-ego reaching the real me’s present age (77 as of this writing)!
Imagine that this doppelganger of me has just sat down with his friend Zaphod Beeblebrox for a relaxed lunch at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
(This is a reference to the 1980 Douglas Adams novel, where Adams describes the universe’s last moments as a hot dense ‘Big Crunch’ that is a time-reversed Big Bang. Of course, the Restaurant is protected from the final catastrophe by “Temporal relastatics” and a “Time Turbine.” A pretty nice “physics techno-babble” passage describes it all in the first paragraph of Chapter 20. Adams gets high marks here for his lucid penetration of the mysterious frontier at the boundary between existence and non-existence. Maybe he thought it was just employing paradox for its humorous effect, but that’s actually the point. It is not very hard for a humorist to unveil fresh truths that the stone-faced “experts” on a subject could/would never achieve).
But back to the story. Don’t wait up to see what I order for dessert. It won’t happen for another ten years! It’s not that the service is particularly slow. It’s something called ‘time dilation’. What is happening out there on the frontier reveals itself to us in extreme slow-motion.
And worse, what is happening to the real me here on Earth today will never be seen by that dubious alter-ego out there at the frontier. Not even close. All the news from Earth just sort of stalls out before it gets there because of the universe’s relentless expansion. It is just one of the many weird stories that science tells us about the great cosmic dance.
And that, finally, is the point I’m trying to get to here:
How does any of this cosmic dance, even the original 9000 stars that you and I can see on a clear night, affect how any of us go about our daily lives?
Yes, a small minority of people make their living studying these far-away wonders, and their earnings trickle into the general economy. But how many pennies do we gain? No, if not for some of the great epic imaginary stories in our heads—from Olaf Stapeldon’s visionary novels First and Last Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) through Douglas Adam’s Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, to Hollywood’s CGI-infused science fiction sagas from Star Wars to Avatar—how else does such knowledge actually affect us? There is, perhaps, another rule here: The big stuff is for our “Spirit-lives” (our “muses”—our dreams and imagination) and gains its significance entirely from the unique perspective of our individual minds.
Song 6:
What, then, of the stuff in between? How cozy! How comfortable! Not by accident do we find ourselves secure beneath a warm blanket of restless atmosphere, bathed by a balance of incoming sunlight and Earth’s radiation escaping in a controlled stream outward into the bitter chasm of empty space. Beneath our feet, great forces gently stir the scalding cauldron of Earth’s fire, keeping the crust overturning. The restless ocean floor is everywhere less than 300 million years old, and averages just 64 million years old—barely 1.5% of the age of our planet. The ocean above stirs and churns, maintaining a balance of heat between equator and poles. This great trinity of dynamic states—solid, liquid, gas—assure the equanimity and balance of the essential elements in ways that science has barely begun to understand. How special is our situation? All that can be said is that we have yet to find another example in all the vast expanse of the cosmos. Is this not worthy of a hymn of profoundest joy and wonderment!?!
Song 7:
We have had a quick look at the size scales and settled into our cozy center. Now let us begin the journey through time. We start by revisiting the Great Empty Everything where time was not even a thing!
I’ll begin by quoting myself from my 2023 Appalachian Trail hike memoir (I know, shameless plug):
[Referring to the Appalachian Mountain chain]: “It all began 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Well, actually everything we know began 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Why the Big Bang produced a blob of hot quarks and gluons, nobody knows. It could have just as easily produced a horde of pink Easter Bunnies streaming out of a rabbit hole, but it didn’t. Scientists can’t explain it.
“One proposed explanation is that the physics of our universe came from a parent universe. Alan Guth, MIT professor and cosmologist, first showed back in the 1990’s that it is possible to create a child universe ‘in a test tube.’ The baby universe would inherit the properties of its parent universe, subject to quantum mutations, but would disappear from the parent universe and be entirely separate and autonomous once formed. Such an ‘evolution of universes’ would neatly explain why our universe is so specialized and conducive to life. Yes, boys and girls, deep down in the rabbit hole, there is a Mama Easter Bunny.”
Here in our Song of Everything we are going to elaborate on the Mama and her babies in much more detail and delve far more deeply, exploring that “huge first Nothing” and where the Mama came from. Metaphorically, we will ask (adding new lines to the 1961 Barry Mann doo-wop rock and roll classic):
Who put the Bop in the Bop-she-Bop-she-Bop?
Who put the Ram in the Ramma-lamma-Ding-Dong?
Who popped the cork to the World’s Champagne, and …
Who put the Bang in its Big, Bad BANG?
To be continued in Part 2 and beyond.
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