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| … Everyone wants this story told; and everyone has their version. This is the “Cover” for our break-out, cross-genre, multi-media interdisciplinary “book.” It’s meant to be far more than just a book, though. The full presentation is ideally a dynamic, evolving thing, prepared afresh with each telling, presented live and in person by one or more well-seasoned ‘wise ones’—Shaman-sages in an updated modernization of the ancient story-telling tradition that long preceded human written language. The content of our Song of Everything defies categorization into any specific genre, though the greater part of it contains three basic elements. It is part instructional (non-fiction), part spiritual guide, and part personal narrative. The non-fiction element encompasses all that today’s Science has discovered (updated as new discoveries are made), while also exploring deep into the often-neglected and unrecognized clues and hints that the frontiers of current knowledge are pointing to. Secondly, the Inspirational part taps into the deep wisdom of ancient faith traditions where they still resonate with the truths that the universe is revealing. And lastly the story is partly Aspirational—the speculative expression of one inquisitive mind (your host and author here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters)—not quite fiction, but, rather, following the author’s keen sense of direction as he pursues the available clues down a path toward a broad, coherent, understanding of the Biggest Picture of what our world is all about. As said, this is a story that is best told in the 80-thousand year+ tradition of oral and visual ‘enactment’ around the hunter-gatherer’s tribal campfire. The participants bring the story to life using language, song, dance, even gymnastics. They’re dressed in elaborate and colorful costumes (with special emphasis on exotic masks). They use props like flaming batons or juggling; and they invite the audience to actively participate. In today’s world there can be video clips and immersive CGI animation. Virtual reality, however, is NOT the aim. This is AI's fail-zone. This is *real* reality—meant to be an intense, live-in-the-moment, fully interactive physical experience. Because always, built into the story’s core, is living fire—a riveting personal emotional intensity meant to inspire awe, wonder, raw excitement, sometimes even fear, but with an exquisitely controlled purpose—to engage the audience, capture their imagination, and take them on a fantastical journey into the depths of their own souls. Here is a form of unceasingly restless, dynamic narrative that evokes the very hearth-fire itself with its vaulting flames, its dangerous crackling chaos, its deep burning core, yet always carefully contained within its ring of stones. |
Here begins a fire that cannot be quenched. It is the burning story of the all-pervasive experience we call “life.”
How can a raging fire be captured in words on a page? Not well. What we present here is merely a basic sketch—just a skeletal outline—far from complete fulfillment of the fantastical experience that the caption under the opening image suggests.
Yet even in such a simple static text form, this story is literally “to die for”—it is the essential greatest blockbuster of all time!
How could it not be? The subject matter is the stuff of humanity’s profoundest mysteries—the stuff that keeps more people awake at night than anything else. Yet when it’s revealed in the careful, balanced, natural and comfortable way that it should be, it is the stuff of inspiration—evoking our deepest wonder and awe.
And so, we introduce our Origin Story: the most cross-cultural, most deeply embedded story that humans have ever tried to tell—the story of all of us—our roots, our relationship with everything around us, our purpose, our dreams, and our ultimate destination.
The goal of such a story, when done right, is to satisfy the audience’s needs in balanced, accessible terms—sharing the best available, most reasonable, widest-ranging explanation of what happened to get this thing we call reality started, why we exist at all, what our presence in this universe is all about, how we achieved such a special privilege, and what we could do with this precious gift.
Diverse versions, but with common purpose
We are not all going to agree on the way such a story should be told, of course. Yet most of us would agree that it is a story meant to unify us—to keep our tribe, however we define that, working as one in purpose and vision.
Each and every tribe, and each and every tribal member within said tribe, will ultimately trust only their own unique perspective on this story. Yet there is a vital unifying theme across all cultures—the quest for certainty in an uncertain world—the desire to encircle the raging, chaotic fire with a solid and secure ring of stones—the hope that, when the story is well-told, the members of the tribe will have absorbed the essence of it, and will come away ready to settle down for a comfortable night’s sleep.
Yes, it’s Comfortable! You actually know *much* more than you think you know.
To look at a helpless newborn baby, you may not recognize this unexpected truth:
From our very day of conception, we are endowed with 99.9 percent of the knowledge we need to successfully function in this crazy, chaotic world.
The ‘book of knowledge’ that contains this amazing treasure trove of guidance has been 4.3 billion years in the making!
It’s called our DNA; and here on this blog, we have devoted a post to its essential importance and its largely unrecognized value.
This is our ‘Sense’—our deepest internal intuition—an understanding of each one of the billions to trillions of routine tasks that we do every second of every minute of every hour of our lives—tasks that each and every one of the thirty trillion individual cells in our bodies are busy accomplishing second-by-second, even though we never realized that we needed to know all this shit in order to survive.
But we damn well do. It didn't happen by accident.
Somebody (usually a single-celled organism living a very, VERY long time ago) had to work out how to choose the right chemical reactions—ones that could work for it—and how to take advantage of every single one of them—how those processes would cooperate and integrate into the collective mission of our thirty-trillion cell human body collective, in order to sustain life and thrive.
Not a single one of these chemical processes can be taken for granted; and yet modern science has identified, categorized, and described only a paltry few of these essential tasks.
Never thought about this before? Few have.
This is where our Comfortable Universe project stands out from all the rest of the Stories that you’ve ever heard.
This kind of ‘outside-the-box’ perspective is just the first taste of the kind of deeply creative thinking that our Song of Everything will be striving to emphasize as we present our version of this essential universal tale.
We’ll give you another quick sample of our craft. It’s a more speculative one, but definitely another thing that everybody seems to take completely for granted *without justification*, because it almost certainly required uncountable trial-and-error attempts to accomplish: the fact that the vast majority of the (ordinary – “baryonic”) matter that our universe generated as it emerged from the inscrutable chaos of the Big Bang turns out to be HIGH OCTANE FUEL, capable of initiating a three-step process that is essential to the successful resolution of the story of us:
- (1) making stars and solar systems,
- (2) while, at the same time, producing all the essential elements for life, and
- (3) providing a reliable mechanism (super-nova explosions) to release these elements back into the general environment where they could gather in chaotic ‘Goldilocks’ habitable zones where the chemical experiments needed to produce life could take place.
Any one of these achievements separately—stars lighting up the primordial sky, the manufacture of 92 complex atomic elements from the primordial fuel of just two abundant elements (Hydrogen and Helium), and the convenient release of these 92 elements back into the general environment when stars self-destruct in just the right way—would have profound consequences to the evolution of the universe. All three of them achieved in a choreographed dance? No way! This is far, FAR beyond any believable claim that it was just a lucky break—a statistical fluke. The laws of physics had to be EXQUISITELY TUNED, through trial and error, we argue, to achieve this crucial configuration.
What to expect as you read on
This post is a rewrite of what we called the ‘Introduction’ in the Song of Everything, Part 1 post.
Presented in the many (currently 30) “Songs” under this title you will find your host’s always-evolving best current working version of this collective Origin Story of ours.
It is intended to be a complete story, starting with how the Universe formed, and ending by 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 … wait … no spoilers here!
Always our particular version of the “Song of Everything” is working at the frontier of human understanding—trying to piece together the unexplained ‘loose ends’ and missing puzzle pieces that science has exposed. This is a job that few people are doing. There’s a whole lot of big-picture, outside-the-box thinking possible in that realm; but few thinkers work on it because it’s not a pursuit that pays well. In part, that’s because it delves deep into areas where there can be more than one explanation—more than one path that leads to where we find ourselves. The pejorative science term for this is that such theories are “not falsifiable.”
So what?!?
So ... fucking ... WHAT?
Think. Which path did the putative traveler who witnessed our world-realm’s evolution take to get from point A to point B? What if we don’t even know where ‘point A’ is (which we definitely don't)? Could there be more than one reasonable ‘point A’ that can be shown to be her valid starting point? These questions DO, inherently, have multiple answers. That doesn’t diminish the value of the answers, as science might want to try to have you believe.
ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME, for Chrissake! We don’t all take the same ones.
But each of us does have to choose a path … if we want to tell a coherent story to ourselves and others. Faced with multiple reasonable stories, we here at Comfortable Universe HQ are choosing a common-sense one that relies on simple steps down one of the more comfortable paths leading from our detailed thought-model that describes the universe’s origin to its present state.
And, for our presentation, the very diversity of possible paths is actually a key part of the story. We’re arguing that there is *inherently* no single possible story—no objective “right” answer to how we came to be, any more than there can be a right answer to why you, the inestimably brilliant current reader of this article, are the person you are rather than finding yourself as a cockroach wallowing in the sewers of Cleveland in 1890.
The Balanced Trinity: Sense, Spirit, Science
Here at Comfortable Universe Headquarters, we take a far wider view of our universe than just the hard facts. Our story, our “Song of Everything,” always strives to maintain a balanced mix of three elements of the dynamic trinity of the ‘ways of understanding’ the world:
1.) Sense: We introduced this above. The deeply ingrained intuitive understanding that we have inherited, augmented by our human physical senses and cultural background, significantly filtered through our life experience. This is the kind of story that an average person who could be your neighbor might tell, and you’d probably mostly agree with it.
2.) Spirit: The element of the story that is distinctive to each individual, vitally dependent on the first-person perspective and its unavoidable uniqueness. Each of us has our personal point of view, and we cultivate it throughout our lives. If we take that job of cultivating our perspective seriously, the result can be a spectacularly rich and far-reaching vision …
Wait ... a vision? ... What the ... ?
Be patient. Let us double-down on this and explain. But first we have to complete our trilogy of components to the story.
3.) The icing on the cake is the newest of man’s tools for understanding the world: the enterprise of Science. The scientist’s gleaned knowledge is meant to be repeatable (that’s where the issue of falsifiability raises its ugly head), and as objective as possible, meaning that it is supposed to be independent of the biases of any individual, any culture, any time in history.
Our four billion years of intuitive understanding, our 80 thousand years of cultural heritage, now have to face the hard, cold scrutiny of experimental testing … where this is possible.
It is not possible, however, in many, many important situations.
The best stories go far beyond what science can tell
Science deliberately limits its scope. If something cannot be observed, then science stands silent.
It is an important feature of nature that we live within a comfortable cocoon of time and space, with tight restrictions on what can be observed. The speed of light restricts our view of the biggest things that surround us, and what’s called the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle strictly limits what we can say about the smallest things. There are boundaries called the ‘Compton Limit’ and ‘Event Horizons’ that impose further censorship rules (or, in a more positive view, guardrails) that restrict what science can observe and talk about.
Consider the profound and critical questions that are veiled behind these barriers. These include all the early steps describing how our Universe formed and how life got its start. And it includes our visions of where life and the universe might go in the deep future.
Our Song of Everything does not shy away from exploring best answers, or one set of consistent ones, that extend well beyond the boundaries, barriers, and censorship limits that restrict science. This is where the idea of a well-formulated *vision* becomes important.
In modern scientific 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.
The seven ‘C’s of a Useful, Practical telling of the Story
What makes a good modern-day “vision”? First and foremost, it has to be a story that others can relate to. It has to Connect with its audience. Vision becomes Visionary—it draws in an audience.
To do so, it faces the task of finding a balance between being Concise yet Complete (not compromising any known facts). The presentation must be Coherent and well-organized. The factual content needs to be verifiable—Citations from public, researchable sources must be included to assure trust and reliability.
And most important of all, coming back to that first “C”, the final product needs to be Comfortable—easy for its intended audience to absorb, while at the same time holding their interest and attention. To that end, it requires Creativity to carry the audience to unexpected exciting and appealing new destinations.
In today’s world, a good ‘vision’ distinguishes itself from the drab, entirely unimaginative AI-generated rehashing of already published information. Real humans re-imagine the best known ‘facts’ in unique and original ways—we build structures (mental models) that even the best AI algorithms entirely lack. Only the quirks of a real human being are capable of pulling off a story with true ‘sparkle’ and ‘zing’. And the best of that comes by telling the tale in person, live, using the full repertoire of gestures, expressions, body language, and intonations.
The Magic and Power of Escaping the Box!
Einstein could be said to have had this kind of 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 people with such vision 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.
This old way of talking about the process of developing hypotheses, which are truly nothing but ‘visions,’ has real power.
The stories/theories/hypotheses – the ‘Songs’ that are offered in this series of posts explore 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 the magic ‘trinity’ of a good story; and it is, of course personal to the teller. That’s the part 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!
Do not be shy. Stand up and tell your story!
Imagine 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 that brings us full-circle, back to Amadou Hampâté Bâ.
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| “In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns, an entire library disappears, without the need for the flames to destroy the paper.” |
In this story, your host aims to use the terms ‘observer’ and ‘mind’ in the broadest sense. We’re going to eventually be talking about a vast Intergalactic Empire run by single celled interstellar space travelers, who we call the Twees. Do single-celled microbes have minds? Stay tuned! That’s the sort of outside-the-box magic that we’ll be revealing ... and reveling in!
Open your books, people! Share them, just as we’ll be doing here! As the prophet Mohammed was told (three times!) by the Archangel Gabriel in his seminal vision in the cave of Hira in 610AD:
Imagine if Mohammed had gone back home, told his wife he had just had a bunch of crazy hallucinations, and decided to just keep it all to himself!
The Christian Bible speaks to this as well. Paraphrasing Matthew 5:15-16:
“Does a person light a lamp and then hide it under a bushel basket? Of course not! The lamp is set on its stand, giving light to all the world. Let your light so shine before all men ...”
If we never proclaim our stories, then what value can they possibly have?
Most importantly, there is no better way to clarify your personal take on this greatest of all possible stories than to share it with others. It forces you to organize it, to work out the kinks, to strengthen the narrative. As the old adage goes: “the best way to learn a subject is to teach it to others.” And what more important subject is there than “the meaning of life?”
And so, with that said … off we go!
Strap yourselves in and enjoy the ride.
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