All World
Gayatri Pariwar

[Abstracted from Catherine Ingram’s universally acclaimed book- ‘Passionate Presence’. Published with glad consent of the author. – Editor]

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new

landscapes, but in having new eyes. "

- MARCEL PROUST 

Awakened awareness is sometimes likened to being swept into a wave of universal intelligence. You are standing on the riverbank of conditioned mind and belief, clutching a branch of dogma, hoping to stay put, and suddenly a torrent of white water rushes by and sweeps you off your feet. Nothing to do but surrender and enjoy the rapids. Like this, one's conditioned mind is out of the way and what roars through is the intelligence of the creative force of existence. Suddenly, one is interested in the process. Moving from dogma to the unknown is also a movement from dullness to aliveness, and life becomes an exploration, a celebration

According to the modern astronomy, our solar system was formed some four and a half billion years ago when a cloud of interstellar gas and dust condensed into itself, forming a broad and rather flat disk. At its dense center there formed the sun, a blazing ball of thermonuclear fire around which swirled millions of rocky chunks, some of which merged together to form planets. This process apparently repeats itself throughout the universe. In 1994, the Hubble Space Telescope sent back dazzling images of new stars similarly forming in the constellation Orion. In the observable universe alone it is estimated that about one hundred such solar systems are forming every second. 

Today the planets along with other large space matter swirl around the fiery center in our solar system on the same flat plane as they did at the time of their formation. What has dramatically changed, however, is the phenomenal variety of life that has sprung up on the third planet from the sun, our Earth. Apparently abundant in conditions for life, Earth sits strategically not too far from or too close to the sun. It is protected for the most part from devastating collisions with intergalactic space debris by our massive neighbour planet Jupiter, which has so far taken the largest hits for us. 

In the early days, organic matter was generated by sunlight on earth or fell to earth from space, becoming the building blocks for primitive life nearly four billion years ago. It is assumed, however, that stromatolites had much more primitive ancestors of one-celled organisms or small molecular systems but the fossil record does not go back that far due to earth's ancient crust having been subsumed far into its core.

From these humble beginnings life emerged in a fantastic surge of creativity. Over the next few billion years and despite many catastrophic eradications, living things persisted in the oceans and eventually on land. Adaptations of stunning variety morphed and replaced previous designs. Life forms came and went. The current estimate of thirty million species on earth represents probably only 1 percent of all species that have ever lived. Of the living species, a relative newcomer known as Homo Sapiens arrived on the scene about a hundred thousand years ago and evolved to become the most dominant and self-reflective life form of all. From gas and dust through a remarkable evolutionary journey in the sea and on land, life emerged eventually into a creature who would wonder, “Who am I, and where do I come from?” The late astronomer Carl Sagan described this process as a star's way of looking at itself. 

Self- reflection, for all its benefits, comes at high cost. As humans, we are ever aware of our mortality and of our general vulnerability while alive. We are delicate creatures, as mammals go, and we have compensated with cleverness and an extraordinary ability to adapt to or to change our environments. Nevertheless, the shadow of death hangs like a pall over our every activity, our every tender moment. Cave drawings and artifacts indicate that when self-reflection and awareness of mortality emerged in evolutionary development, humans the world over developed myths and stories of an afterlife. It is Understandable that myths and hopes of an afterlife would be needed to assuage the fear and. anxiety of primitive man. It may have been an evolutionary necessity for man to devote himself to those beliefs in the face of a short dangerous life that included the possibility of being eaten alive. Myths must have helped lessen the fear and provided the purpose and a sense of belonging, a knowing of one's place in the world. This worked well enough when there were few people on earth and one would rarely bump into someone who had an entirely different idea about the meaning of life or what happens after death. But then humans began to multiply and become mobile enough to collide with other communities. People began to kill each other for their beliefs, and they have been doing so ever since. 

It is possible that the evolutionary journey could now lead us to a condition of wonder as a replacement for myth? Could our acceptance of death be based in the immediacy of our connection with life? In awakened awareness we directly experience the breath of existence without knowing its origin or destination. This suffices for a feeling of belonging because we sense that it permeates everything else. It also provides an understanding of impersonal continuation, not a continuation of the personal me but of the fundamental essence from which I emerged and which suffuses my every cell. 

Many of the ideas in modern science correspond with these feelings, which explains why so many scientists are mystically inclined. Paradoxically, the more we comprehend of nature, the greater is the mystery of whatever intelligence informs it. Science is therefore not a departure from the mystical; it is ultimately an embrace of it. Science is a threat to religion, not to mysticism. Scientific discoveries continually disprove many religious beliefs while at the same time revealing the existence of an intelligence that pervades everything, the recognition of which coincides exactly with the mystical experience. 

When scientists or mystics look deeply into what seems to be emptiness or space, what they find is some kind of presence. Quantum physics now tells us that particles emerge out of so-called emptiness, out of pure space. We can eliminate all particles from a given amount of space, such that the space is seemingly devoid of anything whatsoever, and suddenly elementary particles will emerge. They will simply appear out of the void. They are somehow already there in potentia. What could possibly be the operating system that powers this fecund emergence? I once asked my teacher if he thought that love was what powered creation, and he answered. “I don't even call it love. It is some kind of fullness, such as the fullness of the ocean when there are no waves." A burgeoning wholeness merging into itself. And within this wholeness, stardust is looking at itself and wondering, "Who am I?"