Tuesday, August 18, 2009

The Meaning of Life: 1 Big Crunch - Introduction

Images and Models of the Big Bang, Big Crunch, Heath Death and diversification of the forces of nature.

This posting is the beginning of a series on nature as the solution to our existential dilemma and redemption of our spiritual seeking. It is nature, rather than religion, that holds the keys to our survival, to our conscious life and to all the aspirations that our quest for the meaning of life encompasses. Many of our most central anxieties, from the fear of mortality to the quest for meaning in the chaos of existence, can be resolved completely in a real win-win way, not by turning to religion with its unverifiable promises of an eternal heaven, or an empty mind void, but through better understanding our integral position in nature and cosmology.

Although the universe is full of wild forces and life cannot exist in the core of the big bang, and may become extinguished long before the eventual big crunch, or heat death, again renders stars, planets, and galaxies uninhabitable, these extremes are nevertheless essential to the existence of life, because it is through this process of cosmogenesis and the complex differentiation of the fundamental forces of nature, with their inscrutable twisted architecture, that makes possible the complex fractal hierarchy of quarks, hadrons, nuclei, atoms, molecules, molecular complexes, organelles, cells, tissues and organisms, that the diversity and complexity of life can come about as the climax interactive process integrating the forces of nature throughout the long periods of galactic, stellar and planetary existence, in the lush fecundity of the cosmic equator - a veritable cosmic Eden.

Recent discoveries have found that the nucleotide building blocks of RNA can spontaneously assemble from simple primordial molecules and that planets potentially capable of bearing life are commonplace both in our galaxies and other close neighbours. Life appears to have come into existence on earth almost as soon as the oceans cooled to a habitable temperature after the initial Hadean era and has continued since on Earth for a good third of the universe's own life time.

Elephants below Kilimanjaro

The meaning in our existence is healed by better understanding our integral place in nature, as the sentient eyes and ears of a universe coming through the evolutionary process of sexual recombination and fertility to understand itself as a conscious process, to compassionately enrich the diversity of nature and the journey of life of the generations to come. Evolution is not just a war of tooth and claw of survival of the fittest, but a sacred loom of regeneration, in which new life forms emerge, and new forms of conscious existence converging on the cosmological universalities physical consciousness is capable of.

No attempts to find a salve in an eternal heaven, or retreat into the mind void, as a double negative escape from mortal angst, can in any way compare with the sheer vitality of living our natural sexual and visionary lives to the full and taking the opportunity which our sentient incarnation provides, both to experience life and consciousness in their full depth and mystery in the first person, and to give back to the passage of the generations of life our own compassionate insight into the existential condition, so that life can continue to flower and discover itself anew.

This series will explore in detail how new discoveries of nature and cosmology brought about by the scientific age, in combination with direct experiences of inner reality catalyzed by natural psychoactive sacraments, can provide a complete and more meaningful solution to our spiritual quest than any form of scorched-Earth religion, or renunciation of the natural world in seeking annihilation of the ego without embracing nature, sexuality and its fecundity as the source of all new life and consciousness.

No comments: