CONNECTION
The Universe Is Alive
And noticing that might just save our species
For most of human history people believed in a universe that was alive. Whether it was spirits guarding sacred forests, Mother Earth herself, or a divine presence animating all things, we lived in a World that was living, vibrant, and sentient. The Greek philosopher Plato described this as anima mundi — the “soul of the World” and proposed that the universe itself was a living creature sharing the same soul that brought all things into existence. This fundamental belief created space for a lived daily experience in which people felt connected to nature, themselves and each other.
However, today the dominant paradigm in the West is that the universe is dead. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, even life itself, are simply the product of mechanistic physical and chemical reactions occurring synchronously to create your experience of reality. What place then for spirit or soul?
Life in a dead universe soon became meaningless for the human beings living within it. If life is simply the product of random probabilistic events taking place in an inert universal container, then why should we derive any greater meaning than randomness? As this paradigm of reductive materialism marched on, it allowed humanity to achieve incredible feats of technology and industry — turning us into the masters of the natural World from whence we came. In doing so, Man lost his connection to nature, “scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend” as the lead protagonist of our own Shakespearean tragedy. And collectively we walked into a shared existence of meaninglessness, isolation and separation.
We are rapidly moving towards the realisation of one or more existential threats that hang like a spectre above the survival of our species. Pick your favourite one: climate collapse, nuclear war, microbial resistance, skyrocketing rates of cancer and chronic illness, etc. The list goes on and makes you wonder if George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are secretly holding the pen on creation — cheerfully debating whose ending will make the final print in the Story of Humanity over heavenly glasses of absinthe. With so many different threats against our survival, is there any hope for us to thrive, or even survive?
Our survival depends on getting to the root of our problems, rather than dealing with each crisis as an independent issue. Is there something that all these global problems have in common? The answer, it can be strongly argued, is separation. Separation from ourselves and separation from each other. In other words, the true underlying issue of our time is a crisis of spirit.
Separation from each other is clear in its manifestation. Wars, racism, discrimination — these are all different appearances of the same underlying idea that we are separate from each other. If we were able to find similarity and oneness at a more fundamental level then perhaps separation would reveal itself as merely an illusion and slowly disappear.
Separation from ourselves may seem a little more subtle, but its effects are just as pronounced. We’re talking here about separation from one’s true self. However, “self” has come to mean “personality”: whether we are white or black, what our name is and whether we like dogs or cats. This is where we get our identity, and our sense of who we think we are. But personality is a construct — a set of stories that we tell ourselves which are in most cases transient, and ever-changing. In losing our sense of who we really are underneath all these layers of personality, we feel the need to fuel this false self by reinforcing its stories and patterns of condition.
Take climate change for example. In many ways climate change can be viewed as a problem of over-consumption. We “need” more things and we “need” them faster. As we consume more products than ever before, we fail to realise that really we’re trying to fill a void. A void created by separation from ourselves and the disconnect between what we truly need in order to survive and be happy, versus what societal conditioning and mass media lead us to believe is required for our happiness. By losing touch with the true essence of who we are, we’ve allowed separation to drive our society to the edge of collapse.
How do we address this underlying problem of separation? By cultivating a sense of unity, or wholeness, which is where the word “healing” comes from. To be healed is to know we are not separate from each other. Although we see the appearance of separateness at the physical level — I am certainly a separate person from you, you are certainly separate from your coffee mug — there is a level at which these things are not actually separate at all.
Since the first use of the word “atom” by the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, humans have believed that matter was made of particles — little solid bits of stuff, like tiny golf balls — that when put together made up bigger bits of stuff like molecules, compounds and eventually visible material. This all changed following the advent of Quantum Mechanics when we learned that particles aren’t like little golf balls at all, but behave more like waves — with no definite properties or shape. This meant that physical reality is not really physical. The reality that we see and interact with is not solid, but appears to be made of something different — as if we live in a viscerally vibrant portrait painted by the colours of an empty palette.
What causes the wave to collapse into a particle to form the solid portrait we call reality? The answer, it seems, is consciousness. It is somehow through the act of observation and awareness that nothing seemingly becomes something. The mind-bending implication here is that a particle knows it is being observed — somehow noticing that it has an audience and deciding to perform the dance of reality.
At the most basic level of material reality there is awareness and some sense of sentience. All particles are woven from the same fabric, emerging from the same interconnected quantum field through consciousness. To put it another way, it may be that consciousness is all there really is. It may be the fundamental building block of all reality — the common fabric from which all things are made.
A subatomic particle probably isn’t sentient in the same way as a human being is — it probably doesn’t have emotional feelings or complain to its friends about its spouse. But consciousness develops from that point into more complex forms of expression — through objects, fungi, plants, mammals and eventually humans. It also transcends the individual human into collective consciousness — the interconnected consciousness of our entire human society — which is the key driving force behind our development as a species, and whether we survive or not.
Sentience begins at the most fundamental level, implying that everything is in some way alive. And it is that same spark, shared by the voyeur electron and the flirtatious teenager, that animates all things in the universe. All things are connected and unified by the same single presence — a connected heartbeat willing all things into existence. The physical World may be describable by equations, but what is it that “breathes fire” into these equations? This question is asked by Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time. It would seem therefore, that consciousness itself may be the fuel to the fire of life — illuminating all things but not itself being revealed in its resplendence.
The view that consciousness is the fundamental aspect of reality is an ancient one, common to the Advaita Vedanta philosophy of India and certain traditions within Buddhism. In more modern philosophical parlance, this view is called panpsychism. It has gained popularity again in recent years. Perhaps panpsychism is coming back into fashion because it fills a gap that science currently can’t. Or perhaps it resonates with how people increasingly feel.
It would be hard to argue these days that animals do not have a subjective experience of some kind. There is some flame, some flicker of being, that allows an animal to show love, fear, compassion and pain similarly to humans. The rapid spread of veganism is evidence that people are waking up to this idea around the World.
What about inanimate objects? Rest assured you are more intelligent than your doorstop. But it is consciousness that calls your doorstop into being — giving shape to the particles within it; holding them together rather than letting them fly apart. This same consciousness orders the cells in your own body, which are made of the same atoms that make up your doorstop. Underneath all the layers, you and your doorstop are made of the same thing. You were just lucky enough to get more of it.
In viewing each other as extensions of ourselves we leave less space for division, discrimination and discord. By noticing our common essence with animals, people might eat less meat — reducing the huge climate impact from meat farming. If enough of us shift our consciousness in this way, the collective consciousness of humanity can develop with more intention. And we can evolve towards an awakened species: responsible stewards of the planet we rely on to survive.
I’m not suggesting here that we should all start singing to our dishwashers and registering our hamsters for therapy. Simply becoming aware of the spirit in all things is the first step. Boundaries between “self” and “other” would be revealed only as illusions. Perhaps we would begin to treat each other better. To feel this unifying presence is to live in harmony and connection with the World. Small changes made by all of us in the direction of anima mundi may help to support the unity, compassion and connectedness that could help save us from ourselves.
