The Living Universe

Less than a century ago, humanity’s cosmological picture underwent an unprecedented expansion when the astronomer Edwin Hubble revealed to the world that the Milky Way is far from the only galaxy in existence. It suddenly became apparent that the cosmic horizon spanned unimaginable distances in every direction, and in which our home galaxy, -a spiral of some two hundred billion stars, was just one in a sea of two trillion others. In this moment, humans opened their eyes to a new appreciation of the scales and immensities of the cosmos. The last century has been a time of incredible human discovery, and in which the field of cosmology has acquired new scientific status. Among other feats, scientists can now determine the elemental compositions of distant stars, and the trajectories of galaxies in relation to our own. They have gained insight into the birth and death of stars and planets, as well as the fabric of space and time. In this new understanding, our universe appears to us as never before. As a developing and evolving system, of fantastic forces and energies, and dynamic displays of order and chaos. Perhaps most extraordinarily, small patches of this fabric have become conscious of themselves. We live in a universe that our ancestors never imagined, and it is now apparent that making sense of our new cosmological picture requires a departure from old ideas and metaphors, and the exploration of new frames on reality. Our journey begins with the observation that the way we talk about nature, can ultimately be scaled to a grounding cosmic metaphor, which itself comes to serve as the lens through which we form our deepest questions, -about what we are, and our place in the universe. The Western scientific lineage can be seen as having moved through two epoch-defining paradigms, as characterized by their grounding cosmic metaphor. These are the view of the universe as a great mind, moving into the view of the universe as a great machine. The long-standing cosmic metaphor of the universe as a great machine has become so closely associated with science that it is often viewed synonymously with it. This is not the case, however, and today the great machine metaphor no longer serves to further our understanding as it once did, and there are now telling signs that the modern mind is in the midst of a transition; toward an organismic lens on reality – apprehended as an evolving, self-generating, and ultimately living process. Furthermore, this organismic paradigm may offer greater explanatory and predictive power, as well as a deeper, more meaningful understanding of our place in the universe. Of course, none of this is to say that the universe has not been historically compared to an organism, both in the Western lineage and in many other cultures. The universe is the universe. The question of whether it is more like an organism than it is like a machine has only a subjective answer. The manner by which we apprehend the universe may reveal more about ourselves, as we meet reality in our historical moment, than it does the character of the universe itself. This is however, not to say that progress in our understanding cannot be acknowledged, and as we will explore, it is growingly apparent that we indeed appear to see further, deeper, and with greater understanding through an organismic lens than through any other concept available to us.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ePIJdmVUhug

The Living Universe - Cosmos As Organism

Adrian David Nelson (2019)

https://drive.google.com/file/living_universe.pdf

Focusing on the Western intellectual lineage, this essay traces the human archetypal metaphor for the universe as it shifts three times, from that of a great mind, to a great machine, to the modern-day transition toward an organismic view of the universe. We explore how the way we talk about nature can ultimately be scaled to a grounding cosmic metaphor, which itself comes to serve as the lens through which we interpret our deepest questions, - about what we are, and our place in reality. Discussed are the implications of the emerging organismic paradigm to the fundamental orientation of the self to the world, to other beings, and its place in reality.