The New Story

Chief among the mysteries of life is the existence of consciousness, for which material science has no explanation, other than that it is an emergence from the human brain; but there is no explanation for how something non material like consciousness could emerge from a material substance like the human brain.

Twenty-first century cosmologist, Jude Currivan in The Story of Gaia (2022) provides a modified version of the origin of the universe, not as a Big Bang, but as a Big Breath, exquisitely fine-tuned, giving rise to space and time, creating the first stars and galaxies, and continuing forever as unfolding evolution. The universe, and possibly other universes, arose out of an energetic field of consciousness, which is the Source of everything, and provides the capability of human beings on Earth to think. In other words, consciousness was there from the beginning and did not depend on the evolution of the human brain to produce it.

Human beings, themselves, were a later emergence, having their origin in the continuous evolution of the universe under its exquisitely fine-tuned conditions to allow the birth of stars and galaxies and the recycling of atoms and molecules into new forms of matter. The theory of cosmogenesis asserts that biological life on Earth, including human beings, was forged out of the atoms and molecules of exploding stars. If it happened on Earth many billions of years after the initial Big Breath, there is good reason to believe that it happened also on an unknowable number of other planets during the life of the universe and will continue forever into infinity.

To know that humanity was born on one small speck of dust
called planet Earth in a universe of incomprehensible magnitude,
and to know that human beings are evolving into higher states
of consciousness to reveal knowledge of origins and the potential
for extraterrestrial life is the inspiring new story of the 21st century.

We are stardust!

What is our potential to grow into cosmic awareness to discover the mysteries of the universe? That is the exciting new question for generations born into the 21st century and beyond.

However, all is not well with the human project.

Though our knowledge systems reveal the process of continuous evolution, they also recount the process of extinction, as species come into existence, flourish for a time, then cease to exist. There is good reason for human beings to be concerned about the process of extinction in the 21st century. Science reveals that we are living at a time of mass extinction across the planet. As our knowledge of human dependence on the exquisitely fine-tuned ecosystems of our living planet increases, and as we discover the extent to which our human activities are disrupting and even destroying these ecosystems, the question arises as to whether the human species will bring about its own extinction before the dream of emergence into cosmic awareness can be realized.

This question lies behind a huge fear spreading across the planet that human beings will not live up to our potential and that the generations following us face a future of steadily disintegrating living conditions, until they fail completely. But even as this fear rises, an even more powerful sense breaks through.

Our knowledge systems tell us that there is a countervailing belief to fear, which, if we embrace it, can give us the power to overcome and rise above the despair of potential breakdown, collapse, and possible extinction.

This is the belief in hope and the power of attraction embedded in evolution, which is fueled by the power of love.

So, a struggle is now engaged on Earth between forces grounded in fear and forces grounded in hope and love. This is not a new struggle, for it has played out continuously in human history, but never before on a scale to imperil all life on the planet.

However, we have good reason to believe that the future will play out
as a testimony to hope rather than fear.

The human species was forged not just as a thinking species, but also as a feeling and emotional species, with the capacity to tap into the energetic field of consciousness that underlies the material universe, and to discover there the wisdom on which everything was founded. Filled with that wisdom, we will embrace our destiny and rise above forces and actors that engender fear. Led by heroes and heroines of humanity and engaging our own powers of imagination and vision, we will find our way forward under the impulse of evolution towards greater wholeness and integration. These voices have been rising in unison in the Song of Transcendence for more than a hundred years, now reaching a crescendo as the storm clouds gather with an intensity never before seen in the history of our species.

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