Journey of the Universe Page #4

into the spider's body including

even a distant star out of whose explosions

its molecules were constructed.

And this capacity to see

into the depths of time

gives new meaning to death.

The universe throughout space and time

is filled with violence and chaos.

Millions of galaxies have been destroyed.

Trillions of animals have been killed.

Death and suffering are woven

into the very heart of the universe.

Usually such destruction

is massive and senseless.

A volcano erupts and

kills every living being

in its vicinity.

But it can also happen

that dealing with death

leads to more complex

coevolutionary relationships.

For a rabbit, an eagle wears

the face of destruction.

But in this relationship,

the eagle develops

more acute eyesight, and

the rabbit develops

greater speed for escape.

Interdependent communities arise

out of suffering and death.

The ultimate meaning of this

escapes easy explanation.

We are confronted with

a fundamental mystery

in which the small self of the individual

dives into and nourishes

the whole communtity.

But living beings are not

just linked together by food.

Passion, our urge to merge.

What could be more intimate to our souls?

Our passions determine

so much of our lives.

They are the wild explosive energies

of all of love and creativity.

And such desire resides at

the very center of life.

With fish, the female deposits her eggs

and the male later fertilizes them.

There's no contact between them.

100,000 million years later,

when the lizards have evolved

out of their fish and amphibian ancestors,

the passion to merge has

deepened considerably.

With mammals and birds, passions reach

yet a new crescendo.

Not only are they able to

co-mingle as one body,

they can become so profoundly bonded,

they remain in a relationship

their entire lives.

We are not just similar to animals,

we have been shaped by them.

Our passions come from

vertebrate evolution.

Even our compassion can be understood

as an expansion of what took place

hundreds of millions of

years ago in the ocean

with the early fish.

Biologists speculate that mutations

led to a mother fish who scared

away predators from her babies.

This behavior was new at that time.

What was more common among fish back then

was a mother who ate her young.

With the emergence of the

fishes' descendants,

mammals and birds, maternal care broadened.

Now the offspring were not

just protected from predators,

but were nourished

directly by their mother.

This care even included transmission

of survival information of their group.

And in some cases, this

required years of training.

We see them, the caring

behavior among vertebrates

expanding for 500 million years before

the emergence of home sapiens.

Earlier humans intuited

this deepening compassion

and celebrated it with images

of the divine feminine.

As we enter into evening here on Samos,

we approach one of the deep mysteries

at the center of every

traditional cosmic story,

the nature and ultimate

meaning of the human.

We humans have our origin in the birth

of the universe 14 billion years ago.

And thus, we are composed

of the same energy

and quanta as that which

composes everything

in the universe.

And we followed from the first cell

emerging four billion years ago.

So we're genetic cousins

to every living being.

So what is distinct about us?

What is uniquely human?

Our current best evidence suggests

that something took place between six

and seven million years ago in Africa.

Something happened to

ignite the human lineage

in the primate world.

A new line of energetic apes emerged

that would over several million years

bring forth massive brains and learn

to dwell in a world saturated with dreams.

Nothing like them had ever existed before.

So, what gave rise to us?

We don't really know.

We don't have the detailed knowledge

of that transformation yet.

But forces speculate on the data

and perhaps that's entirely

appropriate here in the night.

To be forced to dream about the origins

of this dream-making animal.

One theory offered by the scientists

is particularly fascinating.

It suggests that humanity had its origin

in the prolongation of childhood.

The idea is that mutations took place

which slowed down our development.

Humans went through the same phases

as say the chimpanzees, but they remained

in each stage for a longer period of time.

In particular, this meant that the humans

were childlike for more of their

lives than other mammals.

So, to understand what makes a human human,

we can study the children

of any mammalian species.

They jump to play.

They explore the world with their eyes.

And they taste the world with their mouths.

Simple existence thrills them.

Their actions are in some sense free.

So after nearly four billion years

an animal emerged that could remain free,

spontaneous, curious, flexible,

open, impelled to try everything.

So what was going to happen now?

Early humans awoke to an

incandescent consciousness.

But where other animals were

controlled by instincts,

humans were liberated

from such set reactions.

Captivated by the thrill of movement,

we could make dance,

or sports central to our lives.

Astonished by the sounds of Earth,

we could dedicate ourselves to the joy

of making music.

Or making love.

The greatest creation in human history

was what enabled humans to plunge into

and to share their

superabundant consciousness.

This new invention was language.

More simply, the symbol.

The symbols of language

and art and mathematics

opened up new depths of consciousness.

Each human began to carry

an entire universe within.

This new form of consciousness

called symbolic consciousness

would soon change everything.

A crucial step in the

process of becoming human

was learning to externalize consciousness.

To represent in the physical world

what we had experienced within.

This is the Archaeological

Museum on the island of Samos.

Come and have a look.

By creating marks on bone or on wet clay,

humans invented a way

to fix their knowledge

into an enduring form

outside of themselves.

The coding processes life were bursting

beyond the DNA molecule.

So with human culture, experience itself

can be remembered and passed down

for thousands of years.

Not just successful mutations.

Any valuable understanding,

even if experienced by a single human being

can become part of the enduring legacy.

Works of the mind and

spirit float into Samos

from every direction of the ancient world.

From Athens and Mesopotamia,

as well as Spain, Egypt, Persia.

You know in the early universe,

concentrations of matter led

to the emergence of galaxies.

And something similar was going on here.

In Samos and in other cities,

we find a concentration

of symbolic constructions.

What does this mean really?

It means that rare

insights and deep feelings

from around the planet and

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