It Slumbers

In the quiet that followed, Adam could almost see his granddaughter's mind at work, turning the Story over and over. Suddenly, she bolted upright. "I think I know," she said. "When the dust was ready, Spirit . . . like . . . breathed into it."

"But how did Spirit get there?"

"It didn't get there, it was always there," said Dawn. "It had to wait, that's all." (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 30)

What makes up Everything? For Bill Bryson, it's Matter, Life and a touch of Spirit. For Harold Morowitz, it's Matter and Life, with Spirit coming on strong. Ken Wilber strikes a different proportion. Ninety percent of his A Brief History of Everything--the last in this series of "Everything" books-- is about Spirit.

Wilber is a philosopher who dropped out of a biochemistry major in college to write his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, at the age of 23. Consciousness and integral thinking have been his abiding interest since, over the course of two dozen books. Much of his work is summarized in A Brief History of Everything, which was published in 1996. I read the revised edition, published in 2000.

The history that Wilber covers--moreso, interprets--is indeed that of consciousness, traced through philosophy, mainly from the West, and spirituality, mainly from the East. But playing in the background, and sometimes coming to the fore, are the sciences of Matter and Life, which complete his cosmology.

That cosmology begins with the Big Bang and Matter. Then comes Life, an emergent or holon that is "higher." Then comes (depending on which page you are reading) "mind and Spirit" or "mind, soul, and Spirit." No surprises so far: this is New Story all the way, with gradations once you get past Life.

But wait: there's a stunning sentence on page 179, six words that turn the story upside down. "Pure consciousness is not an emergent." Not an emergent, says Wilber. Nor is Spirit, the equivalent of pure consciousness. If Spirit is not an emergent, it's more than just the end of the story. It is also, in some way, the beginning.

What is Spirit? Wilber is liberal in his referents. It is Self, Subjectivity, the Ultimate I, the I-I, Emptiness. It is pure Witness, pure Seer, pure Presence. It is Buddha, Christ, God and Goddess, Tao and Brahman. It is the support, the cause, the creative ground.

For being so much, Spirit does very little . . . for a while. "Spirit slumbers in nature, begins to awaken in mind, and finally recognizes itself as Spirit." The metaphor of slumber comes from the German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854):

Schelling's key insight was that the Spirit that is realized in a conscious fashion in the supreme identity is in fact the Spirit that was present all along. . . . At each stage Spirit unfolds more of itself, realizes more of itself, and thus moves from slumber in nature to awakening in mind to final realization as Spirit itself.

Interestingly, Alfred Russel Wallace, who hit upon the idea of natural selection independently of Darwin, "always maintained that natural selection itself was not the cause but the result of 'Spirit's manner and mode of creation.'"

Spirit at the beginning of the story. Spirit at the end. Spirit all along the way. The template is neither "old" nor "new," but this may be the story our children tell when their time comes. They ought to love the metaphor of sleep because they are part of the awakening.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 JOHN N. KOTRE

The Other "E" Word

There's everything. There's evolution. But the key to the New Story may be an e word lurking in the shadows. It's emergence, the subject of a book by Harold Morowitz entitled The Emergence of Everything, the second in our series of "Everything" books. Emergence is evolution on steroids.

The concept of emergence addresses how you put elements together and wind up with something more. Take two hydrogen atoms, add one of oxygen, and you get something cool to drink on a hot summer day. That's more than dihydrogen oxide. Run hydrogen atoms through a series of emergences, do it over 13 billion years, and you get a whole lot more. You get us.



It works something like this. To my right is a dot. It's an element, the simplest of beginnings.



Now here's the dot combined with others. If I asked what you were looking at, you'd probably say "an x." That's more than dots; it's a letter of the alphabet. The letter is an emergent-- like water, or like a living cell that arises from a collection of chemicals.



Take it to the next level. Arrange the x's a certain way and you get a second emergent, this time a triangle. The dots are still there (very small now), the x's are still there, but now there's something new--a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Next week's author, Ken Wilber, calls it a holon. A holon isn't reducible to dots.

In a Story of Everything--the New version--you substitute Matter, Life, and Spirit for dot, x, and triangle. Life emerges from Matter. Spirit emerges from Life. Each is more complex than what preceded it. As the narrative of the cosmos moves along, the emergents become richer, more interior, more subjective, deeper--until you have something called Mind or even Spirit.

Harold Morowitz is a biophysicist involved in the study of life's origins. But in The Emergence of Everything he writes as more than a biophysicist. Every now and then you hear the voice of a philosopher, even a theologian. This is a whole person speaking, one who wants to "go beyond the obvious" and align himself with those who seek nothing less than to "know the mind of God." Morowitz regards his "speculative scholarship" as a calling.

How many emergents have arisen in the history of the cosmos? It all depends on how closely you look. Somewhat arbitrarily, Morowitz picks 28, from the formation of particles, stars, and solar systems to the formation of hominids, tools, language, and philosophy.

Emergence number 28, underway now, is Spirit, and here Morowitz acknowledges a debt to the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist. Spirit is not defined, except to say that it goes beyond Mind, or Teilhard's "noosphere." Call me a heretic, says Morowitz, but as we emerge so does God. In a phrase whose meaning escapes me, he repeats, "We are the transcendence of the immanent God." He simplifies once: "We are God."

To be sure, the God that comes at the end of the story isn't the God of our traditional faiths. But Morowitz contends that science has forced us to rethink God. God cannot be a one-time creator nor can he ever rest, as on the seventh day in the Genesis narrative. He cannot rest because creation continues to occur. Each new emergent is in fact a new creation.

The subtitle of Morowitz's book--in places dense, in places accessible--is How the World Became Complex. What I'd like to know is why the world became complex, why evolution proceeds in the direction it does. I imagine that Morowitz would like to know this too. That, after all, is the nature of his calling. He wants to know the mind of God.

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Pluto and the Pea

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is popular science writing at its best. In a series of short stories he visits the players and events behind the great discoveries that go into a Story of Everything. There are unsung heroes and liars (Edwin Hubble, no less!), Nobel laureates and janitors, and someone (Linnaeus) so obsessed with sex that he names a genus of plant Clitoria. The book is not, as the title suggests, a history of everything, but rather a history of how we got to know everything. In Bryson's hands, that history is fascinating.

It's fascinating not merely because of the drama but because Bryson has a way of communicating scale. Take the solar system. In depictions like this one, where Earth is the size of a pea, the giant Jupiter is located a few inches away and Pluto a few inches beyond that. But if the solar system were drawn to scale, Jupiter would be a thousand feet from a pea-sized Earth and Pluto would be a mile and a half. You wouldn't be able to see Pluto because it would be about the size of a bacterium. Scale matters.

It matters more in our knowledge. How much of that dinosaur skeleton you see in a museum is actual fossil and how much is plaster? Answer: in practically every case, it's all plaster. Closer to home, how much of the story of human lineage is fossil and how much (theoretical) plaster? Answer: the total world archive of hominid and early human bones--coming from roughly 5000 separate individuals--could fit in the back of a pickup truck. Even the heralded Lucy skeleton, a 3.2 million year old Australopithecus, is only 20% complete, 28% if you strip out bones that are redundant. Here's a look at her reconstructed skull. A BBC series called the skeleton "complete."

Scale in our knowledge is the ratio of light to dark, of evidence to the lack of it. The hard part is seeing the lack. I'm thrilled by the story of human evolution, but I have to recognize the enormous gaps in the fossil record. Some equate to the distance between Pluto and the pea. I don't want God to fill in the gaps but I don't want plaster either. If there is darkness, let it be.

Bryson is guided in his book by the New Story template--first Matter, then Life, then Spirit. How did life come out of matter? Quite naturally, say Bryson's sources, maybe inevitably. The age of the earth is 4.6 billion years; the first record of life appears at 3.85 billion. Once conditions were right, it didn't take long for life to get going.

And so evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould can say that bacterial life "was chemically destined to be." And biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve that life is "an obligatory manifestation of matter, bound to arise whenever conditions are appropriate." Curiously, when it comes to intelligent life, Gould does a flip-flop (I don't know about de Duve). Life was destined to come out of matter, but the next emergence, homo sapiens, was a random fluke.

Curious indeed, at least to this outsider. Why should one transition be a matter of destiny and the other an accident? But let's put both in scale. If the cosmos is like the Sahara, matter is its sand. We know so far of only one grain that's given rise to Life and Spirit. If we're in the dark about all the others, who's to say what's inevitable? Who's to say what isn't?

Inevitable or not, Spirit is beyond the scope of Bryson's book. As a science writer, he ends his engrossing tale at Life. That's "nearly" Everything, he says in his title, but by my calculus it's far from it. So let's change the title. How We Got to Know Two-Thirds of Everything would be more accurate. It's what Bryson covers--in scale, like Pluto and the pea.

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