Improvisations in the Key of Cosmology

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Cosmology, David James Duncan believes, is one of the most underrated and practical sciences of our time. “A cosmology,” he writes in his book God Laughs & Plays (Triad Publishing, 2006) “is a living relationship between humans and the universe that envelops them. It is creation and abstraction engaged in imaginative negotiation. It is mind, matter and spirit at play... A lively cosmology inhales what’s fresh and exhales what’s stale; cross-pollinates and migrates if needed; morphs if needed; intuits, imagines and responds to serve life as needed.”

To prepare a lecture for the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Duncan recently read a stack of books on cutting-edge physics, astro-physics, and brain science. The result, he says, “was eye-opening, mind-expanding, wonder-producing” — and led him to update his own personal cosmology in several ways. Those updates landed in God Laughs & Plays in an almost jazz-like series of cosmological and mystical “riffs” titled “Assailed,” first published in Orion Magazine, and reprinted in Orion’s 2007 anthology, The Future of Nature. The following is an excerpt from one of Duncan’s improvisations, entitled “Science and Reverence.”

The Earth, like the universe that envelops it, is essentially wild. I hold this infinite wild to be “the divine manuscript,” the only unbowdlerized copy we have of the Book that gives and sustains life. Human industry is shredding this gift like an Enron document. There are those who call the shredding “free market economics” or just plain “freedom.” It’s not exactly a lie. But the freedom to shred the divine manuscript is not an economics any lover of neighbor, self or Earth wishes to practice.

Once self-forgetfulness and self-giving start to bequeath a person’s peace and joy, they grow bewildered by the worship of selfishness, toss the politics of self-interest and economics of free market fundamentalism, and cast about for less ephemeral hopes.

A new source of hope for me: the growing reverence for the “infinite wild” and its mysteries among scientists. This recent outburst of awe and wonder marks a significant change in scientific consciousness: the physical sciences, until recently, were committed to mechanistic paradigms that made reverence possible only by disconnecting spirituality and scientific thought. We all know the story: the so-called “Enlightenment” and its empirical thinking led, sans spirit, to the effective naming of things, cataloguing of things, dissecting, extracting, and reconstruction of things, creating the modern world as we pretended, for a time, to know it. By the late 20th century, however, the same divorce between spirit and science led to the filing of corporate copyrights on ancient living things; the genetic warping of living things; the raping, monoculturizing, and extirpating of hundreds of species of living things, and to a form of consciousness that suicidally abstracts itself from living things — as if consciousness and humans were not themselves living things.

I see two chief causes for the countering outburst of reverence in science, one famous, the other infamous. The famous cause: the new physics. Quantum mechanics has changed the way we see the universe. The old proton/neutron/electron atom is now as unfit for describing matter as a typewriter is unfit for surfing the Web. Atomic particles are now said to derive from immaterial wave packets; space is said to have had at least ten original dimensions that collapsed, at the beginning of time, to form the superstrings of which subatomic particles consist — to say nothing of field theory; wave mechanics; morphogenesis; the recently discovered ‘tunneling’ of electrons through neutrons! Through a multitude of new images and equations, physics is now telling us that Space, Time and Matter derive from a source infinitely subtler and greater than all three.

The infamous cause of the new reverence in science: suffering. How many biologists, botanists, ethnologists, anthropologists, have been forced to renounce their fields in mid-career because the living objects of their passionate study have died out before their eyes? How many more scientists have grown so dismayed by the world’s barrios, biological dead or disease zones, slave labor and oil war zones, that they’ve abandoned their disciplines to become peace activists or humanitarians? I’m not going to belabor these problems, but I touch on them to introduce a sentence that strikes me as pivotal:

Humanity’s most serious problems, Albert Einstein held, “cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them.” What is needed, if this deceptively simple statement is true, is not just scientific or political problem-solving, but an actual upward shift in humanity’s level of consciousness. Many scientists are, like artists, or even prophets, renowned for the absent-minded, dreamy, walk-about states in which their greatest insights come to them. I sense more here than a quirk shared by an eccentric minority: I sense a direction that smacks of hope. What if every human’s primary focus became the way in which she greeted the dawn, the moment, her every breath,,. and only then did she turn to face humanity’s thorniest problems?

Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin: By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.

Biologist Charles Darwin: Each living creature (is)... a little universe, formed of a host of self- propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.

Living science.

Author of The River Why, The Brothers K, River Teeth, My Story as Told by Water, and God Laughs & Plays, David James Duncan has won many awards and honors including the 2001 Western States Book Award, three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, a National Book Award nomination, and — with Wendell Berry, the American Library Association’s 2003 Award for the Preservation of Intellectual Freedom. The above was excerpted from the new anthology The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine (Milkweed Press).

by David James Duncan Article Sourced from http://cemagazines.com/