ATTUNEMENT

Closing my eyes and slowing my breath, I imagine the beginning of our Universe. It is black. Not the transparent black clarity of a night sky tinged by stars. Nor the blackness of squid ink, black yet with a hint of blue. But an utter and complete blackness. Not an empty void but replete with everything and the potentiality of what might come. Not a black hole, but the black whole.

It is minute; tiny almost beyond comprehension. Its wholeness at its first moment is as small compared to my body as I am to the vastness of what it has since grown into over its 13.8 billion-year-long evolutionary journey.

It is hot. One hundred trillion trillion times as hot as the interiors of its stellar progeny will be billions of years in its future.

It is simple; though only as simple as it can be to gift an eventual cornucopia of planets, plants, and people.

I am in wonder at the audacity of its visionary magnificence. How, how! could the infinite and eternal mind of the Cosmos dream the perfect intricacy of such a thought?

And why?

The big bang wasn’t big and it wasn’t a bang.

Instead of our Universe beginning in the implicit chaos of a “bang,” it was born in a minuscule and incredibly simple and ordered state.

Its laws of physics, the informational algorithms guiding its existence and evolution, were extremely fine-tuned, and the relationships between its fundamental physical attributes and the associated numerical constants they embed were exact to a meticulous degree. Had they differed from what they are by only a minuscule amount, our Universe would never have been able to even exist, let alone go on to evolve.

Its unified nature and the extreme order and simplicity of its birth had the inevitable consequence of a universal and one-way flow of time from its first moment until its last. The complementary and ongoing expansion of space and its holographic manifestation, has, ever since, enabled more and more meaningful in-formation to be embodied within space-time, and it will continue to do so throughout its lifetime. As a finite thought of an infinite and eternal Cosmos and vitally imbued with meaning, the extreme fine-tuning of its laws of physics instills it with an innate evolutionary impulse and essential purpose: to evolve from its original simplicity to ever-greater complexity and individuated and relational levels of self-awareness.

In doing this, our Universe embodies two universal principles that continue to guide and be way-showers in the ongoing journey of exploration and discovery. Its first underlying rule is that—to paraphrase Einstein—the Universe is as simple as it can be but no simpler, to manifest its evolutionary impulse. The second is that within its overall conservation of energy-matter and their overall balance to zero, all sub- systems use the minimum energy possible to manifest their existence and its evolutionary impulse.

So rather than a one-off and chaotic big bang, our Universe continues to sound the ongoing harmony in the Big Breath of its emergent potential.

Gaia’s story explores the discoveries and understanding, both leading-edge and ancient, that have progressively perceived how our Universe began and, from its earliest epoch, the long path that would eventually lead to our home world and the myriad abundance of the children she’s birthed, including ourselves.

One of our most venerable of wisdom traditions, the Chinese I Ching, tells that “In the beginning was the one, the one became two, the two became three—and from the three, ten thousand things were born.”

From the potency of its unified oneness, our Universe realizes itself through its universal informational “alphabet” of just two letters: zeros and ones. This simplest of differentiation then combines, imbuing innate meaning into all the diverse expressions of the relational two-nesses of energy-matter and space-time.

Its primary two-fold relationships then further resolve into a multitude of three-fold relationships at all levels of existence.

For example, the two-dimensional holographic boundary of what we call space, through the flow of time, projects the innate and evolving intelligence of the entire Universe into its appearance of three orthogonal dimensions. Our x/y/z experience of left/right, up/down and forward/backward is woven into its semblance, rather than being merely a construct of our awareness.

Within the intrinsic properties of energy-matter, three-fold combinations of quarks make up the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei; the familial groupings of protons, neutrons, and electrons form into stable and electrically neutral atoms and the ubiquity of positively, negatively, and neutrally electrically charged particles and energy fields are subsumed within an overall and exactly neutral Universe.

From its beginning, our Universe has evolved from this foundational simplicity the complexity of the I Ching’s “ten thousand things and more.” From the genesis of its first moment, it was poised and expectant with all the potency of its evolutionary diversity.

Another wisdom tradition, that of the ancient Greeks, intuitively perceived the fundamental nature of number, geometry as number in space and music as number in time, all underpinning their cosmology in a four-fold quadrivium of knowledge. We’ll see how the harmonic and resonant relationships and universal patterns of these teachings are now being newly appreciated as playing all-pervasive roles in the story of Gaia and her Universe.

As a creative and finite emanation of an infinite and eternal Cosmos, its manifestation through its continuing Big Breath also reflects the ancient Vedic perspective of the Breath of Brahman. The Upanishads, a series of discourses in ancient India between seers known as rishis and their students, sets out an integral philosophy of the unified nature of reality and all-pervasiveness of consciousness. Their Ishavasya wisdom teachings seek to guide the understanding of both the unmanifest causative realms of existence with the manifest world that the Breath of Brahman exhales, and which represents the ultimate unity behind and transcendence of all names and forms.

The profound insights of these ancient scholars are being re-appreciated by ever more discoveries of leading-edge science. Even more vitally so, the living lore of Indigenous peoples who have never forgotten the innate web of life that encompasses the whole Cosmos is now being honored as offering experiential guidance to heal our collectively dismembered relationship with Gaia.

With the wisdom and presence of these fellow travelers accompanying us, let’s now begin to share the 13.8 billion-year-journey of Gaia’s story.

An excerpt from The Story of Gaia: The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of Our Conscious Planet.