The Cosmological Answer to Everything

42.

42 is, of course, the number Douglas Adams gave us through his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe
as the answer to "The Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, of Everything."

42.

42 is a number. In the Hitchhiker's Guide series, a mega-supercomputer took 7.5 million years to come up with this answer. A single number.

Wouldn't it be every scientist's wet dream if the answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe, of Everything came out to be a number--or, better yet, a mathematical equation. The Grand Unified Theory, too. Unfortunately, it might just take our real life human scientists about 7.5 million years to come up with a singular, unifying answer to everything.

The deeply mystifying and often nearly incomprehensible findings of science over the past century have hinted at something that writers and artists have been theorizing for a while now:  The intangible abstracts of our world must be incorporated into the theories and formulae of science in order for science to have any chance at completing their grasp of Life, The Universe(s), of Everything. The fact that almost every scientist, even Einstein, eventually comes to admit that there is just "something more" or "something bigger" out there that has to be "pulling the strings"--that is responsible for at least setting all This in motion, if not orchestrating It, is reason enough to open one's mind to the consideration of a truly all-encompassing, Truly Grand, theory of Everything.

As I myself have alluded to from the beginning of this podcast series, abstracts like thought, emotion, faith and Love are glaringly missing from the mathematical language of science. On the obvious level, this is due to the inability of science and mathematics to quantify abstracts. We're not even sure we can observe them much less quantify them. Thought and love, faith and emotion, have no boundaries. They are not confined to brain, neurons, touch or even words. They are not confined to time or space. We can only observe the effects of them, not their essences. Were scientists able to use their minds to incorporate these abstracts into their theories--non-mathematical though they are--I think they would be able to leap into realms of understanding far beyond their limited theories. Shamans and yogis routinely do this. Writers and artists, too. They use the mind to travel beyond their corporeal material, empirical worlds. They use imagination to explore the infinite pathways of cosmic possibilities.
     The question is:  How does one measure, or quantify, thought, emotion, faith and Love? If they could, science would try (and may!) But until that time--until abstracts and unfixed, variable phenomena are included in science's scope of imagination, we are stuck being ... stuck. A Grand Unified Theory could not be so grand nor unified if it didn't account for thought and emotion, faith and love, could it?
     What is needed is a bridge between the empirical and the abstract, the physical and the metaphysical, the subjective and the objective, the implicate and the explicate, here and there, this and that, church and state. One thing, one concept, to bridge--or unify--them all.

In the recently released science fiction film Interstellar, Christopher Nolan has his protagonists bring this subject into their conversations. The film begs for scientists to expand their thinking to incorporate abstracts--and especially love. Never before have I seen or heard presented so clearly how necessary it might be for the advancement and survival of Life and, perhaps, humankind, to rectify the gulf, to merge the dimensional thinking of science with the non-dimensional imagining of heart-based creative arts. Unfortunately, such a merger, such an event, is highly unlikely to come from humans coming out of our schools and school systems.
     If you look at the science taught to our young in schools and textbooks, the information being disseminated there is still stuck in much out-dated Newtonian principles. Texts and curricula have not yet begun to include much less embrace the Quantum Era. And yet, quantum theory was born over a hundred years ago! It's hard, observable, empirical facts all the way. Black holes and The Big Bang (theory) may be taught. Atomic and subatomic news and theories are only be mentioned in relation to nuclear weapons and atomic energy. Relativity might be mentioned--and maybe Schrodinger's cat--but the real significance and applications that quantum findings have to our lives, to our society, to paradigms dependent on cause and effect (like consumerism, and history)--to thought and behavior--are absent from school and media borne information--and they are very much absent from curriculum-initiated classroom discussion. It's as if the powers-that-be don't think we, the masses, can handle the information, or, worse, that they can't trust us with it.

     What introductory and general science books and classes are more likely to do are to share the most significant figures of science in storybook form--perhaps as historical characters--accompanying their contributions to science with 'interesting' factoids while glossing over or ignoring the impact and significance these contributions should have to our perception and our interaction with the world.
     Unfortunately, I believe that these facts-only, storybook versions of science's heroes and their accomplishments have been delivered in this meaningless, edited, trivial fashion on purpose. Teaching people that power is in the hands of the observer, the individual, would undermine the capitalist agenda of breeding mindless, perpetually dependent consumers. Therefore, any perceptual adjustments humankind should or could be making to an expanded understanding of Life, The Universe, and Everything--which might come as a result of the findings and insights revealed in the quantum era of science--have been purposely watered down or, more likely, just plain omitted. It is the same with anything that can be contrived as "spiritual:" it has been minimized, trivialized, or ignored. Instead, busyness, fear, helplessness, automation, entertainment, distraction, escape and addiction have been promoted, nurtured in our fast-paced, information-overload, rampant consumer society. Why? A confident, self-assured, self-reliant individual is not only difficult to control--difficult to 'herd'--but he usually makes a bad consumer. The current powers-that-be--our capitalist "Captains of Industry"--need easily manipulated consumers to sustain their power and wealth. 

     It wasn't always this way--and it won't be for much longer. According to my current and, yes, limited comprehension, Earth is in a place most distant from the embrace and power of Love and Light. This does not mean that Love and Light are absent from our time. Within the dualistic game that our sun is playing within Cosmic Creation--and, particularly, with its twin in the Pleiades star cluster--the effects of Love and Light are diminished by the "distance" our sun has traveled on its circuitous journey ("precession") around a Galactic Clock--a clock that the sun and its Pleiadean twin co-created for the express purpose of periodically testing themselves against the wide range of effects that can occur while "separated" from one's loving twin.
     Of a journey that is approximately 24,000 Earth years long (on average), it has been 13,500 years since Sol was last "with" its twin. The effect on humankind while Sol travels away from its twin is a steady diminishment of spiritual understanding. At its furthest distance (which occurred, on Sol's current journey, in the so-called "Dark Ages," around the year 500 A.D.), the human mind is most fixated with everything material and materialistic, is least aware of its spiritual nature and purpose. It is, therefore, quite a testament to the power of Spirit that there is any Love and Light on the planet right now!
     In my still limited comprehension of Life, The Universe, and Everything, Thought is an instrument of Creation. Perhaps it is the instrument of creation. It moves faster than light, faster than time. As a matter of fact, Thought has absolutely no allegiance to space, time, or dimensionality. It uses them, but it is not bound to their laws. And yet, Thought is a Creative force.
     Love also exists beyond any space-time continuum. To my understanding, Love is the Glue that Binds, the matrix of "water" in the "ocean" of Cosmic Creation. Love is ever present and never not present. Love is the constant presence of Divinity. It is the reminder of the Sacred Unity binding us all together--the constant reminder of the Oneness from which we all came, the nourishment we took with us when we created the Illusion of Separation, the 'directional beacon' reminding us of the Home we think we left and to which we are always welcome (even though we have, in fact, never left it).
     Now here comes the big leap: I posit before you that both Thought and Love are one in the same. That waves arising from the Heart and Mind are of the same origin as well as of the same substance. They are both creative forces. One, Love, is the power of Life, the power of Creation, the power to create; Thought is the conversion and direct focus of that power, of that potential energy, into Creation and creativity, into action.
     Now the reader may react to this by asking, But what about hateful, hurtful thoughts? In this view where Thought and Love are one and the same--or at least one arises from the infinite source pool of the other, how could "bad" or "evil" things happen? In my view, the "world" beyond space and time, beyond duality, there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, no better or worse, which means that, ultimately, there can be no "hateful" or hurtful thoughts (or even actions--or events!) for every thought or action is an act of creation, which is an act of love in that it is joyfully making something where nothing was before, and an act of creation can only be an act of Divine Joy, Truth, Love, and Beauty. An act of creation offers something new and unique to the Cosmos. An act of creation is only possible because of the Divinity of all things and is always performed for the Divine expression of infinite possibilities and growth experiences to the other entities of consciousness who are using the Illusions of Duality to convince themselves that they are separate and individuated. The experiences and lessons available to "others" through thoughts or acts of "hate" or "hurt" are brought into Creation as gifts for others to use (or not) for their evolutionary adventures in self-definition, self-actualization, and Self-realization. It's okay:  It's all good.
     Going back to the stimulus of Christopher Nolan's provocative film, Interstellar, I can't help but question whether or not Thought and Love may also be one and the same with Gravity. Think about it: Gravity is the undeniable and irresistible mutual attraction of two (or more) things. To my understanding it is constant and invariable. Since all of the Cosmos' Creations arise from the same Source, doesn't it make sense that they all should be attracted to each other--that they all want to stay together, to joyfully acknowledge and revel in their Divine Source, their Ultimate Oneness--that Gravity should be an extension of the unifying Divine Consciousness of all Creation?
     I believe that no formula is going to pin down or incapsulate the essence and power of Love, Thought, Faith, intention, imagination, or even gravity. Science is limited by its attachment to an underlying belief in the physicality of all things. Until this belief is suspended, is let go of, scientists will only be able to understand the Universe in physical terms.
     I see a day in the not too distant future--a day in which Light and Love are permeating the fog of ignorance and materialism--a day in which scientists become mystics, a day in which mystics agree to play with observable, empirical data. The two camps will get together. They will hash things out for a long time, and they will, eventually, merge into one camp, into one group. It is then that they will finally come up with a unifying system that will satisfy our understanding of Life, The Universe, and Everything. The only problem with this is that once again, it will be just a system, just a box, just a temporary and limited expression of our most expanded understanding of our selves and our place in the Cosmos. There will always be more. There will always seem to be inadequacy. The Divine discontent. So long as we continue to choose to play within the dualistic Illusions of Creation, we will always feel this twinge of discontent, this feeling that something isn't quite right, that maybe this isn't really real. And we will be right.