Miriam MacGillis and Cosmology Revisited, part 2 by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Part 1 was posted yesterday. Miriam MacGillis’ words from Education for a Small Planet continue:

“And those implications, have been the unspoken assumptions which lie at the heart of the way western civilization evolved, distinctly different from eastern civilization or from tribal civilizations. That’s why we look so different. That’s why in 300 years where I live, our ancestors totally, totally altered the natural world. Their obsession with development is outside themselves.

“So, what has transpired in the unfolding of western civilization has been this extra-ordinary capacity of the human in its rational, linear, analytical mode of knowing, to understand, to probe, to analyze, to uncover, to discover, to alter, to change, to redesign and to bring about a better state of affairs than what was. Whether it was the discovery of fire, or the wheel or the printing press or the computer, always the real issue behind the technology is not the technology itself, it’s the vision of bringing about development, the perfection of.

“Now ironically, it’s because of that very detachment from the world that the western mind was free to do that. “If this is just matter, you can do anything you want with it.” That’s not really where there is any moral dimension. Moral development happens between humans, human/human, human groupings and human/god. That is why the whole unfolding of western civilization, we were able to probe to such a depth of the physical energies of the world that in this century we were able to do what we did.  

“And that was to take the last indivisible particle of the matter that we assumed was the very very last. .  . after this is it  . . . to take the atom and to split it open. You see the Delaware people never could have done it. That would have been total absurdity. To break open the mother? To break open the spirit? Couldn’t do it. Not because they weren’t intelligent. It made no sense.

“Of course, when we did that, that was when we discovered what the Delaware people always knew. That what was inside the atom was not matter. Was not material. Was not knowable. But rather had a profound psychic, spiritual, luminous, intelligible dimension. And that exploration of the world of inner space has caused us to change everything.

“Our ability to develop our knowledge and power over the material world has also given us the capacity to, in this century, in our lifetime for most of us, to breakthrough the laws of gravity and to be able to take ourselves right off the planet and go out and from that long distance of space, turn around and see ourselves for the first time.

“The Delaware’s people might have done that in a kind of spiritual trance not because they got into a machine and broke the laws of gravity.

“It’s been in this century that we have been able to learn how to read the radio waves coming in from outer space. And to pick up the sounds of the universe at its beginning. We begin to approximate its age. And to have to reshuffle all of our old assumptions about time or to learn how to read the carbon, the strata of the earth. And be able to rethink all of our assumptions about the age of our planet.  And its been this whole exploration technologically into knowing the earth and its physical dimensions that have caused us to radically, radically have to rethink and redefine, not only the earth, and the universe, but to redefine at the species level who the human is.

“We now approximate the age of the universe at about 15 billion years. And we know its beginnings was in hydrogen. And now we’re beginning to grapple with the implications of, not only this universe as an unfolding, still becoming, still evolving, process, not just in its physical dimension but in its inner spaces as well.  And we know the universe went from hydrogen to helium to carbon and from that complexity into the greater and greater and greater expanding complexities which has brought the universe to where it is.  It is now some 15 billion years later and now we’re beginning to grasp that this has been not only an unfolding its physical dimension as a single unbroken sequence that goes from hydrogen to the present but also in its inner space, in its inner dimension, it is a single unbroken, unfolding process which is not material, but which is this inner potential to expand its capabilities even as the physical capabilities of the universe expand.

“And that only some 5 billion years ago, just recently, our sun, the stars, exploded. And this was a star with an extra-ordinary complexity of atomic elements. And its that complexity of atomic elements that make is possible for the most extraordinary things to happen. Because as this star explodes and shoots off parts of itself, those parts cool and begin to go around in orbit. And our solar system begins to coalesce. And in that solar system, our particular planet goes through an extraordinary unfolding process.

“One of the key things for us to get our heads around in that though is that we are speaking about the universe as this unbroken sequence of events which expresses itself as this event. And as the Earth. The Earth is the universe at a new stage of its unfolding.

“And with this particular planet, some extraordinary things begin to happen. Because of those atomic elements cooling, as the core of the Earth burns and spews off gasses into space and they cool, come back down as moisture, this planet becomes a fluid planet. A water planet. And its proximity to the sun with that regulation of temperatures begins to have some marvelous effects.

“And as the complexity of those elements come together to crystalize in the mineral crust of the Earth, out of the oceans we begin to see the first stirrings of life. Because those amino acids which form and combine to make protein finally bring forth life. But what we’re talking about is the Earth as the subject which becomes alive.

“It’s the Earth in the unfolding of those complexities which finally in that stage of protein awakens into life. And that life is connected at its inner dimension with the same unbroken sequence which is in the inner space of hydrogen and of all atoms.

“It’s a single event unfolding. It’s a single communion with itself expanding. And as this material dimension expands so does the potential for this inner non-material dimension to unfold into life. So the Earth is the planet in which the universe awakens into life.

“If we could trace the 5 billion year of planet Earth and watch the stages of greater and greater and greater complexity out of which it unfolds we begin to see that as it begins to form as a planet that we can now recognize in its later stages, that life as we know it in its greater complexity moving out from the oceans into the diversity of vegetation and insect and animal life, bird life. That it’s gone through the most extraordinary, the most extraordinary journey. It’s hard to imagine that in evolutionary time. But if we could take this 5 billion years and squeeze it into a one year time frame and accelerate that [push it open] to see the movement of that, it would have taken the first 8 months of that year for the earth to unfold to that degree of complexity that life as we know it would have emerged. But all this process could not be skipped. Each stage was the necessary set of conditions, the necessary set of complexities which allowed the next stage to unfold from within it.

“If we were to look at the last 4 months of the year, this is the period when all of those life forms in their genetic coding becoming more and more and more diverse as the DNA and the genetic memory of species expanded. And finally out of that 4 month process, within the mammal kingdom a nervous system encased in bone was able to expand, become more and more complex. A brain structure to more and more and more complex.  But now the Earth was not only capable of life but the Earth awoke into consciousness. And that’s who the human is.

“The human is the being in whom the Earth has become conscious of itself. But it’s the Earth we are talking about as the subject or even more intrinsically, the human is the being in whom after 15 billion years, the universe becomes conscious of itself. Or as Peter Russell would say, “the human person is a star’s way of knowing it’s a star.”

“The human is the being in whom the earth learns how to think, to understand, to comprehend, to reason, to analyze, to decipher, to remember, to organize, to choose, to act, to decide and in the deepest definition of the human, the human is the Earth.”