A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
January 4, 2004
I guess this is a kind of sequel to "The Persistence of Light" three weeks ago.
At this beginning of another year I want for you to consider the speed of light.
It has been fourteen or so billion years since this adventure, this experiment — got underway. Its first moments happened fast, if there is any point in talking about time in that inexpressible unfurling of being from potentiality. The light exploded into the inconceivable darkness and all this universe was born, in a moment.
But then the pace of change shifted kinda dramatically. For millions of years there were only the simplest elements, hydrogen, helium, floating around before more complex atoms, like iron, began to show up.
It was billions of years before the next epoch, when the lighter elements formed stars,
and then the stars collapsed in on themselves and became supernovae
and thereby creating the heavier elements like cobalt or nickel or copper or gold or uranium.
Then, the scene shifts to the story of evolution that started with the swirling dust and water on an obscure planet. Once the hundred or so elements known to us came to exist, another billion years brought the first living cells; and another billion, photosynthesis.
From there, it was not billions, but only millions of years that separated the appearance of bacteria that breathe oxygen, and then multicellular organisms and crustaceans, and then fish, and then dinosaurs. We might think dinosaurs were a failed experiment, since they're gone now, but they lasted for maybe 170 million years. And then there were mammals. And then: the scientifically impenetrable mystery of consciousness.
Now there's a British scientist1 who's laid all these epochs of development out from the Big Bang to now as though it were the 108 floors of the World Trade Center. Which is ironic, because he published his work only eleven years ago, never knowing that he couldn't have chosen a more dramatic symbol for sudden, monumental change.
And the story up to this point has brought us to the top floor. The first living cell would have been at about the 25th floor, the dinosaurs on floors 104 to 107, and mammals wouldn't come until 108, the top floor.
But there would be no homo erectus standing on two feet until a few inches from the roof on the top floor, and the Neaderthals with their bigger brains and tools wouldn't come until the last quarter-inch and the Pharaohs would rule Egypt a fiftieth of an inch from the top, the Greek and Roman empires a hundredth of an inch above them. The Renaissance happens within less than the thickness of a layer of paint.
The whole of modern history would play out in the thickness of a microscopic bacterium.
The age of the microchip and global warming and the Internet — invisible to any but the most delicate of scientific instrument.
Here we are, tucked away in the tiniest of spaces in time, starting a new year, and it's the scene of the most monumentally consequential of events.
Things are happening fast. Ray Kurzweil, the Boston inventor, has said, "we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be approximately 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)."2
There's a story astronomers tell. Once at an astronomy lecture somebody, looking very very worried, asked the speaker, "how long did you say it would be before the sun burns the Earth to a crisp?" And the lecturer ssays "six billion years," and the questioner, looking awfully relieved, says "thank God for that, I thought you said six million." At first some of this may seem just as blazingly irrelevant to our actual lives.
Yes, but I'm talking about the next twenty years.
The next moment for life on Earth turns "critical" because in the twenty-first century, humanity is more at risk than ever before from the misapplication of science.3
Now: Over the 14 billion years, the change has come in phases, in thoroughly different kinds.
There was the emergence of fundamental elements, and there was the dispersal of stars, and the appearance of biological life, and of human consciousness. The Agricultural Revolution brought change in a different arena than the Industrial or Information Revolutions.
Every one of these hugely important developments happens in something like one-quarter to one-tenth the time the previous one took. The intervals drop on a curve until the intervals approach zero. A singularity, when there is no interval. What would that be like? Can we handle such a speeding up of the pace of change? Someone has computed that we should reach the singularity, when there is no interval but only change and novelty, in the year 2035. Somebody else came up with 2012. At the speed of light, time stops.
It's mind-boggling. A compression inconceivably different from previous time. Are we ready? What are we supposed to do?
Not so far into his book, the renowned British scientist Sir Martin Rees drops a bombshell:
In 2002 the magazine Wired . . . inaugurated a series of "long bets." The idea was to gather some predictions about future developments in society, science, and technology, and thereby stimulate debate. . . . I staked one thousand dollars on a bet: "That by the year 2020 an instance of bioerror or bioterror will have killed a million people." Of course, I fervently hope to lose this bet. But I honestly do not expect to.4
This forecast involved looking less than twenty years ahead. Significantly, his book is entitled Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning.
So much is at stake. Everything, so far as human are concerned.
So far we have escaped a nuclear holocaust. But the sudden explosion of knowledge and technical capacities — especially in biology — what does this mean, what peril does this mean, in the next half-century? New sciences are about to put in the hands of small groups, into the hands of individuals, an awesome leverage over all our lives. So Dr Rees warns: "Our increasingly interconnected world is vulnerable to new risks; `bio' or `cyber,' terror or error." You can add to the list of new dangers misapplied robotics or nanotechnology.5
We know the horrors of history, the intertwined promise and peril of technology. Stalin's tanks and Hitler's trains and ovens used technology. Today the policies of our government regarding energy, technology, and profit versus the natural order amount to weapons of mass destruction: — as if there were to be no future generations.
We grasp what is at risk and we tremble. Something has to change. It's time for another revolution. A wiser, nobler human. Always there have been those who have foreseen the advent of a wiser, nobler human. Thinkers from Timothy Leary through scientists and philosophers past and present have proposed a quantum leap in human evolution. The philosopher Nietzsche once said, "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal." The great twentieth-century Indian mystic philosopher and poet Aurobindo spoke of "the appearance of the super[human]." He was convinced that humanity as we know ourselves "cannot be the end of the mysterious upward surge of Nature."
Can we get there, and cross the bridge fast enough? There are those who think the next stage in the evolution of consciousness will be aided by the technology itself. Max More, for instance, thinks it could result from huge networks of computers and their users "waking up," as he puts it, in the form of a community of minds, a distributed super-intelligent entity. He thinks it will involve a more intimate relationship between humans and computers.
Ray Kurzweil thinks that Artificial Intelligence will get us there — sometime around 2035 — if we work at it.
I'm certain that we will have to trust our own highest and most brilliant capacities — including technological ones — to get across that bridge. It will not do to say "Stop The Train, It's Going to Hell in a Handbasket." Even Bill Joy, the CEO of the tech giant Sun Systems, thinks we just have to lay off our pursuit of some kinds of knowledge, relinquish our curiosity.
But it won't do to despise our curiosity about the material world. As Kurzweil puts it, "What's the problem with the so-called material world? Is the world of matter and energy not profound enough? Is it truly necessary to look beyond the world we encounter to find transcendence?"
But then, he asks, what is the material world anyway? He writes:6
Consider the author of this chapter. I am not merely or even principally the material stuff I am made of because the actual particles that comprise me turn over quickly. . . . It is the immense, indeed transcendent, power of our pattern that persists.
Think about light. We think the world we normally experience everyday follows the predictable laws of Newton. Yet underlying everything there are patterns that will leave our minds spinning — mysterious and astonishing. In a single photon of light, there are deep mysteries. Simultaneously, a photon takes all paths available to it, only retroactively working out the ambiguities. It's both wave and particle, an apparent mathematical contradiction.
Fourteen billion years into the life of the universe. All this came from that first Light that appeared in the darkness, that was the work of the encompassing Immensity from which it came. And everywhere, whether we can see it or not, is light. Any exchange of energy between any two atoms anywhere in the universe involves the exchange of photons of light. Everywhere is light and there is no reason to suppose it is any less active and creative now than then. Somehow, we have come to realize, we are that light.
The speed of light: rapid, accelerating into the realm of consciousness.
You've heard the phrase from the 24th hexagram of the I Ching.
After a time of decay comes the turning point. The light that has been banished returns. There is movement, but it is not brought about by force. The movement is natural, arising spontaneously. For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy. The old is discarded and the new is introduced. Everything comes of itself at the appointed time. This is the meaning of heaven and earth."
Yeh? Could some ancient mystic have understood?
The speed of light: Nature accelerating into the realm of consciousness. Like the first light that spread wide the Universe and lighted the stars, the light of consciousness is expanding, creating nobler and higher forms of being. It will not cease. It is like a rushing stream that will not stop to be observed. Our minds flow with this stream of light; they cannot stand still.
This nobler human — even Ray Kurzweil owns that hope as our best and only hope:
One of the ways in which this universe of evolving patterns of matter and energy . . . expresses its transcendent nature is in the exponential growth of the spiritual values we attribute in abundance to God: knowledge, intelligence, creativity, beauty, and love.
The God-language isn't really adequate anymore. But let us leave the scientists to their theories about Artificial Intelligence. I want to turn to that modern mystic, Aurobindo. I want to think about Intelligence Itself, Life Itself, the Light the permeates everything, that is everywhere, though we cannot see the Light itself, the mystery beyond our present capacity to penetrate it. Spirit and Transcendence. What is in you and me. Aurobindo7 wrote:
The appearance of a human possibility in a material and animal world was the first glint of some coming divine Light, the first far-off promise of a godhead to be born out of Matter. . . . Out of the material consciousness in which our mind works as a chained slave is emerging the disk of a secret sun . . .Man is himself a little more than . . . a littleness that reaches to a wideness and a grandeur that are beyond him . . . His mind is a . . . moment of the universal Life. . . . This cannot be the end of the mysterious upward surge of Nature. There is something beyond, something that [human]kind shall be; it is see now only in broken glimpses through rifts in the great wall of limitations that deny its possibility and existence.
It's really an astounding statement. Or consider something one of Emerson's friends said — Sampson Reid:
The mind has attained an upward and onward look, and is shaking off the errors and prejudices of the past. . . . The loud call on the past to instruct us . . . comes back in echo from the future. . . . We appear to be approaching an age which will be the silent pause of merely physical force before the powers of the mind, the timid, subdued, awed condition of the brute, gazing on the erect and godlike form of man.8
It is not mere pulpit rhetoric to say that it is time for a spiritual revolution, a Revolution of Consciousness. Whatever it has to do with technology, it must have to do with spiritual disciplines and exploration, with soul-deep passion for Life Itself, for this great Light. It is time, and it is, I believe, the meaning of these times. It can come like a great dawn. But of us it asks not less than everything. The frontiers of this spiritual revolution have barely begun to turn back the tide of fear and greed, violence and hate, and superstition that bows to the authority of gurus or popes or scriptures or Wahhabi clerics. The Revolution must come soon.
We grasp what is at risk and we tremble. The trembling is good. Once we've been shocked out of our embarrassment at talking about such things — then we can allow ourselves, commit ourselves, to be instruments of the coming of another revolution, a spiritual revolution. I want you to think about this, and seriously.
Communities of consciousness around the world — Unitarian Universalist congregations among them — must be in earnest about this. Must not be too skeptical about the centrality of their role in what must now happen in our time.
Martin Rees warns quite soberly:
We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos, not just for our Earth. . . . [H]umanity is more at risk than at any earlier phase in its history. . . . [W]ill these vast expanses of time be filled with life, or as empty as the Earth's first sterile seas? The choice may depend on us, this century.9
Can the primitive laws of nation and conquest, domination and division, greed and waste, depravity and futility, be transformed, turned to music, the strains of a higher consciousness?
We have known times of spiritual revolution before, revolution of consciousness, and some of it came into the world in the persons of our own spiritual forebears.
When I walk the Boston streets where the small, gaunt man we remember as William Ellery Channing once walked, I am breathless with the immensity of change in consciousness that great man signalled. His message was that we are godlike, we are not fallen sinners but sometimes erring emanations from that Immensity that he called God.
In his time, superstition reigned, and slavery, and outmoded images of the universe and the divine. Mr. Channing saw beyond the horizon and his vision was infectious. We are different people and our nation is different and our world because of him.
Those who heard him learned to ask the questions no one had dared to ask; and they caught a vision of beauty that melted away the vengeful, parochial vision of the God who sent nations into war and whose pulpits taught his believers to hold slaves. In its place was planted an anthem that rang from the very depths of existence with all the sorrow and pathos, but it was a gentle sweet song of love and beauty that began a work of transformation. And the new strain was taken up and expanded and enriched by those he inspired. Light streamed from their minds: — from Emerson, from Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, from Theodore Parker, from Lydia Child — just as it does from Gandhi or Aurobindo or the Dalai Lama — or, perhaps, as it will from you.
Still there must be visionaries and prophets; still must go forth the truth that we, all of us, however dehumanized or corrupted, are children of the light; — that humanity, our humanity — is the magnificent achievement of Nature. It is an unmistakable lesson of our history that our humanity can be compromised, lost. How it can be lost, and how it might be regained, is a subject for another day. Yet we have no greater hope. There is nothing greater that we know. There is no stronger guard against the worst implications of history. Our unfolding humanity is our one best hope.
I read with some astonishment Elizabeth Peabody's reminisces of Dr. Channing. On one of their long walks, Dr. Channing said this:
But this Unitarianism which so many people seem to think is the last word of the human mind, is only the vestibule! We have everything to learn!10
A vestibule. Mr. Channing watched with both trembling and delight as his spiritual children in Concord ignited a further revolution of consciousness. But we, too, are children of that spiritual revolution. We, too, must take up the song, add new harmonies, new words and themes.
We have come to this moment, and our time presents us with new and even starker urgency. So much is at stake. Everything, so far as human are concerned.
This revolution of consciousness and of spirit must be our primary and most urgent project.
Finally, this: from Aurobindo.11
How long shall our spirits battle with the Night
And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,
We who are vessels of a deathless Force
and builders of the godhood of the race?
In the vague light of [our] half-conscious mind, . . .
Only we hear the feet of passing gods.
All we have done is ever still to do.
Baffled and beaten back we labour still;
In anguish we labour that from us may rise
A larger-seeing [hu]man with nobler heart,
The executor of the divine attempt . . .
Forerunners of a divine multitude . . .
I saw them cross the twilight of an age, . . .
The labourers in the quarries of the gods, . . .
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner [hu]man,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature's face.
©2004 by F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
Sampson Reed, Observations on the Growth of
the Mind, 1826.
The mind has attained an upward and onward look, and is shaking off
the errors and prejudices of the past. . . . The loud call on the past to
instruct us . . . comes back in echo from the future. . . . We appear to be
approaching an age which will be the silent pause of merely physical force
before the powers of the mind, the timid, subdued, awed condition of the
brute, gazing on the erect and godlike [human form][form of man].
We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind
in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the
phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life
should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we
accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter
and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life
a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little
objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental
consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are
beyond Mind.
If evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of
that which slept or worked in her, . . . it is also the overt realization of
that which she secretly is.
If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent
Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the
realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate
aim possible to man upon earth.
From "Rough Times"
We are trying to live . . . . . .
Those slimy fish with air sacs were ugly From "Heavy as in Being Squashed"
I don't hope for justice
in this silence.
Readings
Aurobindo, The Life Divine
Marge Piercy
as if we were an experiment
conducted by the future,
as they hauled up on the mud flats
heaving and gasping. How clumsy we are
in this new air we reach with such effort
and cannot yet breathe.
till we grow it,
only that for every action
comes a reaction equal
and opposite, and in the
dialectics of rebirth
the past never again
breaks from the egg.
Meditate
We come, we gather, we enter this quiet, the depth of quiet: —
Awake, aware, in the midst of an aching world,
with hearts that sometimes ache —
In a world endangered, this world of life and shining promise
imperiled, trembling on some terrible precipice; —
And here, somehow, we know
A calm confidence may overtake us
A surging hope lay hold on us
from within: —
Urgently, insistently, —
A steady clear light
Glows, radiates, from the heart of us, a force of soul,
Ancient and yet new, within and yet everywhere,
essence and heart and soul of us
and of all being
even as the peril deepens,
in this aching, this breaking time.
Oh renew in us the promise of life, the promise held in the heart of us:
The strength of love, clarity of vision,
New and wondrous arts for our hands,
and for these minds and souls,
a mightier music,
Resolving the dissonance, drawing peace from disorder,
and from this chaos, the new creation: —