The challenge of conscious self-awareness is unlike anything that has occurred for millions of years. We are finding ourselves in the midst of a vast transition. How are we to respond? For we sense we are in a dark night—we dwell in unknowing and yet grope forward. The path is still unclear. With what shall we navigate?
The path is uncertain because our sense of larger purpose and destiny is clouded. We are seeking patterns that connect us to a vaster destiny—a vital participation in Earth’s unfolding. There is nothing more mysterious than destiny—of a person, of our species, of our planet, or of the universe itself. But in the modern era the question was considered unimportant compared with the practical necessities of commerce and trade.
Our puzzlement regarding our destiny is especially poignant since everything else in the universe seems to have a role. The primeval fireball had the work of bringing forth stable matter. The stars had the work of creating the elements. The same is true on Earth. Each species has its unique role to play for the larger community. The phytoplankton in the oceans fill the air with oxygen and thus enable every animal to breathe. That is their great work, to fill each lung with nourishing breath.
But do we humans have such a role? With respect to the universe itself—is there a reason for our existence? Is there a great work required of us?
Throughout the modern period, we have often been dissatisfied with the traditional answers concerning human destiny. Maybe this restlessness reveals something significant in our deep nature. Other species found their biome and settled into it, but nothing has seemed to satisfy us fully. Every place we went we felt we were at home, yet not at home. Some urge carried us forward from place to place.
Perhaps our destiny has something to do with this desire to journey and to experience the depths of things. Perhaps that is why we are here—to drink so deeply of the powers of the universe we become the human form of the universe. Becoming not just nation-state people, but universe people. Becoming a form of human being that is as natural to the universe as the stars or the oceans; knowing how we belong and where we belong so that we enhance the flourishing of the Earth community.
In this process of becoming human we are searching for ongoing guidance. We will need to know what we can rely on. So many of our former certainties are gone now, or are in the process of changing. In order to move into the future we need to know what will be there for us.
First of all, there are the stars. We can count on their presence, their immense fiery light. In the depths of night they are a reassurance that we can find our way. They stun us with their beauty, drawing us into wonder. This sense of wonder is one of our most valuable guides on this ongoing journey into our future as full human beings.
Wonder is a gateway through which the universe floods in and takes up residence within us. Consider the stars. They shine down on Earth for four and a half billion years. Then these new creatures emerged, these humans. What was different about them is that they were amazed every time they beheld the stars. Their amazement inspired works of art and science. Hundreds of thousands of years later, humans discovered that it was these stars that forged the elements of their bodies.
By dwelling in a world of wonder, humans were led to realize that they were children of the stars—something intuited in early myths and uncovered by modern science. They came to understand that everything in the universe then forms a huge interconnected family that we can call “all my relations.”
Wonder is not just another emotion; it is rather an opening into the heart of the universe. Wonder is the pathway into what it means to be human, to taste the lusciousness of sun-ripened fruit, to endure the bleak agonies of heartbreak, to exult over the majesty of existence.
The universe’s energies penetrate us and awaken us. Through each moment of wonder, no matter how small, we participate in the entrance of primal energies into our lives.
However insignificant we may feel with respect to the age and size of the universe, we are, even so, beings in whom the universe shivers in wonder at itself. By following this wonder we have discovered the ongoing story of the universe, a story that we tell, but a story that is also telling us.
The oceans too will be our guide as we journey into the future. The ocean is a power that can dissolve things into itself. Even the hardest rocks, given enough time, will become one with the ocean’s waves.
With our symbolic consciousness, we are very much like the ocean with its power to pour through boundaries. What we long for is profound intimacy of relationship. Our human imagination brought something radically new to Earth’s life: the capacity to experience the world from another’s perspective. We call this empathy. What does this mean? In the mammalian world, a mother bear has the capacity to identify with her young cubs and thus devote herself to their well-being. With the emergence of humans, we have arrived at an evolutionary breakthrough for being able to develop compassion, not just for our offspring, but for all beings of every order of existence. With this alone, Earth gave rise to the possibility of an empathetic being who could flow into and become one with the intimate feelings of any being.
Our human destiny is to become the heart of the universe that embraces the whole of the Earth community. We are just a speck in the universe, but we are beings with the capacity to feel comprehensive compassion in the midst of an ocean of intimacy. That is the direction of our becoming more fully human.
Finally, along with the stars and the oceans, we can consider what we make with our hands as a way to reflect on human destiny. Our urge to make things, to create things, is certainly as deep as the urge of the Sun to shine and the Earth to spin. Our destiny is woven into the mystery of creativity and time.
For one of the most stunning discoveries in twentieth century cosmology is the deep sense of time that the universe carries. This is not a mechanical time but a cosmological time of universe emergence. In some remarkable way the universe seems to be similar to the unfolding of a giant red oak, where one stage of development leads to the next, as when the galaxies began to form several hundred million years after the birth of the universe. It was not possible for galaxies to emerge earlier or later. If any galaxies started to appear in the first hundred thousand years they would have been torn apart instantly. The energy conditions and patterns of organization necessary for such a magnificent feat were present then and only then. And with the galaxies in a stable form, it was suddenly possible for second- and higher-generation stars with planets to form. These solar systems could not have formed in an earlier era.
It is the same with our moment. We are in the midst of vast destruction, but it is simultaneously a moment of profound creativity. We are involved with building a new era of Earth’s life. Our human role is to deepen our consciousness in resonance with the dynamics of the fourteen-billion-year creative event in which we find ourselves. Our challenge now is to construct livable cities and to cultivate healthy foods in ways congruent with Earth’s patterns. Our role is to provide the hands and hearts that will enable the universe’s energies to come forth in a new order of well-being. Our destiny is to bring forth a planetary civilization that is both culturally diverse and locally vibrant, a multiform civilization that will enable life and humanity to flourish.
Because we know that life is an adventure involving both chaos and order we sometimes want desperately to control things. And whenever our fear grows too strong we become vulnerable to simplistic promises concerning the future. But no one knows what the future holds—all of that is hidden in the darkest night. The future is being created by all of us, and it is a messy and confusing process. What is needed is courage to live in the midst of the ambiguities of this moment without drawing back into fear and a compulsion to control.
Are there guarantees? No, none. But there are reasons for confidence.
When the universe was just quarks and leptons, could anyone have known that it was in the process of bringing forth stars and galaxies? Or later, when Earth emerged, and life existed in the form of tiny jiggling cells, could anyone have seen in them the possibilities of the bluefin tuna or a vast temperate rain forest? We find ourselves inside an amazing drama filled with danger and risk but also stunning creativity. This has happened many times in the past. Two billion years ago, when the atmosphere became so filled with oxygen, all of life was deteriorating. The only way for the life of that time to survive was to burrow deep into the mud at the bottom of the oceans. The future of Earth seemed bleak. And yet, in the midst of that crisis a new kind of cell emerged, one that was not destroyed by oxygen, but was in fact energized by it. Because of this miracle of creativity, life exploded with an exuberance never seen before.
It is in the nature of the universe to move forward between great tensions, between dynamic opposing forces. If the creative energies in the heart of the universe succeeded so brilliantly in the past, we have reason to hope that such creativity will inspire us and guide us into the future. In this way, our own generativity becomes woven into the vibrant communities that constitute the vast symphony of the universe.