Have you ever wondered why your spirits are lifted on a sunny day and not in a hot bright room—or paused to consider that the energy of your life is itself the recycled light of the Sun? Have you spent more of your life thinking about suntans, sunglasses, and sunblock than about the nature of the star in your movie—the movie of Life? As you read these words, the energy that moves your eyes and the energy with which you comprehend their meaning is the light of our Sun being expressed through a new medium: you. It's no wonder that we enjoy bathing in Sun's light.
Is there any reason why we cannot consider whether that which brings us the light of life might be conscious of life itself? It was once a common understanding. History's most enduring monuments were built with the Sun and other heavenly bodies in mind. As we explore the history of these cultures, we can easily overlook the one underlying principle common to the Egyptians, Maya, Celts, and Greeks, not to mention the Sumerians, the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Gnostics, the Khmer, the Norse, the Inca, the Aztec, the natives of South and North America, and countless other cultures through the world, including today's Hindu, Zoroastrian, and Shinto religions. This is the recognition that our local star is a conscious entity—a celestial being worthy of divine status. Yet despite being the world's most worshipped deity, the concept of a living Sun became one of the most powerful and unspoken taboos of the Western world and one which modern researchers of the above cultures are often reluctant to breach.
Many scientists question the existence of consciousness itself. Since they have no tools with which to weigh or measure it, and no formula to express it, they find no alternative but to deny its existence. They believe consciousness to be an illusion created by our brain to serve some evolutionary purpose, as yet undetermined. Some of this “Grand Illusion” camp have a corollary to their belief, which is that human beings have no free will—that every single thing we do or think (every word, each wink or inadvertent stink) was somehow predetermined by the arrangement of particles immediately after the Big Bang.
For scientists who do acknowledge the existence of consciousness, it was assumed until recently that human beings were the only vessel that it could possibly inhabit. Nothing else was deemed to be aware of its own existence, or functioning on anything other than the level of a biological machine solely driven by the need to propagate its species. Some in this camp now argue that orangutans and dolphins and a handful of other species, mainly primates, might just share this “rare” facility. But worms and trees rarely figure in their consideration, even though bacteria colonies are seen to act like a unified intelligence.
Scientists who may disagree over whether or not consciousness is an illusion will agree that it is the greatest mystery of our existence; this, even though it is consciousness that is seeking to understand itself. So how can we be sure that nothing else experiences this mysterious experience that we cannot understand? We cannot be sure; we simply perpetuate a well-entrenched Church tradition. It was not science that made us look on Sun worship as primitive and ignorant, but the Roman Church that took an extremely dim view of anybody who disagreed. Scientific thought does not even entertain the idea of stellar consciousness, dismissing it out of habit, not by the application of science.
Were you to have told a Zoroastrian or Mayan Sun worshipper of the fusion reaction in the core of the Sun, describing the very different functions of the next six layers, explaining the corona and the solar wind that spins from it, their jaw would have dropped in delighted awe. Our scientific understanding would give them greater cause to revere the character bringing light and the power of life to our world. The knowledge of anatomy does not diminish our status as conscious living beings.
However, unlike the ancients, we now view the Sun as little more than a dumb ball of hot gas that happens to accidentally provide us with the light of life. But science has found out an awful lot about this hot ball of highly charged plasma (it's not actually gas) and its stellar siblings. Unlike the ancients, we know Sun and others stars turn simple hydrogen and helium into all the elements that make up us and the world around us—from carbon and oxygen, to iron and gold. They are the transmutation engines of the cosmos. By weight, 93 percent of the matter in your body was born in the body of a star.
We know that stars turn matter itself into the energy of light, agent of the electromagnetic force. Light informs us of the world around us and brings it energy. Light is the catalyst in photosynthesis, on land and in the world's oceans, where water molecules and carbon dioxide from the air are rearranged into the basic building blocks of the entire vegetable world. During this process, the energy of Sun's light is stored in plants and their seeds, transferring to us when we eat those basic foods or another animal that ate them. This is the energy that powers life and consciousness.
We are made of stardust and powered by starlight. This much we know.
Unlike the ancients, we know that stars are complex and interconnected balls of plasma. Our Sun has seven distinct layers, all performing different functions with some of them rotating around each other at different speeds. Its powerful corona, an invisible energy field, occupies more space than Sun itself and is thought to manage various solar features including sunspots, solar flares, coronal filaments, and coronal mass ejections. We identify and measure electromagnetic field lines connecting the corona to Earth. In 2008 NASA discovered a magnetic portal the diameter of Earth that connects Sun's corona to our planet's geomagnetic field, through which tons of high-energy particles are believed to pass at eight-minute intervals in what is called a “flux transfer event.” We know that the solar wind spinning off Sun's corona twists into a giant electromagnetic bubble, the heliosphere, which embraces and protects the solar system as it travels through the galaxy at an estimated 45,000 miles per hour. Scientists rank Sun's corona as its most mysterious feature. Perhaps it is as great a mystery as human consciousness. Perhaps it embodies the mind of Sun.
Unlike the ancients, we know that all those stars in the night sky are related to our Sun. We see that most stars live as couples, called “binary systems” by astronomers, and that they are not scattered randomly but live in communities called “stellar clusters.” Every star sends its own unique signature into space and may have undiscovered connections to other stars, like those recently discovered connecting Earth to Sun. Electromagnetic fields have been discovered spanning deep space, connecting galaxy to galaxy.
Unlike us, the ancients felt connected to the heavens and believed that the consciousness of the Sun and planets influenced our consciousness, and thus the course of our lives. They carefully constructed monuments designed to connect our human energies to those of the Sun and other celestial beings. Today we know little of their knowledge and skills, of why and how they created the structures that survive to this day.
The harnessing of light in its multiple wavelengths underpins nearly all our technology of information transfer, from radio to TV, smartphones to wi-fi, optic cables to MRI scans. Within its narrow “visible” spectrum, light informs us and other animals of the world around us. Our cells and those of other species use photons to communicate with each other, and we discover plants communicating with photons. It does not seem far-fetched to consider that when stars are dispatching photons of many frequencies into the cosmos, they are serving the same purpose—the exchange of information.
Perhaps if scientists abandoned that old religious taboo against considering consciousness in anything other than us or things like us, they would not need fixes like “dark matter” to explain why galaxies do not behave like accidental mechanical systems. Essentially, “dark matter” is little more than the name given to the solution for a problem that has not yet been solved—it might as well be called “Factor X.” Perhaps the reason galaxies don't fall apart is because they are not dumb balls of gas reacting to nothing more than the laws of physics, but are instead joined-up communities of intelligent dynamic beings. Just a thought.
I do not claim that Sun's behavior proves it and other stars to be conscious beings—simply that from an unbiased viewpoint and considering all the science, this looks like the most likely option. It is the default option humanity had always held until it was burned from our culture, literally, by a jealous Church. Now, with the supporting data to hand, and burning at the stake out of vogue, let us reconsider this idea with an open mind, free of irrational taboos.
Acknowledgment of stellar consciousness changes everything, and I explore the inevitable implications of this within my book Sun of gOd. Perhaps the most profound of these recognizes the status of light itself, for which our Sun is the local agent. And from a personal perspective, can there be anything more important to our spiritual well-being than reestablishing a connection with the life-giving star in the movie of Life?