Immortal Being (8)
June 11, 2010
BBC TV produces some stunning scientific programmes, such as “Wonders of the Solar System”, a fascinating 5-part series that explores the majestic sights of our local neighbourhood through the lens of scientific explanation. It’s presenter, Professor Brian Cox, is a highly engaging guy, with an enthusiasm for portraying the gloriously imaginative that quite literally takes you to far-away places!
I got a number of things from watching the series.
That our concept of life (and the intelligence that we assign it) must continue to expand, so that we always get the biggest picture of what we’re seeing and continually grow our understanding.
Interestingly, the last programme focuses on the search for alien life. Surely a cosmic joke. Professor Cox earnestly talks about making contact beyond this world and yet the series repeatedly asserts that what we find ‘out there’ can also be found right here, on our own world. Alien life is all around us. In fact the elements that compose our bodies originate from stars. It’s the definition of alien that hinders a clear understanding of what’s already here – of who we really are. For really there is nothing alien at all – just a perspective of whatever we haven’t yet experienced or been in relationship with.
Our relationship with our environment determines our course of action and affects our view of what’s occurring worldwide (and beyond) .
The series shows some marvellous footage of one of Io’s volcanoes, where volcanic debris explodes from the moon’s surface up to a height of 500km. Io is one of Jupiter’s moons and subject to vast gravitational pulls, both from Jupiter and from neighbouring moons. But Earth too has it’s share of spectacular outages – whether natural, as with the recent Icelandic eruption, or human folly, as with the BP oil spill. The scope of these events focuses our attention on the actions that we adopt in order to adapt.
It occurs to me that we need a world committee to take effective action on anything that has global impact. And that action needs to be energetic and conscious, rather than a knee-jerk unconscious response from a company or country trying to put things right.
It’s time to engage a cosmic perspective – that we are all totally responsible for living here. That our actions must be those of a unified race,
- whose combined initiatives keep the global eco-system in balance,
- whose actions are for the good of all and
- whose visions extend beyond the present moment to encompass our collective future, where prosperity is not counted in coin but is the management of all our resources.
Therefore, we would never see waste or mismanagement, for what arises from us is the authorship of world management.
When we know that our actions are part of a unified plan that calls us to interact on every level with every being, then we are in a profound relationship with all life. We cannot be individually separate from others in our thinking (and treat them as alien) because what wants to emerge is something so strong and powerful and totally embracing of all forms of life, that we are collectively forever changed.
So look again at the image of Io’s volcano and imagine the power of new life bursting its way through the undergrowth of obscure thinking, allowing us to voice a clear understanding of why we are here – in this world, in this Cosmos – understanding what we are being shown.
The need to be imaginative is paramount, for imaginative enquiry sparks our exploration of everything.
A couple of decades or so ago, it was commonly believed that all the great discoveries had been made and that there was really nothing new to know. The mindset of established academic authority required empirical proof for anything to exist and so there were self imposed limitations on what was deemed real and accessible – on what was permitted to exist. The world of energy sensitivity was only just beginning to be explored by ordinary people … holding a possibility that there might be something more than the 5 known senses.
Nowadays it’s easier to be spontaneous and live in a world of energy awareness; to discover what inspires and excites us; to engage our creativity; and to question/examine/ponder anything and everything. The Internet has made it easy to access information and parade new discoveries. It’s allowed us to communicate globally, on a scale previously unimagined. So now we realise that we are only at the beginning of our enquiries about what truly exists in the vastness of the Cosmos. And we do that with the knowing that nothing is fixed anymore … that whatever we thought was true is already changing.
This TV series affirms our immortality. It suggests that we can rewrite what it is to be human, what it is to live. That we can imagine that life exists elsewhere and that it’s intelligence is something that we might have to align to in order to communicate with it and understand it.
We can imagine that the atmosphere found on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, even though composed mainly of nitrogen and methane, is capable of supporting some form of life, whose nature we have yet to establish.
And we can imagine that, if bacteria can survive for millions of years beneath an Antarctic glacier, then the ice cap of Europa may contain viable living micro organisms. The nature of life, the conditions for life to flourish, and the longevity of organic life is suddenly thrown wide open.
Our power to imagine holds the key to our immortality, for we are not compelled to deal with the advice of others telling us what is possible and what we can do with our lives. We have discovered self-reliance and are now moving towards a conscious alliance with all of life.
I look again at that picture of Io’s volcanic eruption and I’m reminded of oil gushing from a well. It is a silent call to action. So I acknowledge the irony of what I see and I align with what life asks me to do. I participate. I join in the dance of the BP oil spill and whisper to all the life in the oceans that we not view this incident as an incapacitance but that marine life can utilise this abundance. I call upon the micro organisms to play their part in breaking up the oil slick; I call upon the technology to seal off this spillage; and I call upon the need for us all to work together in overseeing what is to be done now.
It has been said many times that we are one world, one life, one collaboration. Now we need to implement the actual performance of that in everything that we do, because until we do so then we will fail to feel our interconnectedness and will only perceive the apparent destruction rather than see the infinite beauty.
The infinite beauty spans the Cosmos because it all fits together as One.
* The TV series aired in the UK during March/April this year.