Green River Suite: Robbie Basho

Fifty years ago, I bought a Robbie Basho album sight unseen, or heard, just on a whim.  Some months before I had finally made a connection with a particular spiritual master and when I glanced at a photo of Robbie on the back of the album cover in question, I had the feeling Robbie followed the same master. No surprise then when I read the liner notes and it was dedicated to said master.

I met Robbie after one of his concerts, drove him up to Vancouver, BC, for a show, visited him once at his hovel of an apartment in Berkeley, and produced a concert for him in Seattle about forty years ago.  Maybe 50 people showed up.  Robbie was discouraged about the lack of interest in his music.  I told him I thought he was about fifty years ahead of his time.

As it turns out, a biographical film has been made of him, "The Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho," and if you visit any songs of his posted on Youtube, he is constantly being discovered anew.  I find that heartening, that people are finally able to hear what he has to offer.

I remember sending out press releases ahead of his concert.  Robbie had provided me with some materials, including an interview by a critic who astutely observed that it was as though the "bag" around Robbie's personality had just melted off years ago.  If you spent any time around Robbie, it was impossible not to notice his idiosyncracies.  You know the chatter we all have going through our heads all the time?  Well, Robbie's chatter constantly came out of his mouth.  You had a front row seat to Robbie's subconscious, whether you wanted it or not.

In the film about him, some people attribute that to a period of hard drug use when he was younger.  No doubt there is some truth to that.  But it's also a case study of what happens to a human being when they devote their entire energy to their spiritual pursuits -- their ego dissolves, at least to some extent.  Usually, you never see that happen, nor do you see much evidence of it, beyond the bizarre and unpredictable behavior that spiritual students sometimes evince.  

I've had brief periods in my life where forces beyond my control began to assert themselves from within.  It can be frightening.  I'm not talking about insanity or schizophrenia; I'm talking about the higher impersonal forces that direct the broad currents of human life.  If they start to take yours apart, it's disorienting.  What perhaps is different than mental illness is that in a situation where something "higher" has begun to effect your interior life, you are also granted insights and a wider, deeper perspective on life than perhaps was previously available to you.  The trick is to try and make those new insights permanent. It's harder than you might think and easier said than done.  

My own brief experiences taught me that balance is precarious in any such situation.  I think Robbie's apparent peculiarities were more likely a result of his spiritual commitment rather than anything else.  But then, that's just my two cents on the matter.  What do I know?

If you want to hear what a musically gifted individual with a strong spiritual bent sounds like, then here's your chance.

Time Dilation

The concept of time dilation is a crucial aspect of the science fiction in the movie, "Interstellar."  But time dilation is an actual, measurable event in the real world.  For instance, let's say we had a nuclear or atomic clock placed ten feet above the surface of the earth, and another laying upon the ground.  The clock at ten feet would move faster than the one on the ground, because the gravitational pull on the ground is stronger than the gravitational pull ten feet off the ground -- gravity slows time down.  The closer you are to a strong gravitational force, the slower time moves, and if that stronger gravitational force were off earth, the slower time would move there, relative to time on earth.  Thus, on the fictional planet near a black hole in "Interstellar," one hour on the planet's surface is supposedly equal to seven years on earth.  

Hence, time would be experienced differently in different parts of the universe, relative to earth.  Your own subjective experience of time would be the same, but if we relate your experience to a "home ground" reference point such as earth, your experience and mine would differ.  

Why should gravity slow time down?  Gravity slows motion and time is motion.   Nothing is static in the Universe.  First an object is at point A, then point B, then point C.  Objects appear to move over a span of time.  If there was no motion in the Universe, there would be no time.  If we were all frozen in time, then time itself would cease to exist.  

But this is only part of the story of time.  Time is peculiarly subjective.  For instance, you can be in a particular mental state -- as opposed to a different spatial or physical location -- and your experience of time can be unique to you.  

Athletes on the field of performance, or people in situations of dire emergency, often comment upon how time slowed down for them and they were able to perform actions which seemed extraordinary for those of us who might be observing them.  Catching a pass on a football field, as a case in point.  If you're in the stands watching the arc and velocity of a pass versus the pace of the receiver running, you automatically and intuitively calculate the probability of the receiver and ball meeting at some point.  You may think it impossible based upon what you're seeing.  However, the receiver running who experiences time slow down is able to meet the ball at the point where it descends from its arc, seemingly in defiance of physics.  

That's called "flow" for the person who is experiencing it.  Something indefinable in your consciousness -- something aware of your intention -- aids you in accomplishing that intention by slowing down your perceptual processes and making it possible for you to perform lightning-quick instinctive actions at a pace your consciousness might otherwise not be able to accommodate.

I experienced different versions of that when playing different sports.  Sometimes I knew exactly what was going to happen at a given moment, went through my requisite motions, and the predicted result duly happened, like hitting a baseball over a fence, or making a long moving jump shot on the basketball court, or turning to throw a football in the opposite direction than I had been looking, and hitting a receiver exactly on stride thirty yards down the football field.  But here I'm talking about the subjective experience of being "in the flow" rather than time itself.

I watched a video of a hunting guide in British Columbia describing himself sitting atop a huge fallen tree, tracking a wounded bear.  As he swung his trailing leg over the trunk or limb that he sat upon, he also saw the bear's face -- and open jaws -- lunging up from below.  As he continued to swing his back leg over the tree, he simultaneously swung his rifle from the right, pointed it down to within inches of his left foot, and pulled the trigger just as the bear's mouth was approaching his foot.  He said that for him, time slowed down in that moment and allowed him to make this drastic and life-saving maneuver which seemed almost physically incomprehensible.  He said that this slowing down of time had happened to him on multiple occasions, always in a life-threatening situation, and he theorized that it was an evolutionary mechanism hard-wired into human beings to allow them to survive danger.  Never mind that not everyone survives!

Then there is the difference in time we experience in the dream state rather than the waking state.  I'm sure you've had the experience of looking at a clock, falling asleep and having a long and detailed dream, then awakening to find that only a few minutes have passed on the clock.

There is also the possibility that we occupy different planes of existence simultaneously and have interpenetrating bodies that function exclusively in the plane to which they match in terms of vibratory energy, and our consciousness can move between those planes or fields, which all have their own peculiar states of time.  In effect, they are different dimensions with laws that apply to their own environment.  Hence, someone experiencing an NDE can feel that an eternity has passed while in an emergency room medical personnel have been working feverishly over someone who has flat-lined for, say, twenty minutes.

We often have no way of explaining such phenomena to ourselves, so we just discount it and deny its subjective reality.  But if we occupy different spheres of existence simultaneously, with different versions of our ourselves fitted to match the respective environments, and our awareness shifts from one realm to another suddenly, besides the experience being jarring or disorienting, there may not be a point for point equation in our subjective experience of time between what passes for "reality" for us -- this three-dimensional, physical universe -- and our sense of time in this variable realm.  Time is thus referred to as the "fourth dimension" by physicists.  It can sometimes transcend or operate independently of our usual common three dimensions.

So, there we had two topics -- the measurable difference of the experience of time due to factors in the outer, physical universe, and the difference of the experience of time in the subjective, impossible-to-measure reality of our inner universe(s).

And yet, I still can't quite shake the feeling that time, after all, is just a dazzling illusion.

 

The Labyrinthe of Solitude

I'm feeling a little down and a bit sad today, so my mind naturally wandered to this title by Octavio Paz.  It isn't a volume of poetry.  It's a famous book of essays he penned and published in 1950 about the character of his country, Mexico, and the people who populate it.  For most of the second half of the 20th century, it was considered the best portrait of the elusive character of those south of our border.  For most of the last century, Americans merely had stereotypes about Mexico, and this is what happens with a book like Labyrinthe -- in the past seventy years it has become somewhat stereotypical. The country continues to shift and its people change over time.  I would guess most people in Mexico would consider this book passe and as a finger pointing only toward the fading past.

Still, this video captures something of the feeling of the book, beginning with a remarkable array of faces at about the two minute mark.  The voice-over or narration is in Spanish, of course, which I don't speak, but I don't care and neither should you.  I'm sure they're quoting from the book but the images tell the tale.  

This video was probably produced in the mid-to-late Eighties, when Paz had a regular television show in Mexico.  That's him at the start of the video.  But as when you travel in another country, it is the faces themselves that convey to you the reality, the living truth of the country itself.  So with these.

And we all occupy the Labyrinthe of Solitude, do we not?

 

Piedra del Sol / Sunstone

This is the title of my favorite poem of the 20th century, composed by my favorite poet of the 20th century, the Mexican Octavio Paz (b. 1914 - d. 1998).  As often seems to be the case with Hispanic poets, Paz published his first volume in his teenage years and continued a recognizable arc of development throughout the rest of his life.  It is said that a prophet is never accepted in his homeland, and this seems to be the case with Paz as a poet.  His poetics were shaped by his manifold experiences living in first the United States (during WWII), Paris after the war, Japan, India, back to Mexico, back to Paris, back to India, with his final uncomfortable but permanent return to his homeland coming in 1968.  He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990.

This poem was published in 1957 and it represented a huge leap forward in the visionary topography of Paz's interior and poetic world.  In one sense, it capped everything he had been working on until that time.  And in another, it presaged his mature work which followed.

I would say that for Paz, the most numinous experience, the most significant experience in life and in his poetry, was the coupling of a man and a woman.  He returns to this again and again in his poetry.  In his life, he had a fated meeting with a young French woman in India in 1964, a seemingly chance meeting with her again in Europe the next year, and then they literally spent not a day apart for the rest of Paz's life.

This poem contains 584 lines, in reference to the Mayan calendar and the dance between the planet Venus and the Sun, as there are 584 days denoting Venus's  synodic cycle and then its apparent conjunction with the sun.  This poem, really, is about alternation between conjunction and disjunction.  But more than that, in the quality of the opening lines, Paz captures something I've never before seen in poetry -- it's a perfect cascade of phrases in a single sentence that lasts the entire length of the book.  I'm going to quote the opening fourteen lines:

a crystal willow, a poplar of water,/ a tall fountain the wind arches over,/ a tree deep-rooted yet dancing still,/ a course of a river that turns, moves on,/ doubles back, and comes full-circle,/ forever arriving,/ the calm course/ of the stars or an unhurried spring,/ water with eyes closed welling over/ with oracles all night long,/ a single presence in a surge of waves,/ wave after wave till it covers all,/ a reign of green that knows no decline,/ like the flash of wings unfolding in the sky,...

To me, that is the most lyrical opening or extended passage that I've yet read.  There's a short video of a stanza that occurs later in the poem.  In the hand of another, it would be mere trite romance.  With Paz, it is somehow something much deeper, and more:

Thomas Berry and Native America, Part #1

 One of the most important books of the past forty years was Thomas Berry's 1988 publication, "The Dream of the Earth."  As often happens in such cases, I heard about this book for years before I ever bought a copy.  But then, again as often happens in such cases, I became somewhat obsessed by Thomas Berry's thought.  Sometimes when I discover an author or artist I admire, I spend time inquiring into their life.  Did they embody the ideals they chose to express?  In Berry's instance, though, it has been more about reviewing the evolution of his thought over the course of his lifetime.

Thomas Berry began as a monk in the Catholic Passionist Order in 1933. In 1942, he became ordained as a priest.  However, his profession was really that of a scholar, studying cultural history, especially the world's religions.  He was deeply influenced by Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism, and he published a book on the "Religions of India" and another on Buddhism.  Having read them both, I can attest to the depth of his understanding of the interiority of other spiritual paths.

But rather than taking these insights and applying them to his own personal spiritual quest, Berry instead widened his field of study to include firstly, the geological and biological history of the earth, and then with the aid of people like Brian Swimme, a study of the origin of the Cosmos.  Berry rejected calling himself a theologian or even an "ecotheologian" and coined a new term for himself; he was a "geologian."

"The Dream of the Earth" was written largely about Berry's concern for the earth and its deteriorating environment at the hands of modern humanity.  Each chapter of the book is, in effect, an independent essay drawn from a broad array of perspectives.  I intend to focus herein on Chapter 14, "The Historical Role of the American Indian."  And, no, this doesn't mean a role subservient to white EuroAmerica, but rather a leading role in guiding contemporary culture out of its death grip upon the natural endowment of this continent, and back to a state of complete balance with the land and all forms of life thereon.

I will quote Thomas and intersperse observations or commentary of my own.

Let's begin with this observation: "Indian peoples maintain their unique status as the original dwellers in this region of the world.  They have this position of honor....by their mystical understanding and communion with the continent."

The choice of the word "communion" here is neither haphazard nor a mistake.  Elsewhere in his work, Berry constantly repeats the phrase, "The Universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects."  I would say it is this communion with the earth that differentiates the Native experience of the land from the objectification of all aspects of nature by EuroAmericans.  As Thomas says, "The very structure of our technological civilization prevents us from communicating in depth with Native peoples."

Before I go much further, I must say that I realize a great many people have a deep, even unexpressed, love for this land.  I don't mean to say that we're entirely inured to the beauty and majesty that surrounds us.  But the expression of our love is partial and incomplete.  What do we do?  We hike, we camp.  Or, as was the case where I grew up, we hunt.  All of these are forms of love, but lesser forms.  That ex brother-in-law of mine who has always been an avid hunter and fisherman?  When talking with him about the Native practice of considering seven generations when making a decision regarding the earth, he said "I don't care about the future."  Tell me that's not an incomplete or lesser form of "love."  Let's call it what it is: short-sighted, selfish, and willfully ignorant.  White to the core.

So there it is, the continuing effect of our supposed moral superiority, at least in the minds of our policy makers.  We are only giving a new twist to the spiritual arrogance of our forebears.  Thomas recommends "radical abandonment" of all thought of assimilation towards Native peoples, but he recognizes what he calls our "compulsive savior instincts" and plainly states: "We take up the burden of saving others even when in fact we destroy them."

 And conveying the insularity of this point of view, he says, "We have tended to confer salvation -- whether political, social, economic, or religious -- and have resisted incorporating the resources offered by others into our own process of becoming."  In other words, it's hard to be open to another's perspective when you think you've got all the answers.

A few pages farther into the essay, Thomas observes, "...native peoples...give to the human mode of being a unique expression that belongs among the great spiritual traditions of mankind."

Whereas "...India has its awareness of divine transcendence, China its mystical humanism (he's referring to Confucianism. And what of China's approach to Nature as an incarnation of the Tao, the Dharma?)....so the Indian peoples of America have their own special form of nature mysticism.  Awareness of a numinous presence throughout the entire cosmic order establishes among these peoples one of the most integral forms of spirituality known to us."

I think the phrase "nature mysticism" is a misnomer and belittles Native beliefs.  They don't enact a form of spirituality that is separate from life.  As mentioned by the Incan shaman in the PBS videos, this isn't a "form of spirituality."  It is a way of life.  Part of the achilles heel of the entire Western world is its tendency to divide everything in life into separate categories.  You don't just do spiritual practices every day and viola! -- you're somehow "spiritual."  If it is not integrated into everything you do, every aspect of your life, it's just a haphazard and piecemeal attempt to solve a problem in isolation.  It's whole; it's integral.  That's what I see in the Native approach to Nature, and to life itself.

What Thomas Berry is hitting upon is the numinous mode of consciousness that is the basis of the Native orientation.  This is what we have altogether lost -- the sense that everything about life and everything within existence is sacred -- in and of itself.  It isn't a quality that we need to invest things with, it's already present.  It's intrinsic to all existence.  

That is the quality of consciousness that we must recover.

Regarding the "numinous mode of consciousness" Thomas observes, "...one of the primary instincts of the human community is to protect and foster such primordial experiences...they provide the foundations upon which cultural systems are established....these revelations form the ultimate psychic support for the human venture itself."

It's just this quality that we descendants of Europe must re-learn.  But this is a touchy subject.  You no doubt have heard the phrase "cultural appropriation" bandied about.  The attempt to colonialize even their most sacred beliefs and practices must be particularly galling to Native peoples.  Sweat lodges, drumming circles, vision quests, New Age shamans -- we really can't just lift all these sacred practices out of their native context and expect to successfully apply them to our own circumstances.

What we can do, perhaps, is try a little humility.  We might actually bend our knee and drop our presumption of always knowing better.  It's rare to meet someone who doesn't "know better."  

Really, it isn't so much that we need to copy Native culture.  Native culture emerged from long and intimate experience with the land itself.  It's there we must go.  We need to humble ourselves before the Earth itself, in all its manifold manifestations.  And then, maybe if we're lucky, it might speak to us -- and if we've learned to quiet the din of our own self and its oh-so-precious concerns -- we might actually hear.  But this quieting ourselves is a characteristic all but unknown in modern American life.  There is always something (or someone) with which to distract yourself.

I'm only halfway through Thomas Berry's 14th chapter on Native America.  Perhaps I can survey the other half in a day or so.  Til then....

New World Rising -- Native America

This is the fourth and last of the video series "Native America," produced by the PBS.  It deals primarily with the last 500 years, or the invasion and colonization of these continents by Europeans.  I wanted to write "avaricious zealots."  A lust for gold, land, and the forced conversion of the minds of those resident here seems the most obvious characteristics and motivations of the people who landed upon these shores.  In our own history of the United States, we tend to always state that our progenitors came here seeking religious freedom. It's just that we didn't extend the charity of that intention to anyone already present upon this continent.

There are themes in this video that are interesting and hopeful.  The horse, an animal which evolved in the Americas, went extinct, and then was reintroduced by Europeans, became a kind of new technology for this land, as well as a form of commerce and a mobile unit of warfare.  Native culture was quick to adapt to this new element of life.  The horse seems to belong to this land, along with these people.

What I really come away with after watching all four of these videos is a deep sense of the tremendous strength of character and endurance of those who have withstood five centuries of oppression, and who have successfully resisted both their elimination and/or their total assimilation.  In my lifetime, I feel I have witnessed the resurgence of Native cultures and the re-emergence of their spiritualities into open expression once more, after generations of their practices, even their languages, having been driven underground.  It really is a testament to the incredible strength of spirit present in all these many peoples that they are standing strong once again today.

My hope is that these many indigenous cultures continue to grow, expand, and thoroughly flourish over the next several hundred -- no, thousands -- of years.

I will continue to write of Native culture because I feel that their approach to life and to the totality of Nature itself, holds valuable lessons -- keys -- both for me personally, and for those of us who stand perilously on the precipice of our collective future.

 

Cities of the Sky -- Native America

This is the third in a series of PBS programs detailing characteristics of the indigenous cultures that existed earlier -- and, indeed, which still exist today -- on the north and south American continents. 

Most of the great cities antecedent to our day were built upon an orientation to the sky, in the sense that they denoted solstices and equinoxes of the sun, cycles of the moon, and in some cases, also those of Venus.  The significance of these solar, lunar and planetary phenomena are evident, yet I still feel, after viewing this video, that we have somehow missed the interior meanings that these events held for the native cultures involved.

It seems apparent that civilizations have a life span: their early dawning, their full maturity, and their inevitable decline.  Ethnic cultures sometimes outlive the structure of their own particular civilization.  As with individual human beings, it's possible that human cultures also, in a sense, reincarnate -- they morph into new or hybrid forms.

Human sacrifice apparently was practiced at times in the city of Cahokia, along the Mississippi river, as well as in the ancient cultures in what is now Mexico, Central America, and possibly in South America, although that is not mentioned in this video.

Perhaps it is just my own provinciality of thought, but to me, evidence of human sacrifice seems an example of a system of beliefs no longer properly understood by its own practitioners.  I suspect it was once understood that the sacrifice in question was to be internal, rather than external.  If a people fail to grasp this distinction, it seems to me an example of a culture in decline. You may argue this point, but I hate to think ancestral people were always so literal regarding what really were metaphysical truths. This is more likely our own retrospective projection, or, as I said, the loss of interior knowledge of their own faith by the very practitioners of it, as has happened in the Western European religious traditions as well.

And so to the video:

Nature to Nations - Native America

This is the second video in the PBS series, "Native America."  In this episode we see various methods of rule as depicted by tribes or peoples in Mexico, Peru, the Pacific NW, and upstate New York.

Native America and the Cosmos

This is a video produced by the PBS on the similarity of beliefs shared by the first peoples of these two continents, which we now refer to as North and South America, and the fact that they shared the implements of their belief system over a much wider expanse of territory than previously thought.  A ceremonial set of buildings in Chaco canyon appears to have been a center of shared learning and to have served as a location for the collective expression of important rites.

I'm not certain how long native peoples have lived here.  In this video, the narrator repeatedly says 13,000 years, but I suspect indigenous people have been here much, much longer than archeologists currently believe.  Their own creation myths present them as having originated here.  Isn't it just hubris on our part to think we know better?

To live in balance with the Earth and the powers that be in the Cosmos appears to be the core of the Native orientation to life.  Unfortunately, we of European descent lost that sensibility and acute awareness several thousand years ago. We perhaps last had a cultural expression of it in the builders of stone megaliths, circles, and barrow mounds of the British Isles and on the European continent.  That knowledge all but disappeared in the West.

The monoculture which has spread over the entire globe, almost completely eclipsing all forms of indigenous life, is plainly sick at heart and soul, and is increasingly unhinged intellectually and emotionally.  We can't forever treat the planet as though it is merely a stockpile of resources to satisfy our every want or need.  We lack the balance that the indigenous peoples wisely sought to achieve.  We objectify everything, including ourselves.  We proceed from an assumption of lack, which breeds contempt, competition, and strife amongst us.  As it turns out, we have more to learn from the indigenous approach to life than they have to learn from us.  We are a spiritually bankrupt civilization.  A people gone badly astray.  It necessarily follows, then, that everything we do will go awry.  Balance, as always, is the key.

On another tack, in all Native traditions, there is an emphasis upon the six directions -- north, south, east, west, up and down.  I have often wondered, when I've heard of this orientation, "What about the seventh direction? -- within?"  I wonder if the direction "up" in native cosmology refers only to the literal heavenly cosmos above us, or whether it also refers to the vertical ascension that can take place within the sphere of human consciousness?  What I call the "horizontal" universe --the one we currently inhabit -- also has its hidden vertical dimensions.

With our obsessive energy, we have circumscribed the earth, plumbed subatomic realms, stretched our minds and our thoughts into interstellar space and back to the origins of time -- but we still have not yet plumbed ourselves.  We are a microcosm of the macrocosm.  It literally took the entire evolution of the Universe to produce a human being, that is, a form of self-reflective consciousness.  What if that is the "program" of the Universe?  What if that program involves the further expansion and evolution of our consciousness, as an intrinsic expression of the basic drive of the Universe's evolutionary impetus?

Well, I have strayed far from the subject matter of this video and I apologize.  It's just more recreational thinking on my part, and perhaps a personal indulgence, so I will cease and desist and simply present this first video, as is.  I invite you to listen with an open mind, though.  We all have much to learn.

 

The River in the Sky

A wonderful little video telling us just a bit more about what a miracle trees are, and the fantastic way they contribute to not only our air, but the conveyance of water on our planet.  I love my mother -- Mother Nature, that is.  And here's a question for all you brainiacs out there: why is it that everything Nature does is so intrinsically intelligent?  Nature is far more intelligent, and more creative, than we human beings are.  Efficient, intelligent, and creative.  Relentless as well.  More anon.

 

Awakened Cosmos

 This is the curious title of a book of poetry translated from the Chinese.  The poet in translation is Tu Fu (712-770 C.E.), who lived during a time of civil war in China.  The translator is David Hinton, whom I wrote about maybe a year and a half ago.

Three years ago I was just finishing my third term of graduate school, studying everything from subatomic physics, interstellar physics (so, the macro and the micro laws of the universe) and consciousness.  The degree -- which I didn't finish -- was entitled "Cosmology and Consciousness."  

The cutting edge of scientific exploration posits a kind of "consciousness" to everything in existence now, in the sense that even subatomic particles interact.  They respond to their environment, as strange as it may be to us.  Thomas Berry, the deceased theologian who educated himself out of his faith and into the term "geologian," talked frequently -- as do some physicists -- about the fact that we human beings are the Cosmos made conscious.  If you study broad esoteric philosophy, we in this current state of humanity are not completely awakened.  There are further horizons to reach in terms of the expansion of our own consciousness. It's to this that Hinton refers, although he believes Zen and Taoism to have been forms of awakened consciousness.   Perhaps so, but perhaps not always so.

But what I really found interesting, in a translation of poetry of all places, was Hinton's description of the initial stages of our Cosmos at its own beginning.  I'm going to quote him, almost entirely verbatim, just because I find it a rather cogent explanation of the Universe "awakening" to itself in the very act of creation.  Here goes:

"During its first moments, the Cosmos was a primordial plasma of subatomic particles.  This plasma expanded and cooled until the particles could bond to form the lightest atoms, hydrogen and helium, whereupon the Cosmos became transparent to radiation such as light....hydrogen and helium began condensing into proto-galactic clouds under the gossamer influence of gravity, and chance fluctuations in the density of these clouds led some local areas to intensify their condensation until pressure and heat became so fierce that hydrogen atoms  began fusing together.  In that process....stars were born.  And with those stars came the elemental dimensions of consciousness: space and light and the visible.

"Those dimensions began to evolve.  The stars grew old and died.  In the furnace of their old age and explosive deaths, they forged heavier elements and scattered them into space, forming nebular clouds that in turn condensed into new stars.  It is the heartbeat of the Cosmos, this steady pulse of stellar birth and death....and in the third star-generation, our planet was formed, rich in those heavy elements.

"It cooled and evolved until eventually water appeared: hydrogen, created during the original cosmic expansion, combining with oxygen, one of those heavier elements created in the cauldrons of dying stars.  Water formed mirrored pools in hollows on the planet's rocky surface, and in these pools the Cosmos turned toward itself for the first time here.

"Living organisms evolved and eventually developed receptors that allowed them to sense whether or not light was present.  Those light receptors provided decisive advantages, and so developed into more sophisticated forms.  The lens evolved as a means to concentrate light on receptor cells, thereby making creatures more sensitive to weak light.

"This innovation eventually led to image-forming eyes, which combine a lens with highly specialized receptor cells.  The Cosmos turned toward itself once again, giving shape to consciousness, that spatiality the eye's mirrored transparency conjures inside animals.  It was a miraculous development: the material universe, which had been perfectly opaque, was now visible to itself."

And with that, Hinton is off into the philosophies he loves so much.  But I find this new turn in conceptualizing the Universe as in-the-process of "awakening" by virtue of its continuing evolutionary development, a new blend of science and spirit: the sense of awe that we have, first in simply existing, and secondly, that we are capable of understanding a process of which we are a component part. 

At this moment, we can see the Big Picture and we're just beginning to grasp our place within it.  From here, this ground, we can continue our journey as human beings upon this planet, and as inhabitants, nay, incarnations -- avatars -- of this Universe.