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.