Our Living Universe
By James Donahue
A common question asked when I am becoming acquainted with new friends is what religion I follow. Since falling away from Christianity, which was my backbone for most of my life, I have had a difficult time answering. That is because I didn’t have a name for the way I perceive the Creator.
Two brilliant U.S. researchers have just revealed a new scientific concept they are calling “panpsychism,” which comes about as close to describing my perception of things as anything else I have found. Panpsychism suggests that the universe is a sentient, living consciousness. And this is what I have concluded after years of study and thought.
I was an ardent Bible student in my younger days. I not only spent time studying the Old and New Testaments, but I worked for a while as religion editor for a major Michigan daily newspaper and taught an adult Bible class in a rural conservative Christian church. Then something very odd happened. An elderly prayer warrior in my Bible class raised an interesting question. “When you pray,” said he, “ask who you are praying to. When you get an answer, let me know what you find out.”
Out of curiosity my wife and I both asked that question while in prayer that very night.
The answer was slow in coming. In fact, by the time it came to us, the man who asked the question was dead and buried. But I think he knew all along what the answer was going to be. We were praying to ourselves.
It was about that time in our lives that my family and I were literally driven out of the local churches we attempted to join. Every time we became involved the church would be hit by scandal, the ministers left in disgrace, and the churches split over internal troubles. We came to the conclusion that we were being taught a special lesson. We needed to follow a new pathway in seeking the Creator.
We began exploring occult bookstores, reading books by writers who challenged the old Christian dogma, and eventually ended up living with the Navajo, Hopi and Apache Indian tribes in Arizona for about three years. Those people were following the ways of their ancestors and we came to the conclusion that they were on the right path all the time. And they had nothing to do with the Christian church.
The natives saw the Earth as their Creator. They expressed reverence for the “Mother Earth” and all of the living creatures living on it. One Hopi priest, who was a guest at our home one evening, surprised us when he took his breakfast plate of eggs and toast out the door and gave a portion of his food to the ground for the animals to eat. This was a daily ritual for him. We had long conversations with this man and he taught us much about the native culture and the way his people perceived God.
Somewhere along the line, during my personal research for articles I write for my website, I came to the conclusion that not only the Mother Earth, but the entire Solar System, the Galaxy our system belongs to, and the entire Universe appears to be a giant living organism. That is because everything in it is in constant motion. When we look into a powerful microscope and study the atoms that comprise all things on our planet, we see the same kind of motion. Atoms have nuclei at their center, with neutrons and protons in constant motion circling the nucleus much like planets circle our Sun. This kind of action is true in atoms that comprise the human body, and the rocks in the field outside our door.
All of this motion can be identified in one word: “energy.” And where does this energy come from? In a moment of extreme clarity one day I concluded that it all is part of the great and marvelous thing we want to call God. And If my perception is correct, the God we seek exists in all of us. He is not a loving bearded grandfather type looking down on us from the sky. He is a massive collection of energy that forms everything we experience, from the very smallest things seen through powerful microscopes, to the many whirling galaxies we find looking through our most powerful telescopes.
Having reached this conclusion some years ago, I was not surprised to read where Dr. Gregory L. Matloff, emeritus associate and adjunct associate professor of physics at New York City College of Technology, and Christof Koch, Neuroscientist and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, have reached the conclusion that the universe “may be capable of consciousness.”
In the article that appeared in Futurism, Matloff was credited with publishing a paper that claimed “humans could be like the rest of the universe, in substance and in spirit,” and that “a proto-consciousness field could extend throughout all space.” The conclusion he reached as the same as mine. “The cosmos could be self-aware,” the article stated.
Koch, who studies the behavior of biological organisms, notes that they also exhibit a consciousness because “when they approach a new situation they are able to change their behavior in order to thwart a bad situation.”
Indeed, in our annual battle with a swarm of tiny brown ants that invade our California homes each year during the rainy season, we have discovered that no matter how hard we try to block their established entrance to the house, they always seem to find a way around the obstacles we put up.
To test his theory, Koch is conducting some interesting experiments. In one of them, he wired the brains of two mice to find out if information flows between them “like a fused, integrated system would."
Koch went on: “The only dominant theory we have of consciousness says that it is associated with complexity — with a system’s ability to act upon its own state and determine its own fate. Theory states that it could go down to very simple systems. In principle, some purely physical systems that are not biological or organic may also be conscious.”
What he is suggesting is that the trees, all of the animals, and even the rocks in the field have a consciousness.
The Futurism article concludes that panpsychism is presently in an “experimental phase” but if scientists can prove their theory “it could shake the world of science to the core.”
It is interesting that modern science is only now beginning to discover what the aboriginal people on this planet have always known.
By James Donahue
A common question asked when I am becoming acquainted with new friends is what religion I follow. Since falling away from Christianity, which was my backbone for most of my life, I have had a difficult time answering. That is because I didn’t have a name for the way I perceive the Creator.
Two brilliant U.S. researchers have just revealed a new scientific concept they are calling “panpsychism,” which comes about as close to describing my perception of things as anything else I have found. Panpsychism suggests that the universe is a sentient, living consciousness. And this is what I have concluded after years of study and thought.
I was an ardent Bible student in my younger days. I not only spent time studying the Old and New Testaments, but I worked for a while as religion editor for a major Michigan daily newspaper and taught an adult Bible class in a rural conservative Christian church. Then something very odd happened. An elderly prayer warrior in my Bible class raised an interesting question. “When you pray,” said he, “ask who you are praying to. When you get an answer, let me know what you find out.”
Out of curiosity my wife and I both asked that question while in prayer that very night.
The answer was slow in coming. In fact, by the time it came to us, the man who asked the question was dead and buried. But I think he knew all along what the answer was going to be. We were praying to ourselves.
It was about that time in our lives that my family and I were literally driven out of the local churches we attempted to join. Every time we became involved the church would be hit by scandal, the ministers left in disgrace, and the churches split over internal troubles. We came to the conclusion that we were being taught a special lesson. We needed to follow a new pathway in seeking the Creator.
We began exploring occult bookstores, reading books by writers who challenged the old Christian dogma, and eventually ended up living with the Navajo, Hopi and Apache Indian tribes in Arizona for about three years. Those people were following the ways of their ancestors and we came to the conclusion that they were on the right path all the time. And they had nothing to do with the Christian church.
The natives saw the Earth as their Creator. They expressed reverence for the “Mother Earth” and all of the living creatures living on it. One Hopi priest, who was a guest at our home one evening, surprised us when he took his breakfast plate of eggs and toast out the door and gave a portion of his food to the ground for the animals to eat. This was a daily ritual for him. We had long conversations with this man and he taught us much about the native culture and the way his people perceived God.
Somewhere along the line, during my personal research for articles I write for my website, I came to the conclusion that not only the Mother Earth, but the entire Solar System, the Galaxy our system belongs to, and the entire Universe appears to be a giant living organism. That is because everything in it is in constant motion. When we look into a powerful microscope and study the atoms that comprise all things on our planet, we see the same kind of motion. Atoms have nuclei at their center, with neutrons and protons in constant motion circling the nucleus much like planets circle our Sun. This kind of action is true in atoms that comprise the human body, and the rocks in the field outside our door.
All of this motion can be identified in one word: “energy.” And where does this energy come from? In a moment of extreme clarity one day I concluded that it all is part of the great and marvelous thing we want to call God. And If my perception is correct, the God we seek exists in all of us. He is not a loving bearded grandfather type looking down on us from the sky. He is a massive collection of energy that forms everything we experience, from the very smallest things seen through powerful microscopes, to the many whirling galaxies we find looking through our most powerful telescopes.
Having reached this conclusion some years ago, I was not surprised to read where Dr. Gregory L. Matloff, emeritus associate and adjunct associate professor of physics at New York City College of Technology, and Christof Koch, Neuroscientist and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, have reached the conclusion that the universe “may be capable of consciousness.”
In the article that appeared in Futurism, Matloff was credited with publishing a paper that claimed “humans could be like the rest of the universe, in substance and in spirit,” and that “a proto-consciousness field could extend throughout all space.” The conclusion he reached as the same as mine. “The cosmos could be self-aware,” the article stated.
Koch, who studies the behavior of biological organisms, notes that they also exhibit a consciousness because “when they approach a new situation they are able to change their behavior in order to thwart a bad situation.”
Indeed, in our annual battle with a swarm of tiny brown ants that invade our California homes each year during the rainy season, we have discovered that no matter how hard we try to block their established entrance to the house, they always seem to find a way around the obstacles we put up.
To test his theory, Koch is conducting some interesting experiments. In one of them, he wired the brains of two mice to find out if information flows between them “like a fused, integrated system would."
Koch went on: “The only dominant theory we have of consciousness says that it is associated with complexity — with a system’s ability to act upon its own state and determine its own fate. Theory states that it could go down to very simple systems. In principle, some purely physical systems that are not biological or organic may also be conscious.”
What he is suggesting is that the trees, all of the animals, and even the rocks in the field have a consciousness.
The Futurism article concludes that panpsychism is presently in an “experimental phase” but if scientists can prove their theory “it could shake the world of science to the core.”
It is interesting that modern science is only now beginning to discover what the aboriginal people on this planet have always known.