As I recently prepared for my poster presentation for the upcoming Science and Nonduality (SAND) Conference in San Jose, it occurred to me that my ideas can best be understood from the perspective of the space program.
With the $2.5 million annually in funding for SETI -NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence- drying up perhaps we need to rethink a few things. SETI had their huge radio telescopes trying to pick up patterns of intelligent communication from the stars, under the assumption that only an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization could broadcast such an encoded signal.
The SETI concept of intelligence is a series of sounds or symbols in a discernible, repetitive pattern that implies order and meaning. But in a TED talk in 2003, geneticist Juan Enriquez, compared sequenced DNA code to software in the following description –he was talking about an apple:
“Because this thing codes ones and zeros (software), and this thing (an apple) codes A T, C, Gs, and it sits up there, absorbing energy on a tree, and one fine day it has enough energy to say, execute, and it goes thump. Right?
And when it does that, pushes a .EXE, what it does is, it executes the first line of code, which reads just like that, AATCAGGGACCC, and that means: make a root Next line of code: make a stem. Next line of code, TACGGGG: make a flower that’s white, that blooms in the spring, that smells like this.”
Enriquez was describing the sequenced DNA in the nuclei of our cells.
If SETI had discovered a series of symbols that had a similar meaning and worked according to a precise syntax, they would have exclaimed, Eureka! Someone else is out there.
So why aren’t we saying the same thing with respect to the code that we now use to cure certain diseases?
The most obvious reason is that science cannot supply an adequate explanation, and that if we considered it deeply it would upset many of our most basic assumptions. If we dig a bit deeper we can admit we now know quite a bit about software. Some of us have written code that makes a picture appear in a web browser and we know that without the proper syntax of HTML, the page will not “express properly.”
We also know that the code and the web browser were designed intentionally by teams of programmers.
Best selling author Eckhart Tolle (author of “A New Earth” and the “Power of Now” has written eloquently how “the intelligence” that runs our circulation, breath and reproduction—our entire body—is much greater than that with which we think or speak.
This intelligence apparently runs (as DNA) and according to geneticists like Enriquez, in the same way as Photoshop and Microsoft Word – on coded instructions. The problem is that our anthropomorphic projections, which make us view everything from a “human” perspective, would then make the leap that some “one” or some “thing” must be a programmer of DNA.
This is one explanation; the Ancient Aliens series on the History Channel has a theory that would also address this issue –but it begs the question –who “designed” the DNA of the aliens? Then of course our own fundamentalist religions have a simple explanation –the word “God.” We have a similar explanation in science for the fact that the Universe is endless – the word “infinity.” Neither of these, of course, is truly an explanation – both are metaphors.
As an outgrowth of quantum physics, Menas Kafatos, Professor of Computational Physics and Director of Excellence at Chapman University has proposed that more accurate “explanations” can only come from a new, observer-based science. Such a science might ultimately be able to account for the undeniable fact that there is computer software “operating” in the nuclei of our cells. It would mean that somehow, some way, nature expresses itself intelligently and not randomly.
Of course ancient civilizations knew this –the Egyptians encoded the mathematical constants Pi and Phi (the Fibonacci sequence or Golden Mean) in their sacred structures. We blindly remain intoxicated with our own “superior” knowledge and are unable to confront the obvious…
What if nature itself is intelligent? Not metaphorically but actually – in reality? Wouldn’t that be a shift in our perspective?
Einstein gave us a clue he said something along the lines that we will find the knowledge of the universe by looking at the ground. Basically what that means is the universe is around us, the same patterns are here right under our noses. That’s a habit of humans, we don’t look at things that are right under our noses. Science is kind of funny in that it always seeks what’s is “outside” it doesn’t look within, well not enough. And I believe that it’s quite likely that the answers to the big questions are here because we’re part of the universe. Science has out valuable information. I believe that that in itself forms another pattern that hurts not just science but most other “disciplines” – male thinking. There is a tendency for hierarchical thinking, that something is superior and therefore others inferior, not worth our time. Oh how wrong they are!
Yes, as above, so below.
Could actually be the other-way-around so that as below, so above. What we do on the scale we’re on, is reflected in the whole. What we imagine collectively, becomes our reality.
Metaphorically, it could be said that life is a circle.
Life is cyclical.
Cycles within cycles within cycles, ad infinitum.
Think the ‘flower of life’ in sacred geometrical terms.
Life is a fractal.
Think the Fibonacci sequence in biological settings.
And isn’t the Mandelbrot set the basis for creating realistic special effects? But particular special effects like structures of smoke, or fog, or lava, or mountain, that are realistic–the more you repeat the pattern, the more realistic it looks. That was professed and demonstrated in a documentary that I watched.
Life is recursive, repetitive.
The Earth rotates on its axis.
The moon orbits the Earth; A woman’s menstrual cycle.
The Earth orbits the sun.
The Great Year.
What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Cells replicate themselves over and over and over again, so that forms emerge, and then submerge.
Birth, life, death.
Eat, shit, work, sleep, wake-up.
Habits, routines, traditions, ceremonies, rituals.
The process itself of learning to do something or of embodying information or new techniques–unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence–is in a sense cyclical: from the unconscious, to the conscious, returning to the unconscious.
The alphabet, our language, our knowledge, is recursive. Letters and words, repeating themselves over and over and over again. The majority of our language is metaphorical.
It’s as if we are stuck inside circles within circles, merely transcending from one scale of a fractal to another. I’m almost absolutely convinced that what we call life or reality is some sort of simulation.
As above, so below.
‘God’ and ‘infinity’ are metaphors? In what sense?
‘History repeats itself’? All of this also reminds me of the myth of king Sisyphus, “who was punished for chronic deceitfulness by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever.”
I feel a connection like the Russian nested doll paradigm. A doll within a doll within a doll so to speak. In our cells could be universes and galaxies just like we see above. That could mean there are people on them living lives like us but much smaller as there are beings in planets in the cosmos. When I say like us, I don’t mean exactly this shape and form but live beings with their own neighborhoods and loves and heartaches, just like us. Life is phenomenal! Pity we waste it finding money to pay for things that the earth gives freely. Our minds are not free to wander and discover because most people with education have their minds filled with cultural detritus.
That metaphor of the nested dolls totally resonates with me. It conveys the fractal (or scale-like) nature of reality; and I believe scale is a spatial dimension just as important as the other three. I’m reminded of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holon_%28philosophy%29
Cultural detritus is right. Nowadays everybody is a sucker. Whereas companies incorporate planned obsolescence so that the market never dries up, employees are over working themselves in order to, not only make enough money to afford products of inferior quality at inflated prices but, secure their position at the firm so that they don’t lose their job to somebody else. And contemporary economics as a whole is in that sense obsolete. As a species, our focus is too imbalanced. For the sake of balance we ought to focus less on quantity and more on quality.
I read recently that what we think is echoed back to us in our reality. Therefore we are the source of that reality. Therefore we could be totally responsible for the experience of joy or anxiety on this earth. None of us know anything for sure, no scientists, no astronaut, no Ph.D, no Nobel laureate, nobody knows for sure. I believe that the “now” may allow us to access infinity but we’re always feeling out-of-the-now, thinking about tomorrow, or yesterday or anything other than being in “the now”. Therefore forfeiting our access to infinite information, infinite consciousness. I’m sure we are not going to access it by living our lives around the moronic concept of money. That is one thing I am sure of. Nothing else though.
Hello , there is no possibility of existence without intelligent design , random , as in random selection , wouldn’t create the whole of the ” Natural Harmony ” that we perceive as life .
Therefore our view of existence should be a simple one , defined as ” Intelligent Energy ” .
The Universe viewed as a huge entity , with energy moving from where it’s abundant to where it’s needed .
But remember , one head , two eyes , one nose , two ears , one mouth , many times .
Thank You .
If only we could rid ourselves, of the disease of the mind I call religion, passed on from parent to there children, it’s a malevolent viruses.
Everything we need is right here right now. Where else could it be? We just don’t know how and where to look.