Attuning to Gaia’s Story

Attuning to Gaia’s Story and the Cosmos

by Jude Currivan, Ph.D., author of The Story of Gaia and The Cosmic Hologram

At the end of my previous book The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Center of Creation, and having gathered evidence across all scales of existence and numerous and wide-ranging fields of research, I asserted that

• In-formation is reality
• Mind is matter
• Matter is mind
• And that mind and consciousness isn’t something we have; it’s literally what we and the whole world are.

The reality of our Universe, its meaningfully in-formed and holographically manifest appearance of space-time and energy-matter, emerges from nonphysical realms of causation and intelligence. From the wisdom teachings of the Upanishads of ancient India to the pioneers of quantum physics and now to the latest available science, to paraphrase the eminent early twentieth-century philosopher Sir James Jeans, our Universe is being revealed to be a great and finite thought in the infinite and eternal mind of the Cosmos.

Amassing further evidence and continuing to explore our Universe as a great thought of cosmic mind, my new book The Story of Gaia continues a journey of exploration and expands beyond where The Cosmic Hologram leaves off.

All thoughts, whether by a human being or an entire Universe, are innately meaningful. Whether in the universal languages of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology or in one of numerous human languages, our Universe, from its birth—not in the implicit chaos of a big bang, but in its first moment of an exquisitely fine-tuned and ordered Big Breath—to its eventual demise and throughout its evolutionary journey from simplicity to complexity, embodies innate intelligence and inherent meaning.

Human languages use alphabets currently ranging from twelve letters (the Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea) to a whopping seventy-four letters (the Khmer language of Cambodia) to combine in meaningful ways to express our human experiences. Our Universe uses the simplest alphabet possible, comprising only two letters, the zeros and ones of digitized information, from which to express its universally meaningful and in-formational reality. In doing so, it essentially in[1]forms its entire embodiment over 13.8 billion years and its unfolding stories of planets and plants and people.

Since writing The Cosmic Hologram, further cosmological validation for this radical view of reality has come with two breakthrough discoveries in 2017 and 2018.

In 2017, analysis of the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, the relic radiation from the early Universe that fills all of space, revealed a pattern of temperature variations characteristic of the cosmic hologram.

For decades the quantum theoretical prediction of universal nonlocality, showing that our Universe exists and evolves as a unified entity, has been tested at progressively larger than quantum scales. Momentously, though, in 2018 such nonlocality was experimentally verified to the vast distance of 12.2 billion light-years away, showing that it is indeed a fundamental universal attribute.

In The Cosmic Hologram I show how cosmic mind, articulated as meaningful in-formation, holographically manifests the appearance of our Universe as energy-matter and space-time. That book reveals the evidence that underlying the appearance of our Universe, in nonphysical realms of intelligent causation, reside the dynamic in-formational patterns of what are known as attractors that template and guide the manifested in-formed semblences of energy-matter. Over time—and embodying increasingly evolutionary complexity—the imbued appearance of atoms, molecules, prebiotic molecules, organisms, and ecosystems then progressively organized as nested, interdependent, resonant, and coherent systems.

The ancient Greeks, as did many traditional societies and Indigenous peoples today, viewed the Earth as a living being: a goddess and a mother. They called her Gaia. The Story of Gaia extends the definition of what’s usually been called life. Inclusive of organic entities, it expands the meaning of “living” and being alive to the multidimensional consciousness and multiple agencies, entities, and sentience embodied in our planetary home and our entire Universe.

It shares scientific research and discoveries that further supports The Cosmic Hologram’s perception of integral reality, validating the insights of perennial wisdom teachings and drawing on my own lifetime of inner and outer journeying, explorations, and encounters.

Stories take time to tell. For a human being it can span from a few precious moments of an unforgettable experience to a complete lifetime. For a bristlecone pine, the longest living tree on Gaia, it can be up to five millennia. In 2020, bacteria were revived after hibernating in buried layers of mud on the floor of the Pacific Ocean for 100 million years. And Gaia’s personal story began some 4.5 billion years ago.

Our stories, though, don’t really begin with us. They go back to our parents and their parents. As far back as our personal, familial, and collective memories and discoveries allow. So, The Story of Gaia, and accordingly our story, begins not with her birth but that of our entire Universe.

In telling Gaia’s story, I aim to tell it in her voice. I feel that like my own Mum, Gaia doesn’t like to make a fuss and just gets on with loving life. So rather than expressing my continuing wonderment and awe of her (and my Mum) and our entire Universe, I’ve refrained (except for instances where I just couldn’t help myself) from using adjectives such as amazing, astounding, and marvelous. Instead, I hope to share the evidence in a way that speaks compellingly for itself.

Throughout the book, there’s one adjective that I do ban: random, with its connotations of being accidental and aimless. While many phenomena and their outcomes do manifest in ways that are statistically variable, they all express and embody meaningful in-formation. The evolution of biological life has also been plagued by the mistaken presumption of random mutations driving its processes. Instead, as we’ll see, this is now being turned on its head.

I have a hope that by the end of Gaia’s story, if not at the beginning, that you may experience an enlivened relationship with her and indeed our entire Universe. The Story of Gaia is my invitation to all to re-member and re-heart that we’re all Gaians.

ATTUNEMENT

Closing my eyes and slowing my breath, I imagine the beginning of our Universe. It is black. Not the transparent black clarity of a night sky tinged by stars. Nor the blackness of squid ink, black yet with a hint of blue. But an utter and complete blackness. Not an empty void but replete with everything and the potentiality of what might come. Not a black hole, but the black whole.

It is minute; tiny almost beyond comprehension. Its wholeness at its first moment is as small compared to my body as I am to the vastness of what it has since grown into over its 13.8 billion-year-long evolutionary journey.

It is hot. One hundred trillion trillion times as hot as the interiors of its stellar progeny will be billions of years in its future.

It is simple; though only as simple as it can be to gift an eventual cornucopia of planets, plants, and people.

I am in wonder at the audacity of its visionary magnificence. How, how! could the infinite and eternal mind of the Cosmos dream the perfect intricacy of such a thought?

And why?