The Living Universe by Duane Elgin

The philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775—1854) wrote, “History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute.” His contemporary, the influential German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770—1831),viewed humans as vehicles for the universe to become conscious of itself. In Hegel’s view, spirit seeks embodiment in matter as much as matter seeks transformation in spirit.
    Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was a professor who lived in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His writing powerfully expresses the idea of a living universe, infused with a divine life force that he termed
élan vital
and that animates, not only human life, but also the entire cosmos. He saw the whole universe as a pulsating, participatory reality. According to Bergson, the reach of our identity is not limited by our physical body, but extends as far as our conscious perceptions. Our body provides a manageable island of stability as we grow in our capacity for conscious knowing and expression of the life force that animates the universe. Beyond the power of our intellect, says Bergson, we have the power of our intuition, which is our connection with the “ocean of life,” the cosmic vitality from which we draw energy and insight. 44 The “essential function of the universe” says Bergson, is nothing less than “the making of gods”—or human beings who are fully conscious expressions of the
élan vital
.
    The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), developed a process view of reality in the late 1920s. In his view, what we consider the concrete reality of the universe around us is, in fact, a series of “occasions of experience.” The overall universe is the totality of all of these occasions and, because free will is inherent in the universe, each occasion is always different, new, and alive.
    I have only touched upon Western views, but this is sufficient to show there has existed a stream of thought that, for more than 2,000 years, has regarded our universe as deeply alive. In contemporary Western philosophy, this view is sometimes called
pantheism
, meaning that a divine life force both pervades the world and extendsbeyond it. This life force is both immanent and transcendent—including all that is in our universe and extending infinitely beyond.

Harvesting the Wisdom of Human Experience
    Harvesting the wisdom of human experience is like watching a picture gradually come into focus and seeing an extraordinary image of the universe emerging before our eyes. There are common streams of experience being described by wisdom traditions around the world. Within each major tradition—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Indigenous, and more—we can find remarkably similar descriptions of the universe and the life force that pervades it:
Christians and Jews
affirming that God is not separate from this world but continuously creates it anew, so that we live, move, and have our being in God;
Muslims
declaring that the entire universe is continually coming into being, and that each moment is a new “occasion” for Allah to create the universe;
Hindus
proclaiming that the entire universe is a single body that is being continually danced into creation by a divine life force or Brahman;
Buddhists
stating that the entire universe arises freshly at every moment in an unceasing flow of interdependent, co-origination where everything depends upon everything else;
Taoists
stating that the Tao is the “Mother of the Universe,” the inexhaustible source from which all things rise and fall without ceasing;
Confucians
describing our universe as a unified and interpenetrating whole that is sustained and nourished by the vitality of the life force or
ch’i; Indigenous peoples
declaring that an animating wind or life force blows through all things in the world and there is aliveness and