The Living Universe by Duane Elgin Page A

sacred power everywhere; and a stream of
Western thinkers
portraying the universe as a single, living creaturethat is continually regenerated and is evolving toward higher levels of complexity and consciousness. Overall, beneath the differences in language, a common reality is being described—our life is part of a larger life.
    Despite humanity’s great diversity and historical differences, when the world’s wisdom traditions penetrate into the experiential depths of existence, a common understanding emerges that is in accord with insights from science. This understanding is utterly stunning: We live within a living universe that arises, moment-by-moment, as a unified whole. The universe is a living entity that is continuously sustained by the flow-through of phenomenal amounts of energy in an unutterably vast and intensely alive process of awesome precision and power. We are beings the universe inhabits as much as we are beings who inhabit the universe. The unity of existence is not an experience to be created; rather, it is an always-manifesting condition waiting to be appreciated and welcomed into awareness. The “power of now” derives from the fact that the entire universe arises in the Now as an extremely precise flow. When we are in the now, we are riding the wave of continuous creation. Each moment is a fresh formation of the universe, emerging seamlessly and flawlessly.
    We still have further to go in this inquiry—as far as we can possibly open in our imagination and experience. We have seen that the visible universe is only the smallest fraction of the known universe. We have also seen that our universe emerged from “nothing” roughly 14 billion years ago and is sustained by stupendous energies, moment-by-moment. The understanding that most of our universe is invisible and all of it continuously emerges from nothing visible points to the existence of an extraordinarily powerful, generative ground. We turn to explore the infinite beyond our universe, the deep context that gave birth to and sustains our cosmos—the“Meta Universe” (as described by many scientists) and the “Mother Universe” (as described by many wisdom traditions). In the following chapter, I speak of the “Mother Universe,” but what is being described is beyond words or concepts and beyond the space and time of our particular universe. The Mother Universe is nothing other than the infinitely subtle and creative ocean of aliveness in which we are immersed.

Chapter 4
The Mother Universe
    We bear the universe in our being as the universe bears us in its being.
The two have a total presence to each other and to that deeper mystery
out of which both the universe and ourselves have emerged
.
    â€”T HOMAS B ERRY 1
    Reflecting on the birth of our universe from nothing nearly 14 billion years ago leads us immediately into the depths. When we further contemplate that creation did not end with the Big Bang, but is a continuing process that even now sustains the entire universe, we are led into the realm of wonder and awe. How amazing: An invisible life force is creating our universe and then holding it within its spacious embrace for billions of years, while growing ever more conscious forms of life that are eventually able to look back and appreciate their origins. This is an ongoing miracle of such staggering proportions that there is a natural tendency to pull back from a full encounter with it. Let’s not pull back, but dive into the depths and explore the deeper foundations of our existence.
    What is the reach of our aliveness? How far and how deep dowe extend? Might our aliveness connect with an even deeper ecology of aliveness within and beyond us? When we look through the double lens of science and spirituality, what answers come back about this foundational question?
    It is helpful at the outset to acknowledge that, historically, we humans have been extremely self-centered. Until