Summary:
- Background: Stephan Martin is an astronomer, educator, and author.
- Teaching Experience: He has taught astronomy, physics, and consciousness studies for over thirty years.
- Current Role: Director of the Deeptime Leadership Program at the Deeptime Network.
- Books: Author of “Cosmic Conversations” and “Living a Cosmic Life”.
- Workshops and Lectures: Leads workshops and lectures that integrate insights from the cosmos into everyday life.
- Transformative Leadership: Focuses on developing innovative leadership programs for a flourishing future.
- Cosmic Perspective: Emphasizes the importance of viewing crises and changes from a cosmic evolutionary perspective.
Full interview, edited for readability:
Stephan: Like, one of the things I love about science is: I’m innately curious. I’m always looking at the rocks. I’m always looking, you know, so what’s this about? What’s this about, right, this kind of innate curiosity?
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the gas pump. My name is Rick Archer my guest today is Stephan Martin, he’s an astronomer, educator and author who has taught astronomy, physics and consciousness studies at colleges, universities, and learning centers across the U.S. for over 30 years. He is currently director of the Deep Time Leadership Program at the Deep Time Network, where he helps develop and facilitate transformative and innovative leadership programs that support a flourishing future that works for all. Steve is active in leading workshops, lectures, and experiences that bring insights and wisdom from the cosmos down to Earth and everyday life. His first book, Cosmic Conversations, is a multidisciplinary approach to exploring the universe through the lenses of science, spirituality, and culture. And his second book, Living a Cosmic Life, helps people navigate crises and change from a cosmic evolutionary perspective. You have a new book, Steve. What’s the name of that one?
Stephan: New book is called Becoming the Change. It’s on evolutionary rituals with my co-author Carol Kilby.
Rick: Okay, good. I listened to that one. I listened to half of Cosmic Conversations, which I really enjoyed. I mean, it’s interviews, many of which, many with people I’ve interviewed and many not. And I thought you did a great job and they all had fascinating things to say. Personally, I’ve always been fascinated with astronomy in a very amateur way. I mean, one of my early spiritual experiences, really, was lying in the grass at night looking at the stars and just kind of expanding. And I’m sure many people listening have had that kind of experience. My parents used to take me to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City sometimes on my birthday, and I have like a thousand screensavers on my computer that rotate of web and Hubble space telescope pictures, and it just kind of keeps things in perspective.
Stephan: Yeah.
Rick: And how about you, Steve? I mean, how did you first get intrigued with this field?
Stephan: You know, there’s something about the night sky for me and I think when I was about eight years old growing up in the suburbs of Miami and I spent a lot of time in the Everglades and in Florida Keys, and there’s some really dark skies. But something about the night sky captured me when I was eight years old and it’s never let me go. It’s like there’s some kind of mystery, there’s some kind of knowing, there’s some kind of connection, you know, as Brian Swimme would say, there’s some kind of allurement there, something drawing me forward in a new way. And I decided to follow that. And I followed it my whole life. And I’m still fascinated with the night sky. I can’t walk outside the house at night without looking up and making some kind of connection with this larger perspective. So, it seems like it’s really a part of myself, but also something I’ve been drawn to since an early age.
Rick: There’s a woman in my town who is working on this darkness project to get us to turn off all our lights at night, you know, more so we can see the sky.
Stephan: And that’s really a sign of our culture at this time, right? We’ve become isolated from the larger perspective, right? If you look at the earth from space, you get these beautiful images of cities and highways stretching across the night landscape. But people in those cities, they’re basically living under light domes, right? These kinds of self-enclosed domes of light that are preventing this larger perspective, preventing the larger universe from coming into our lives. But if you think about it, for most of human history, our consciousness has been shaped by the night sky, because most of the time the skies were really, really dark up to about 150 years ago. And so, humanity and all life on earth really grew up under this experience of a vast cosmos, of a vast cosmos landscape. So, we lost that.
Rick: And larger perspective is a real key phrase here because, when I look at a picture of a galaxy, which I do every day, because it’s on my screensavers, I think, okay, 100 billion stars I’m looking at here, and if only one in a billion has an intelligent civilization, that’s 100 intelligent civilizations that I’m looking at here. And imagine all the little dramas that people are going through in all these civilizations and how real and all-consuming their experience probably is, as is the case with those of us here on Earth. But if you could just zoom out to the big perspective and maintain that perspective while yet living an individual life, it would be much more realistic, actually, in terms of what the universe actually is and our part in it.
Stephan: Exactly. Well, and also you point to something, Rick, in that when we kind of get stuck in a situation, it’s often because we’ve lost perspective. It’s like, “Oh, I think this is the way things are,” right? Or, “I’m stuck in this problem,” right? The problem isn’t really… Well, the problem’s in ourselves and we need to kind of take a step back. Like, “Oh, I need to go for a walk. I need to get a bigger perspective.” And then the problem looks different and the problem’s not a problem anymore. So, often the things we run into are a matter of perspective and a matter of a smaller context than what’s actually there in reality.
Rick: Yeah, and we just described it in terms of space, but it can also be done in terms of time. And you have this thing called the Deep Time Network. And I don’t know exactly, I’ll have you tell me what that is in a second. But I kind of have one of those myself, and in which I, I realized, okay, this life I’m living is like the snap of the fingers, in terms of a much longer timeline of my existence. And anything which is happening right now is about as significant in the big picture as what I had for breakfast when I was five one day or something. It’s like, this too shall pass. So, what is the Deep Time Network?
Stephan: Well, The Deep Time Network, it’s a non-profit and it’s an organization of individuals and organizations around the world that are taking kind of a deep time look at things, taking a look at the evolutionary cosmological view of things and how to apply that to daily life and the problems we face as a culture. So, we look at, for example, evolutionary cosmology and how this kind of picture of an unfolding universe can really help us solve some of the problems in our human civilization, but also looking for connections between the larger cosmic perspective and daily life. And I can talk more about that of course, but it’s really…
Rick: Yeah, I could start bringing up examples, but maybe we should just do that in the course of our conversation. Like we could talk about it in terms of climate change or politics or technology, AI developments or many other things.
Stephan: Well, the thing is, you know, a lot of the issues, well, first of all, we’re going through some tough times now, right? Individually and as a culture, right? There’s a lot of crises happening now, multiple crises, the poly crisis as people have described it. And we need a larger perspective. We need to take a step back, take a breath, see what the larger picture is, and see what’s actually happening here. And I think that’s really helpful for a couple reasons. One, because it connects us to larger contexts that can provide solutions that we wouldn’t think of normally. But also, there’s a lineage here, right? Many traditional cultures look to the ancestors for guidance. It’s like, oh, you know, let’s talk to the ancestors, right? Whenever they have a problem in the tribe, they talk to the ancestors. And the ancestors might be human ancestors who have passed, or it might be trees, rocks, mountains, right, the Mother Earth that we come from. So as an astronomer, I wonder, well, what if we look at this 13.8 billion-year lineage of matter and energy that has led to this moment, right, this ancestral stream that we’re part of. Could we get some insights about life by looking at things from that long time perspective, that large perspective because clearly the universe knows what it’s doing, right? It’s been doing what it’s been doing for 13.8 billion years and if we study things in terms of what is the universe doing, what does the universe want, what is the universe aiming towards, that might give us some insights in terms of solutions that we’re not thinking about in our daily lives, because we’re disconnected from this larger cosmic perspective and I would even argue this larger wisdom stream that’s available to us in the night sky and in the world around us every moment.
Rick: Yeah, so you just said something that would lead us into an interesting point, which is, what does the universe want? Some people would listen to that and they think, “What do you mean, what does the universe want? It doesn’t want anything, it’s a bunch of stars and rocks and empty space and it doesn’t have desires.” You’re anthropomorphizing it by saying it wants something.
Stephan: Absolutely. You know, and as Thomas Berry would say, and your listeners may know of Thomas Berry, he was a Catholic priest, he was a cultural historian, he was tremendously influential in this perspective that the Deep Time Network includes, which is this perspective on the new cosmology, which is an, you know, an interpretation of modern cosmological science inside a meaningful cultural context. But he would say that we’ve taken these human qualities and we’ve kind of shrunk them down to too small a container.
Rick: right,
Stephan: Because what we want as humans came from a lineage that came from earlier from us. It came from certain tendencies in the universe over the course of 13.8 billion years that shape our desires in a particular way. So, we say we don’t really know what desire means without a cosmic perspective. There’s a larger perspective here that we’re part of and as he would say, the universe is primary, the human is derivative, not in the sense of being less than but that the qualities that we inhabit and express in the life that we’re living is the root of this larger life. We’re aspects of a larger life, a larger whole. That’s always expressing itself through us in a particular way.
Rick: Yeah, I think I’ve heard you say that we are the universe. And this leads directly from what you’re just saying. So, when you say that, who or what constitutes this “we” that you’re referring to?
Stephan: Yeah. Well, and Rick, what you’re pointing to is really what people have talked about as being the most significant scientific discovery of the past 400 years, which is that we don’t live in a cosmos, but we live in a cosmogenesis, right? We live in an unfolding, dynamic, process-based reality, which is really what the universe is. So, the universe is not a place, right? It’s not a collection of objects. It’s an ongoing evolutionary creative self-generating process and so that’s huge. I want to unpack a little bit about that in more detail because I think it’s really helpful to understand where this came from and just the impact that that can have on us. But that leads to the insight that we don’t live in the universe but we are the universe in a particular form at at a particular time in cosmic history. So, I’ll just, I can give some examples about that or if you have another question, we can kind of riff on that too.
Rick: Well, let’s define universe. I think everybody could give a definition of what they think the universe is, but let’s make sure we’re all on the same page here when you use the word.
Stephan: Yeah, so, I use it in multiple contexts. It’s like talking about cosmology. So, cosmology has two meanings. Cosmology is the scientific study of the evolution and dynamics of the physical universe, cosmology is also kind of the worldview, the overarching framework of meaning that a particular culture inhabits, in their cultural space. So, I’m using universe and kind of overlapping context that way. One, the physical universe that we’ve discovered through telescopes, through Hubble, through James Webb, through evolutionary theory, but also in the sense of meaning the larger whole of things, right, universe like with a capital U. And the relationship between those two is really interesting. I think they’re at least co-emergent, but they might be subsets of one, one larger whole, if you get what I’m saying.
Rick: I think I do. It’ll become more clear as we talk. And again, people listening should send in questions if anything we say is not clear. I, you know, there’s some sayings in the Upanishads and books like that, such as that, you know, Sarvam Kalvidam Brahma, all this is that, all this is Brahman or absolute. And some traditions, Kashmir Shaivism, for instance, doesn’t just dismiss the manifest universe as mere illusion, but sees it as imbued with tremendous intelligence, that the whole thing is a play and display of, we could say, creative intelligence. And I really resonate with that. I mean, to me, God is hiding in plain sight. If we look at a blade of grass or a pebble or something and contemplate what we’re actually looking at, if you had microscopic vision and could see everything that was going on inside the atom in the pebble or the cell in the blade of grass, you’d be astounded. What was it, Einstein or somebody talked about being in a state of perpetual astonishment. Or maybe that was Kurt Vonnegut. Yeah, he said, “I’m starting a new religion. I’m calling it Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.” Anyway, riff on that.
Stephan: Well, you know, that’s kind of our natural state. When we get a sense of kind of the magnificence and wonder of that which we come out of, and by that which we come out of, I mean, this reality, this moment, but also this evolutionary cosmic journey of matter and energy for the past that anything at all happened, and that we’re connected to that in some really profound ways. You know, for example, we’re connected to the Big Bang, the birth of the universe, right here in this moment, right, and if you want to ask, well, where’s the leading edge of the universe, where is it going, where’s the center of all this? Well, it’s right here, and it’s right where you are, and it’s right over there in Andromeda, and it’s in your cat, it’s in your dog. So, there’s this whole perspective in this movement from cosmos to cosmogenesis that is based on omnicentrism. This idea that there are many centers for the universe’s experience and each of us is a particular center or portal through the universe, through which the universe is reflecting its capacities and experiencing the universe. So, as Thomas Berry said, each of us, in every living being, including that blade of grass, is a particular mode of the universe, a particular way the universe knows itself to be itself and perceives itself. And I think that really resonates with a lot of these great spiritual traditions as well.
Rick: Yeah, I have several thoughts on that. So, you’re not saying that the universe is like a big basketball and you could calculate exactly where the center of the basketball is. You’re saying it doesn’t have any definable edges to it. It’s not like a big ball, and therefore anything and everything could be said to be its center. Is that right?
Stephan: Yeah, it’s actually even more profound than that, because here’s the distinction between cosmos and cosmogenesis. So, if we go back 100 years, back to the year 1924, the universe, as was known in modern western culture was essentially the Milky Way galaxy.
Rick: Right.
Stephan: So, they thought the Milky Way was this galaxy, a couple thousand light years across, and-
Rick: A couple thousand? Is that all they thought it was, across?
Stephan: A couple thousand. They were just getting the sense of how to measure distances. This is observational astronomy. And they thought, “Oh, it’s a couple thousand light years across, and the sun is at the center.” And they said, “Well, maybe it’s not quite at the center, but it’s just a little bit removed from the center.” And it was also eternal. And by the way, this is the universe that Einstein grew up in. So, this was Einstein’s idea of how things were. Have you heard of Einstein’s greatest blunder?
Rick: Yes, I heard it in your book just the other day, remind me of what it was.
Stephan: Let’s talk about it because when Einstein…
Rick: He fudged his theories because they didn’t fit what he believed and he felt guilty about that later.
Stephan: Exactly. Let’s just unpack a little bit for your listeners because in 1914, he wrote down his equations of general relativity which essentially tell how matter, space, and time interact. And his equations told him that the universe or one solution to equations is that the universe is going to expand. And so, well that can’t be true. Everyone knows that the universe is static. It’s always been around. It’s not changing at all. So, I’m going to add this cosmological constant, which is a fudge factor, to kind of fit what he thought the universe looked like. So, he had this idea in his brain of what the universe was, yet the equations were speaking to him and saying what the universe really was. But he decided, I’m going to go with my idea versus what reality is telling me. So, there’s a spiritual lesson here as well. Well, fast forward to 1924, Edwin Hubble, after whom the Hubble Space Telescope was named, discovers that the Andromeda Galaxy actually isn’t in the Milky Way. It’s actually 800,000 light years away. It’s a whole other galaxy. So overnight, the universe doubles in size, right? We go from one galaxy to suddenly two Island universes.
Rick: Isn’t it 2 million light-years away.
Stephan: It’s actually two and a half million light-years away.
Rick: Okay.
Stephan: Yeah, he mismeasured. Yeah, he forgot to take in certain factors. Yeah, exactly, understandable, but a great result nonetheless. So, then they started measuring distances to other galaxies and found these other galaxies which they just thought were spiral nebulae through the telescopes Are actually other island universes millions of light-years away. Then Edwin Hubble, in 1929 publishes a paper, where he discovers that these galaxies are moving away from us faster and faster depending on their distance. So, in other words, the whole thing is actually expanding, right? The universe is expanding. This is the first evidence for an expanding universe. Einstein looks at the telescope, he says, “What a blunder I’ve made.” He calls it the greatest mistake of his life. So, he sees that we’re actually in an expanding reality, which is the equations we’re telling him, you know, from the very beginning.
Rick: Oh, well, we can forgive him.
Stephan: You know, if he can do it, right, we can forgive ourselves. Exactly. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. So, just something I was wondering. So, when we say the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and yet I think I heard you say that it’s 95 billion light years across or something, correct me if I’m wrong about that, is that because it’s expanding and is it also true that, at a certain point it actually expands faster than the speed of light in a sense, so that we can’t possibly see what is out there beyond the light cone.
Stephan: You know, it’s tricky in that sense because we don’t see the entire universe, we just see the part where the light has the time to reach us.
Rick: Right.
Stephan: As the universe is expanding, there are certain parts of the universe that we’ll never see. They’re kind of disappearing from our cosmic horizon, as we see.
Rick: Faster than the light could get to us. Yeah,
Stephan: Yeah, yeah, and then it’s like 20 million, Ones that we’ll never hear from again and they’ll never see us.
Rick: Bye-bye.
Stephan: Bye-bye, yeah. But this whole idea that the universe is expanding and then if you run the tape backwards from what Hubble was perceiving, then maybe the universe was closer together at some point, hotter and denser, and that’s part of the evidence for the hot Big Bang, right, that there was a beginning. Now the other thing is that they found direct evidence for the hot big bang in the form of the cosmic background radiation in 1964. There’s this energy left over that pervades all of space that’s present even where we are. It’s in this room and if you have one of those analog radios and it’s in between stations, that static you hear, some of that static is this cosmic background radiation. So that radiation is there from the beginning of time and so in that sense we’re actually connected to the birth of the universe in every moment in every place. We’re at the center, we’re also at the origin of the universe at the same time. And there’s just something so revelatory about that. I mean, what term do you give to the origin of the universe? Well, scientifically we call it the Big Bang, but it wasn’t big and it wasn’t a bang. But it seems like it needs a better name. Like people have said, well, maybe the flaring forth or the great emergence. We’re in a time now where we don’t really have the language to describe what we discovered about the universe. Because what name do you give to the sacred origin of everything, right? Everything that we hold sacred, at least in the physical world, had its origin in this beginning. Shouldn’t that have a sacred name as well? And yet, we settle for a big bang of the culture.
Rick: Yeah, one thing I heard you discussing with one of your guests, I think it might have been Hamid Ali, A. H. Almas, was that, you know, we can think of the universe emerging both temporally, 13.8 billion years ago, and constantly, like right now, it emerges. And my way of understanding that is that there is a level of creation right now, right here, at which nothing has emerged. Nothing has ever happened. It’s kind of the absolute unmanifest non-emergent field from which everything appears to emerge. And that appearance of emergence is a continuous process. And so, that’s one dimension of it. And then the other dimension is, okay, something happened 13.8 billion years ago and it’s been expanding ever since.
Stephan: Yeah, well, I mean, the reality of the universe is always the now. It’s always this moment. It’s always this kind of, you know, co-arising of this whole kind of matrix of reality in the moment and quantum physics is pointed to that, right? That what we call physical matter is arrangements of energetic patterns. The latest theory might be its quantum fields and these quantum fields are fluctuating in such a way that they’re giving rise to what we call the physical universe. Now, we know the physical universe through interacting with it at a quantum level, right? It doesn’t exist except in potential, except when we interact with it. So, there’s this interaction with the world that’s creating the world of our experience in the moment. That’s very much a quantum physics point of view, but also very resonant with some of these spiritual teachings at the same time.
Rick: So, it doesn’t exist unless we interact with it. And I think there was some kind of an argument between Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore about whether the moon exists if nobody’s looking at it or something like that. Go ahead.
Stephan: Yeah, you know, just to be scientifically accurate, I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t exist if we’re not interacting with it. People interpret quantum physics in many different ways and some of them do say, “Well, this is evidence for God because God is the observer that’s observing the all and that’s causing it all to come into manifest through this quantum collapse of the wave function.” That’s one interpretation of quantum physics, so I wouldn’t say that all scientists would agree with that. But yeah, I could see why, you know, Rabindranath Tagore and Einstein would have this kind of discussion about it. So, just being clear, it’s like, “Well, what’s interpretation and what’s the actual science, but we know that something happens to create a quantum event when it comes from potentiality and actuality.
Rick: Yeah, and I don’t know, if there were some cosmic rays that caused us all to go blind all of a sudden, we’d still have tides, you know, I mean, does people sticking their toes in the water make the moon appear so as to create tides?
Stephan: Right, right, exactly. Yeah, but the point about, I think the point that you’re getting at is that our interaction in the universe is shaping it in a particular way, right? It’s like we’re not just passive dead observers floating around inside a big box, but we’re actually shaping our experience of reality at the very least in significant ways through our living.
Rick: Yeah, and you know a million years after the big bang, there couldn’t have been any biological life around yet to perceive anything, and yet we can detect evidence that things were happening and expanding and growing back then. So, is it our observation now that is somehow causing that to have happened, or does it happen even if this were a lifeless universe?
Stephan: It’s a great question. You know, in fact, John Wheeler is a quantum physicist who talked about this kind of thing, that our existence as observers might be shaping the past such that the universe created observers to observe itself. It almost seems like circular reasoning but he had this kind of participatory observer theory interpretation of quantum physics saying you know we can actually literally change the past through our observation of it, shaping it in ways that lead us to be here to make the observation which kind of makes your head hurt. Right, the chicken or the egg.
Rick: Right.
Stephan: No one knows if he’s right, but this is this kind of idea, this kind of creative brainstorming about “can we influence the past, is the past fixed, are we shaping it,” and there’s some experiments in quantum physics, and I’m not super qualified to talk about them, but where they do seem to be able to change the past history of these particles by tweaking the experimental setup. Doesn’t mean as time travel is possible, but…
Rick: I think Dean Radin has done some work around those.
Stephan: Yeah, he’s terrific, he’d be a great resource for talking about that more.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve had him on the show a couple of times.
Stephan: Yeah, he’s terrific.
Rick: Yeah, so we’re getting there. This, piecing this together, it’s remaining coherent. So, you know, a minute ago I quoted the Upanishads, “all this is that,” but then they also say, “Well, thou art that.” That’s what you are. And so, what they’re saying is essentially, when you say we are the universe, I interpret that as meaning we’re all of it. That alone is and our essential nature is the essential nature of that and there’s really nothing other than that. And so, we appear to be an individual but in fact it’s just that reflecting through an apparent focal point.
Stephan: Exactly, some locus of experience.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: And it goes along well with what I was talking about with omni-centrism, right? So, we have many centers of experience, each one unique in each reflection of the whole, or each a portal through which the whole reflects its experience. That was Thomas Berry’s view, and he was also a very broad thinker, like it’s not just our experience, it’s also the experience of the redwood trees, right, and my dog, and all these species that live around the planet. They’re also modes of experience as well. So, he had a very much ecological bent because the loss of any species is the loss of a particular mode of knowing the universe. And so, I’m aware we’re in an ecological crisis right now where we think that we’re it, like humans are the center of everything. And we are a center, but the natural world is also made up of centers of everything as well. So, the loss of any species is the loss of a particular way the universe knows itself.
Rick: Yeah. So, you and I and the 74 people who are watching this right now and the thousands of people who will be watching it in the coming weeks, ultimately, essentially, we’re all the same person, which is not a person. We’re also, we’re ultimately, we’re the same essential reality, which is, we could say consciousness, looking out through different eyes, hearing through different ears. Light that is one though the lamps be many, sang The Incredible String Band back in the 60s. [Laughter] [Laughter]
Stephan: Sounds like the Upanishads too, right?
Rick: Yeah, that’s probably where they got it from. Yeah, and so I’m just stating that as a common, not so common, spiritual understanding, which was derived not merely from philosophizing, but from the direct experience of those who developed the capacity to have such experience.
Stephan: Yeah, well, and this kind of gets into what’s the universe doing?
Rick: Exactly, that’s where I was going with it.
Stephan: And so, if you look at the long arc of the universe and you ask, “Well, what is the universe doing over the 13.8 billion years?” You can say it’s doing a lot of things. But Thomas Berry, and I’ll go back to him because he was really good on this, he talked about the governing themes of the universe, right? These themes that the universe is trying to enact over the arc of history but also in every moment. And they are differentiation, subjectivity, and communion. So, differentiation is the creation of complex forms of itself. You begin with plasma, a cloud of plasma, and now you’ve got the whole diverse manifest world with 10 million different species. That’s pretty diverse, that’s differentiation. And so, it’s creating unique centers of experience over the course of history and in every moment. So, one way to reflect upon this is, you Rick, your particular differentiation of the universe, as am I, and that’s a certain directionality that the universe is choosing to take. It’s choosing to form a Rick, a Rickness, right, and a Steve-ness, and you know, an apple-tree-ness, and all these different aspects of it. So, part of the desire for the universe is for us to be our unique selves. That we’re seeking, the universe is seeking some particular expression through us. And the more that we are ourselves in a natural way, unconditioned way, the more we are enacting that principle of differentiation. It also gives us an ethical principle, because if you ask, does this course of action, for this organization, or the intention, does it increase or decrease the differentiation of this ecosystem? Well, if it’s increasing it, then it’s in alignment with the larger arc of the development of the universe. If it’s diminishing it, then maybe it’s not. So, there’s an ethical principle here, at least for guidelines for action.
Rick: Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.
Stephan: Yeah, yeah, and you know, go forth and multiply.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: Which is what the universe is doing. So that’s one of these themes. Now, the second one of these is subjectivity. The universe is seeking to deepen its subjectivity of itself over time as well. In other words, to deepen its intimacy with itself. And Thomas Berry had a radical view that there’s a subjectivity of the whole that’s expressed in the subjectivity of all the parts, which is very much a traditional spiritual insight. And so, the universe seeks to deepen the subjectivity. And so, when we engage in activities that deepen our subjectivity, that bring in more richness and depth into our particular experience, then we’re aligning, you could say, with the will of the universe, with the directionality of the universe. It’s seeking to deepen itself that way. And some people are monastics, they go deep into the subjectivity and in that sense, they’re aligning with the dynamics of the universe.
Rick: Yeah, and of course you can go deep into subjectivity without being a monastic too. You know, one’s own dharma is better than the dharma of another, says the Gita.
Stephan: Right. Well, but that’s also true. It’s like when we’re thinking about ways forward, it’s not just my subjectivity, but does this course of action deepen the subjectivity or diminish the subjectivity of the redwood tree? That’s on my window. What about its subjectivity? What about its perspective as well? That needs to be taken into account as well because it’s not just deepening mine, but deepening all the different expressions of subjectivity on the whole.
Rick: What I find fascinating, among many things, is the fact that there is this complexity. And I’ve heard you and others discuss it as well. We start, Brian Swimme’s favorite quote, “if you start out with hydrogen and you end up with giraffes, rosebuds and Mozart,” against all odds, because the number of variables that had to be just so to get this complexity is mind-boggling. It’s like a, you know, kind of a one-armed bandit in Las Vegas with a million different wheels that have to spin and line up just so in order to get a winner, but we’re living in the winner.
Stephan: Yeah, isn’t that something?
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: And the other thing that he’s pointing out here is that those self-organizing dynamics, right? They’re not coming from central command, right? The intelligence and the dynamic organizing principle of the universe is happening in every center of itself.
Rick: Right, because it’s omnipresent. And even Christianity says God is omnipresent, right?
Stephan: Yeah.
Rick: Omnipotent and all those omni words. It’s not like God is playing puppeteer off on some celestial realm, but that, you know, you look at a snail, a blade of grass, a pile of dog poop, or whatever, that cosmic intelligence pervades it and orchestrates it.
Stephan: Somehow it knows how to make a galaxy on this side of the universe at the same time how to make a similar galaxy on this side of the universe. Remarkably so, right? It’s somehow present there. But Rick, what you’re pointing to, I mean, this is cosmogenesis. This is the fact that there’s this intelligence is saturated throughout. The old view, right, which is cosmos. I mean, cosmos means ordered whole. And you think about what’s the cosmos. Well, that’s the world that most people are living in. Like, this is what the reality is. This is where I fit into it. This is how we interact with each other. It’s fixed and it’s based on transactions. It’s not the dynamic cosmogenesis that we’re really involved in. So, we’re really as a culture, I think moving into that perspective that you’re talking about, it’s like well the intelligence of the whole is present here in this moment. Which means that the leadership of the whole is present in this moment as well and that’s one thing we bring forward in our leadership program. It’s like can you tap into the intelligence of the whole in your location right now that can give guidance in terms of how you’re called forward. Not how you’re directed forward, but how you’re called forward. There’s a calling here. There’s an allurement that moves you towards, right, what’s wanting to come forward, what’s wanting to come through you.
Rick: Yeah. And that’s, well, part of that is what I was alluding to earlier when I said God is hiding in plain sight. It’s, science has given us the tools to see that the whole universe is alive. Because if we look closely enough with the tools science has given us, then, we just see laws of nature, that we don’t even fully comprehend, functioning in even the simplest of things. And of course, marvelously functioning in more complex things like a single cell and so on. So, it just, we can see now that intelligence is just scintillating, brimming in every iota of creation.
Stephan: You know, and that’s another of those terms that Thomas Berry would have an issue with. It’s like well, we’ve confined intelligence to just the human brain when intelligence has a larger context because where did the human brain develop? It took a universe to develop the human brain. And so, the intelligence doesn’t come from the brain itself that’s kind of a smaller context. It comes from this whole evolutionary process which gave rise to the brain. It gave rise to everything we see around us.
Rick: Yeah,
Stephan: He would kind of unpack that and say intelligence is derivative of the whole.
Rick: Sure, and you know, and we know that, well, all, every aspect of life is, I mean a slime mold can design a subway system better than a bunch of engineers working for 20 years, you know with…
Stephan: Isn’t that great?
Rick: Yeah!
Stephan: Isn’t that great that people are using slime molds to kind of solve these problems and really…
Rick: Yeah, they actually are!
Stephan: I know. I love that! Right.
Rick: In case people don’t know this story. Um, if you know, they’ve actually taken um little bits of wheat or something that slime molds like to eat and put them all around in the places where all the subway stops in the Tokyo subway system had to be, and then let the slime mold do its thing. And it actually makes the most efficient route between all the little bits of wheat in the agar-agar or whatever they’re growing it in. And they’re actually literally using this to help design such systems these days.
Stephan: Yeah, because they know the most efficient pathway.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: The other thing they’ve been doing is: they’ve been giving these problems to kindergartners and saying, “mess around with it.” Right? And the kids come up with all kinds of solutions that the engineers, who’ve gone through western educational training, can’t come up with!
Rick: Wow!
Stephan: Let’s not underestimate, you know, underestimate either slime molds or kindergartners.
Rick: Yeah, but let’s revise education so it doesn’t dumb people down.
Stephan: Yeah. And I love what, Brian Swimme talks about with that, because he says, “the purpose of education is to commingle with the universe.” I mean, just to kind of take that in: the purpose of education is to co-mingle with the universe or become more intimate with the generating reality that’s around us. It’s such a different perspective than: “Okay, we need to get a degree to get a job to have a functional fit in society.” But it’s become closer to the reality that that gave birth to us
Rick: Yeah. For some reason I just flashed on a memory of about twenty, fifteen – twenty years ago. I went out skiing with a friend in Colorado and this lady was helping fit my ski boots to the skis, you know, in the rental shop. And she said she was from South Africa. And she said, “I’m just kind of having a little fling here, because I know that pretty soon, I’m going to end up in an office cubicle for the rest of my life, and so, I’m just having some fun.” And I often think about her, I think, “Wow, is she in an office cubicle?” Or… I mean, you know, as Thoreau said, “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” But I think that, if we could formulate an educational system that did what you have been saying, which is: enable individuals to become cosmic, while yet remaining individuals, it would transform society and the enjoyability of human life en masse.
Stephan: Absolutely. You know, and part of it is learning to trust those nudges from within, right? What we call, you know, what Brian called the allurement, right? So, one way of kind of aligning ourselves in every moment is: to start paying attention to, well, what is it that fascinates you right now? Right? It’s like, at this time in your life, just look around, what am I fascinated by? What am I creatively engaged by? What am I just captured by? And just accept that as that’s guidance from the whole, right? That’s the universe expressing itself in terms of guidance the way forward for that particular aspect called “you” in a particular way. So, learning to follow your allurement, to trust them, to see that they come from a larger process is the process of being led forward by the universe, because this is the cutting edge of the evolutionary edge. What’s happening in this moment, in this location, is the leading edge. So, where is that being, where is that leading you?
Rick: Yeah, but I think you have to temper that attitude with some discernment and perhaps some spiritual practice and some kind of motivation because if what really attracts you is to sit in your parents’ basement and play video games day in and day out, that might not be your highest calling. And you know, you can get addicted to that kind of thing.
Stephan: Absolutely, exactly. And you know, you’re pointing to, right, one, the need for discernment, right? But also, another way of saying it is: heart’s desire. I mean, that’s what they often talk about in spiritual directions, “What’s your heart’s desire at this time?” And you can really discern that, okay, your heart’s desire probably isn’t to play video games. There’s probably something that’s missing that you’re looking for. So, sometimes it takes a little bit of digging. It also sometimes helps to have a community of reflection and so in a leadership program, we reflect each other back to each other. It’s like, okay, here’s my allurement and when people speak it out, they get a sense of the truth of it or the untruth of it. And so, it’s important, I think, to kind of acknowledge these things in community and recognize “I don’t have to go at it by myself.” I need a trusted friend or a dedicated community where I’m speaking my truths out and just seeing how they resonate and seeing what it feels like to speak my allurement out. “This is what I’m called to. This is what I’m called to now.”
Rick: Yeah, I had a spiritual teacher who one of his principles was, what he called the principle of the highest first. And what he meant by that was that there might be any number of things that you could do or get interested in, you know, sort them out, you know, figure out, okay, which would be the highest, which would be the most laudable, the most evolutionary, the most inspiring, the most useful, and go for that one. Maybe you’ll get to the other ones later. Maybe you won’t, but prioritize them.
Stephan: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And also, if these allurements are really genuine, they’re gonna be for the benefit of the whole. Because they’re coming from the wisdom and intelligence of the whole. And so, you can ask yourself if, you know, okay, do we need to go to South Africa right now? You may or may not know, but does this course of action increase or decrease differentiation, subjectivity, and communion? Because if it’s a true allurement, it’s going to align with the dynamics of the universe and increase those aims that the universe is aiming for.
Rick: Yeah, let’s look back to what I think Robert Lanza calls it biocentrism, but there’s another word for it, the anthropic principle. You know, where against all odds, given the number of variables that had to be just right for it to happen, we’ve ended up with the universe, at least in our corner, is teeming with life. And despite the second law of thermodynamics, which is supposed to make everything kind of more disorderly and you know there’s something that opposes or contradicts that law. What’s your take on how this is happening and what most, as fundamentally as you can understand and explain it what’s going on? I mean it is sort of, go ahead. Take it from there.
Stephan: You know first of all I can’t explain it. It’s one of these things that just kind of leads me to just stand there and wonder. It’s like the chances of being here are like that, right? If the expansion of the universe were, you know, a billionth of a percent faster, you know, stars would never form. Or a billionth of a percent slower, stars would explode before life has a chance to form.
Rick: That’s just one of a whole bunch of variables.
Stephan: Exactly, and people call them the fine-tuning constants in physics, which is a terrible name because it kind of imagines god as an engineer tuning dials on a radio trying to get things just right. But I like to look at it from the perspective of deep attunement, right? We are deeply attuned to the universe which gave birth to us, are deeply resonant, we’re deeply expressive of something larger than ourselves. And I don’t have a good explanation for it at this point. I mean, people use the anthropic principle to say, well, we live in a life-friendly universe. Well, it certainly does look like the universe was very eager to create forms of life early on. But in terms of explaining it, I don’t have a good scientific theory. But like you said, there’s bio-centrism.
Rick: Yeah, I would say we are that which is larger than ourselves. In other words, we think of ourselves as this little six-foot, you know, entity that’s gonna die someday, but in fact, we are the universe, like you said earlier. We are cosmic intelligence. We’re running the show, but we’re only, we as an individual are just reflecting a certain, we’re just like a lens, like a mirror that’s just reflecting sunlight that’s shining on billions of other mirrors that are reflecting it in their own ways.
Stephan: Yeah, so you might say that, so Rick, would you say there’s like a larger life of which the physical universe is participating in? Is that how you would see it? Or the expression of?
Rick: I would say that the physical universe and what, and we can discuss more what that might actually be, because there’s a lot more to that than meets the eye. But I would say that if I can use the word God as a shorthand, that there’s only that. It’s all God and self-interacting. And just to flesh out the word God a little bit, we’re talking, I’m obviously not talking about some kind of isolated entity with a beard hanging out someplace. I’m talking about all pervading intelligence, which by definition it has to be if it’s all that, if this is all that. And, but God is in a way playing hide and seek with himself. And I’m sorry for saying himself, herself, itself, playing hide and seek. Because, you know, you and I might not fully appreciate our true nature as that, but that’s part of the game. And the part of the game seems to be to rediscover, who is it, T.S. Eliot, to return to the place from which we started and know it for the first time.
Stephan: Yeah, that resonates. You know, it resonates in a couple different ways. First of all, it seems like we live in a revelatory universe where the universe is seeking to reveal its secrets to ourselves if we’re ready for it. But, there’s something about that revelatory process. Like, one of the things I love about science is I’m innately curious. I’m I’m always looking at the rocks, I’m always looking, you know, so what’s this about? What’s this about? Right? This kind of innate curiosity, because I love the process of discovery, whether it’s discovery in conversation or looking through a telescope. There’s something that process of learning something you didn’t know five minutes earlier. There’s just something so thrilling about that. And I think there’s a cosmic principle in that. That there’s something where the universe is seeking or actually yearning to reveal itself through our experience, as our experience in our world around us to bring forth new possibilities. So, I mean you’re using the metaphor of, you know, God playing hide and seek. But this idea of seeking and finding seems to be really resonant. It seems to be connected to human joy or at least my joy because I love the process of discovery. I love being in conversations where something new is being revealed. So, I’m just pointing to this whole revelatory principle as being kind of a pleasure principle as a principle of joy and maybe it’s reflecting the whole in a particular way. That there’s something that loves to be discovered through this process of asking questions and looking under rocks and, you know, peeking into dark corners.
Rick: Yeah. They say that the reason we don’t remember all our past lives is that we wouldn’t learn the lessons that we are meant to learn in this life if we remembered all the past ones. We have to kind of start with amnesia, otherwise the game is too fixed and we wouldn’t actually evolve as much. So, you know, maybe we’re the microcosm and on macrocosmic level, God is doing the same thing. He/she/it intentionally becomes self-shrouded in order to work out the puzzle of arriving back and knowing itself for the first time as a living reality. Because, if we think of God as just all-pervading, unmanifest intelligence, let’s say without any universe, just sort of resting on the cosmic serpent or something like they depict Vishnu doing, then that’s kind of a passive state. But if the whole universe manifests and then we end up with people like us, or moreover, people like Ramana Maharshi or Jesus, then God has fully realized itself in and through a human form. And this adds something much more to the mix than certainly existed when it was unmanifest alone.
Stephan: Yeah, it’s added something. And I think what you’re pointing to is, what a lot of people point to is that the universe seems to be a kind of a learning system.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: It’s self-organizing, it’s learning and it’s getting better at being itself over time. And this can happen, you know, of course forever. But kind of the insight that the universe is a learning system, I think is a really important one because that kind of gives us, you know, kind of one idea about what we’re here to do. It’s like we’re here to learn, we’re here to discover, we’re here to reveal new aspects of ourselves and the world around us. And did you ever get a chance to talk to Edgar Mitchell before he passed away?
Rick: No, I didn’t.
Stephan: Yeah, I mean, you know, I interviewed him in the book as well.
Rick: I’ve interviewed, you know, Dean and people at IONS, but not Edgar.
Stephan: Yeah, but he talks about this experience he had on the way back from the moon, right, in 1971, where he had this kind of cosmic experience where he saw the universe as a living being, but also, as a learning system. And he realized that, you know, in all his training as an aerospace engineer, as a fighter pilot, all those theories of physics that he learned, consciousness wasn’t a part of it. And he realized that consciousness needed to be part of a fuller understanding of the universe. And so, he went down and he founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences and everything that came from that with Dean’s work and everything beyond that. But this idea that the universe is a conscious, living, learning system is the insight that he had.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: Yeah.
Rick: St. Teresa of Avila said, “It appears that God himself is on the journey.” And if that’s true, then, I mean, what you’ve been saying reminds me of that. It means that, you know, God is evolving. And again, if the universe is all God in an apparently manifest form, then the universe is God’s evolutionary practice. It’s God’s spiritual technique.
Stephan: Yeah.
Rick: God’s ashram.
Stephan: Exactly. Well, and that goes back to cosmogenesis, right? We live in a living, unfolding, process reality versus a static, fixed reality. So, Rick-ing is happening here, Steve-ing is happening here, God-ing is happening here. It’s all process, it’s all in development, it’s all on a journey somewhere. And so, when people talk about the journey of the universe, they mean this unfolding of unexpressed potential that’s happening over 13.8 billion years. So, there’s been a whole new area of theology called process theology, which takes what you just talked about, God is an unfolding process. How do we actually change our liturgy to reflect that? And just touching on the book with Carol, that’s one reason why we wrote this book on evolutionary rituals because we need new rituals to kind of represent what we’re learning about being in an evolutionary context. How do these rituals kind of support us in living a more evolutionary perspective on things?
Rick: Yeah, and of course as we talk here, we have to keep in mind that many people are uncomfortable with the word “God” for many reasons, and the only right reason I use the word is because, you know, all-pervading-cosmic-intelligence is too much of a mouthful. Maybe I should make an acronym of it. But, but, um…
Stephan: People say good orderly direction is another good acronym for God.
Rick: Yeah. But, but obviously, we’re not talking about, you know, your fundamentalist grandpa’s God here. You know, we’re talking about something subtler, more cosmic, more, more profound, less… but you know, you sort of have to respect everybody’s perspectives. And so, you know, I realize, of course, that many people are atheists and some very intelligent ones, you know, like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and people like that. And others, you know, they have a problem with the suffering of life, you know, how could there be some kind of God if we had, you know, the Holocaust or Gaza or many other situations, South Sudan. And what do you say if somebody says that to you?
Stephan: Which part? I mean, it’s –
Rick: Well, you know, it’s like, what kind of God is that, that would allow such things to happen?
Stephan: You know, it’s still something I struggle with. You know, and one thing I’m concerned with is just the dimension of life through human activity. And so, how can we direct our lives and how can we direct human culture’s direction more towards the life-affirming, mutually enhancing life-affirming presence on the planet, right? Because we see that we’re enacting great suffering or great suffering is happening because we have a mistaken idea about who we are in our relationship with the natural world and our relationship with the universe. So, if we could have a larger context, a bigger context, one that’s more inclusive of all these different perspectives, I think that’s more life-affirming, it’s more in the direction of differentiation, subjectivity, and communion. But yeah, there’s a lesson there in suffering and the great suffering that’s taking place. And I don’t necessarily have the context of meaning to unpack that, but we all encounter it. Cataclysm happens, right? Things break down. And if we look to the universe, and I don’t know if you ever had Michael Dowd on your show, but he was a…
Rick: I did, yeah. I love Michael.
Stephan: You know, and I love what he said, like, one of the things that has driven cosmic creativity more than anything else in the past then we can face our lives with more courage. So, not to diminish people’s suffering, because suffering is suffering, but to recognize that breakdowns are part of how life works, it’s part of the cosmic process. It’s actually a form of creativity, that things have to be broken down for new forms to come forth.
Rick: Yeah, I mean you and I exist because stars exploded and that was probably no picnic for the people who were orbiting those stars if they were, you know.
Stephan: Exactly, right, or the stars themselves, all right, if they’re conscious beings, right, to think, right, your entire life blows apart but in that process is transformed into something new.
Rick: Yeah. Yeah, so this is a theme that I heard you mention a lot, particularly in that book that you did with Carol about rituals. You often brought up the theme that chaos or breakdown precedes breakthrough. And, you know, a lot of people these days feel like we’re in dire straits. There’s so many problems any one of which could wipe out humanity. And yet, somehow or other this may all be a precursor to some kind of enlightened age. I talked about that with Dean Raydon and, not Dean Raydon, with Duane Elgin, uh, and many of my other guests and I’m sure you’ve have had that conversation too. So, you have any thoughts on that? Any insights on why that might be a pattern from a cosmic perspective?
Stephan: Yeah, well one, I mean there’s only, you know, if we’re living in a universe that has this benefit matter and energy, that matter and change, that matter and energy is changing form, right? So at least in terms of the physical universe, we have to die because the atoms in our bodies are needed by future generations. What else are going to make, you know, the generation out of, right? So, the fact that we’re recycled and everything is recycled right back to recycle stardust is part of how reality works. The present has to be broken down for the future to be born. Now having the faith that that’s going to be true can be really tough sometimes because I don’t know if this breakdown that we’re going through the culture is going to lead to an enlightened age. I’d like to think so but one way of thinking about it is the larger perspective right this perspective of the larger future is coming through in the present and that’s causing the cracks in the foundations of all these institutions that are crumbling away. So, you could say, well, the world doesn’t have to break down first and then a new world is being born. A new world might be being born now, almost like spring shoots breaking through the soil and that’s what’s causing us to see the breakdown that’s happening right now. So, a new world is probably being born right around us at this moment as things are crumbling everywhere. But can we look for those new green shoots and start to water those? It’s like what are the new ways of living and being that are different than how the old systems went by? You know, what’s new and alive in me as kind of these old structures of myself are breaking down? So, it’s like paying attention to these little green shoots of the future, pouring our energy and our creativity and watering those and giving birth to that new culture. Because it doesn’t happen on its own. It happens through our own collective action.
Rick: Yeah, I subscribe to three or four of those good news emails.
Stephan: Yeah, it’s important to have.
Rick: Yeah, you get these little things and there’s some cool stuff happening or if you, like, you know, go to a bioneers conference or something. You see all the amazing things that people are doing which don’t make the news um because you know as they say if it bleeds it leads and
Stephan: And our brains have a negativity bias, right? So, we’re trained to pay attention to bad news and kind of overlook the good news. So, it’s important to kind of look for the good news. But also, during these tough times, we need a larger perspective. We need to see that breakdowns have happened and that it’s a form of cosmic creativity, right? That’s leading to something new or can lead to something new, but also that there’s a continuity of experience, right? Like you think, you and I are old enough, Rick, that we’ve been through a lot, right? We’ve been through, you know, a lot of crises. We’ve been through a lot of tragedies, we’ve been through some tough times, and somehow, we’ve developed resilience in that process, right? And maybe a little bit of wisdom too. It’s like, oh, I learned something, even though that was a really tough time, I learned something going through that, and that helps give us some faith when the next tragedy comes around the corner to help us navigate it. So, this is where our own self-eldership can come in, but also where elders are important, right? People have been around that know how life works. Let’s look to them and ask them questions like, “Hey, it was really tough back then. How’d you guys get through it?” And let’s listen to them. Let’s not put the old people in, you know, the old folks home, but let’s put them front and center and say, “Tell us about the past and how we learned.”
Rick: Yeah. Obviously, nature moves in cycles, so many different cycles. And this point in our conversation reminds me of the opening chapters of the Bhagavad Gita where there’s a big crisis going on. There’s this war about to start and Lord Krishna says, “When dharma is in decay and adharma flourishes, I take birth age after age,” and he goes on to say, “to destroy the wicked and uplift the righteous,” which, I don’t mean to sound like one of these, you know, Christians that think everybody, all the non-Christians are going to die and they’re going to go to heaven. But, you know, that theme does come up in different spiritual traditions.
Stephan: You know, and you’re pointing to, you know, we need new sources of wisdom when we have new crises that are in our face, right? Because clearly the old sources aren’t serving us or we’re not using them effectively. And so, it’s time now when kind of a lot of the old sources are kind of breaking down. And so, where can we look for new sources of wisdom? And so, I keep bringing back Thomas Berry here just because he’s on my mind. And he said, we’re at this period now where we’re at the end of the Cenozoic Era. Right? We’re at…
Rick: The what era?
Stephan: Cenozoic, right? That’s the geological era that began 65 million years ago with the extinction of dinosaurs.
Rick: Okay.
Stephan: So, we’re at the end of this. Well, how do we know this? Because we’re in the middle of a fifth mass extinction of life on the planet.
Rick: Sixth, isn’t it?
Stephan: Oh yeah, sixth, you’re right. Yeah, so we know and we’re the first conscious beings that we know of in the history of the earth that have actually witnessed the end of an era. I mean, we know that we’re in the breakdown, we’re in this transition phase. And he said, if we’re going to navigate to a new era, which is one that’s life affirming and mutually enhancing, which he called the ecozoic era, right? So, the ecozoic, meaning mutually sustainable for the whole earth community. We need a fourfold wisdom path. We need four paths of wisdom. And so, he talks about this as we need the wisdom of science, right? And science with some of its insights is on the verge of becoming a wisdom tradition, with respect to the universe. We also need the wisdom of the classical religious and spiritual traditions. We can’t just throw them out because we’ve learned a lot about how the world works and suffering and the cause of suffering. We need that wisdom. We need the wisdom of indigenous peoples, the first peoples who know how to live in harmony with the planet and have done so for thousands of years. And we need the wisdom of women, we need the feminine, we need the intuition, we need the power of compassion and care. So, we need this four-fold wisdom traditions and probably more but he listed four, so it’s a time when we need multiple sources of wisdom to make it to the ecozoic. So, I’m not saying that science is the way forward, it’s just the way that I’ve been involved with, but we need all these sources of wisdom to kind of discern the way forward together as a culture.
Rick: Yeah, and all those sources exist, so they’re just out of balance. You know, it’s like we’re kind of running on one cylinder or the other, just dragging along. The science cylinder is predominant.
Stephan: Yeah, well, and as, you know, when he was writing this, patriarchy was dominant. It still is.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: And we need the wisdom of women. We need the wisdom of those voices that we’re not hearing in the larger conversation.
Rick: Yes, and more of the qualities that women personify. You know, I think that’s maybe what you’re talking about when you say wisdom. But I’ve always been fascinated by the interface of science and spirituality. I feel like they each bring something to the table which the other lacks to some extent. And it’s not like, you know, science is going to go away and we’re going to have this spiritual society where we all just, you know, walk around half naked and farm and so on. I think we’re, you know, the cat’s out of the bag, Pandora’s out of the…, Pandora’s box is open, we’re not going to un-, forget everything that we’ve learned through science. It’s… So, how would you describe what science offers which spirituality lacks and vice versa?
Stephan: Great question. You know, one thing science excels at is asking questions and discerning patterns in the physical universe. Right? Kind of, discerning larger patterns of connectedness, at least in the terms of cosmology and evolutionary science. How we’re interwoven with the matter and energy around us and the large scheme of things, but also the development of technology, technology that can really help us, that can ease suffering and create positive change in our lives. So those are big benefits of science. But also, this process of of asking questions of nature, of being curious and being a scientist of nature is really at the heart of, I think, the scientific process. Why is it this way? What is, you know, what’s the universe about? So, asking those questions of everyday life, I think, is part of science. Now traditionally, spirituality has been about questions of meaning. What does this mean? How can I live a good life? How can I kind of be in touch with my deeper nature? How can I be good to my neighbor? Or it’s often a question of religion as well, and the two haven’t always met well together. But I think what you’re pointing to Rick is we need both. We need to have conversations that come out of both and I think you’re doing a great service to humanity and the universe by having this podcast and bringing in all these different perspectives because we need these different perspectives. You’re up to what interview 700 and something.
Rick: Something like that.
Stephan: Yeah, these are all different you know, different voices of the universe, right? So, we need this multiplicity of voices because it’s a big universe and it’s a big life. And so, we need a diversity of voices. So, once again, there’s that principle of differentiation coming in again. It’s like we need this differentiated view of things and not just one view over the rest.
Rick: Yeah. One thing that comes to my mind is that, the mystics in particular, not just, you know, religious philosophers or ethicists, but the the mystics, who really got down to the real nitty gritty in terms of their inner subjective experience, describe all kinds of realities that scientists in general don’t even believe exist, but which I suspect are nonetheless as real as anything science has discovered. And so, it’s as if science has relegated itself to a certain bit of the spectrum of the total reality and spirituality is good at another part of the spectrum. But if, as a species, we want to have what we might call total knowledge, we need to somehow merge those disciplines harmoniously and have the whole spectrum or at least a much bigger piece of it. So, as an example, I heard you describe that dark matter and dark energy comprise the vast majority of the universe, what it’s made of. We don’t even know what those are.
Stephan: Right.
Rick: And then even that which we consider material is mostly not material. So, you know, there’s very little of the universe that we’re actually, that science is actually studying and it doesn’t have a clue about the rest. Now, you know, the mystics talk about all these subtle realities, astral realms, celestial realms, you know, and I don’t know if there’s any equivalence between those descriptions and dark energy or dark matter. I don’t know. But they do say that there’s a lot more of the universe than meets the eye and that it’s actually teeming with life at these subtle levels. Like, that the average person cannot perceive. Anyway, that’s a mouthful.
Stephan: Well, you know, and what you’re pointing to, Rick, is so right because we need multiple ways of knowing because it’s a big universe, right? And one way of knowing isn’t going to capture it all.
Rick: Right.
Stephan: Right, so there’s things we see through our telescopes that we don’t see when we’re on the meditation cushion and there’s vice versa right there’s things we discover, there’s the Hubble Space Telescope and there’s the human space telescope, right? It’s like we’re looking at different directions and we’re seeing different slices of reality. You know, and I love that you brought up dark matter, because it’s one of my research specialties and like you said, dark matter makes it up a significant part of the universe and we don’t know what it is. It’s something that’s felt and has influence but doesn’t emit electromagnetic radiation.
Rick: It has gravitational influence does it?
Stephan: Has gravitational influence but doesn’t emit light. And so, somehow there might be dark matter all around us right now but the light’s just passing right through us and you know and as you’re pointing to is like the universe that we see with our eyes that we interact with our senses is about five percent of what we think the whole is. So, the rest is dark energy, dark matter and we have no idea what that is. However, I had an interesting conversation with a nuclear physicist named Claude Poncelet. Do you know him? Was he on your show?
Rick: I’ve heard his name but no he hasn’t been on my show.
Stephan: He wrote a book called The Shaman Within. He’s a nuclear physicist but also an accomplished shamanic practitioner.
Rick: Oh yeah, I saw you refer to him in your Prague talk. Yeah, go ahead.
Stephan: Yeah, he’s terrific. Well, he was. He passed away.
Rick: Oh, rats. When I saw you mention him I thought, I got to get that guy.
Stephan: But anyhow, he’s a western trained scientist, nuclear physicist, worked for the Department of Energy, he did astrophysics research, but he’s also an accomplished shamanic practitioner. And you know, in the shamanic worldview, everything that exists that’s created or has a form has a spirit. And so, part of the shamanic practice is to make contact with a spirit, to honor, to bless, to be in relationship with those spirits. And so, he and his colleagues would make these journeys out to the spirits of the cosmos. They would contact the spirit of the earth, they would contact the spirit of the sun, the spirit of Jupiter, the spirit of the Milky Way, the spirit of the universe. And he told me, when I was talking to him, that he made contact with the spirits of dark matter and dark energy. And something about that sent shivers down my spine because it’s my research specialty. And of course, these are immense powerful beings. I mean, they’re guiding the whole, you know, unfoldment of the universe. And so, he made contact and of course, he didn’t ask a lot of questions because it wasn’t respectful, but he said, “Whoever and whatever they are, they’re benevolent. He got the sense that they were filled with this tremendous benevolence. And when I heard that something in me just kind of relaxed. It’s like, okay, if we don’t know what of how I orient to the universe. But it’s also, I think it’s really open of him as a scientist to kind of bring science and spirituality together in that way, to use his shamanic practice as a basis for his astrophysical research, and his astrophysical research too, as a basis for his shamanic practice. So, I think it’s just a lovely way that someone’s integrated both into their own psyche and they’re receiving information about the universe.
Rick: Yeah, I mean if we didn’t have dark matter and dark energy, would we have galaxies? Or would…, wouldn’t there be enough gravitational pull to have galaxies?
Stephan: We think that dark matter is part of the shaping influence for galaxies, that it actually, you know, causes them to form and shapes them and guides their evolution. Dark energy seems to be a property of space. So, as the universe expands, it seems like this dark energy, whatever it is, if it is an energy, increases and is causing the universe to expand faster and faster. So, they’re different phenomena and they’re dark because we’re in the dark about what they are. We just have no idea. It’s not that they’re dark or black or anything like that. It’s just we don’t know.
Rick: We can detect their existence because gravitational laws and stuff wouldn’t work out if they weren’t there. We’re kind of inferring their existence, right? By measuring…
Stephan: We’re inferring their existence. Exactly.
Rick: Right.
Stephan: Yeah. And it’s easier with dark matter than dark energy because with dark energy, we just see the expansion of galaxies and we infer because they’re expanding faster and faster than they should that there’s something there called dark energy.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: It’s still, you know, an open question.
Rick: Okay, I want to get into a discussion with you about the possibility of systematizing subjective means of gaining knowledge so that it’s not just everyone has his own experience and how do we arrive at any kind of agreed upon, you know, understanding of things the way science can do because everybody can follow the same methodologies. But before we get into that, a question came in, which I think would be, we can segue to from what we were just saying. This is from a, a fellow named Ivan Dimitrov from Bulgaria. He asks, or says, “If the universe started from nothing in a big bang, this is a textbook definition of magic. There are two explanations. Either this calls for a magician or magic happens out of its own accord. Are we living in a magical universe?
Stephan: That’s a great question. Oh, thank you for that. So, first of all, Big Bang Theory doesn’t describe what happened at the beginning of the universe. It describes what we can detect after the universe began. So, if the universe began from a singularity, that’s not part of our physical theories. We can’t actually detect that. We can detect what seems to have been an account of events based on the current evidence that happened after that. So, we can’t actually study the beginning itself. But I get where he’s coming from, because before the Big Bang was chosen as the dominant theory about the universe, there was another theory put forth by Fred Hoyle and others called the continuous creation theory, saying that matter and energy are always being created in a way that simulates the universe that we’re looking at and it’s been eternal. Now, so the question here is, do you believe in an infinity of miracles or just one? Which one’s more miraculous? And so, it seems like, well, we’ve got just one at this point, which is you know the actual birth of the universe itself. And, of course, people have used this, well there must be a magician, right? There must be some designer or some, you know, first principle. It’s a good question. It’s outside the domain of physics, it’s really in metaphysics, although people are trying to kind of speculate that from quantum field theory and the metaverse and things like that. But that’s still theoretical at this point. So, I leave it to, you know, the listener to kind of interpret things in their own context of meaning.
Rick: Okay. Okay, so here’s a pet little theory of mine that you’re welcome to, you know, shoot to smithereens. But, you know, in the Vedic perspective, the universe is, it pulsates. So, it expands, expands, expands, expands, and then it contracts, contracts, contracts into what they call pralaya, which is sort of the great ultimate collapse. So, I’m wondering, number one, if the Big Bang might be the other side of a universe that has collapsed in upon itself, like a parallel universe or other-dimensional universe that has totally collapsed and now, boom, it comes out the other side as a Big Bang. And then a related question, and again, I’m total novice and this is just something I I was wondering about, is whether quasars could be, in a similar sense, the opposite side of black holes in some parallel universe. The black holes are sucking everything in, the quasars on our side of the divide are shooting everything out. Has anybody, what do you think about those things?
Stephan: Well people talk about, you know, is the opposite of a black hole a white hole? I think we can do a black hole and come out a white hole in our universe and that could be these superluminous events in the past that we call quasars. It seems like, you know, quasars are associated with black holes, right, supermassive black holes in early galaxies. And I can’t say what the source of that… I can’t say whether that’s true or not, but it seems like these quasars have characteristics that go along with accretion disks or something explainable in our universe related to black holes. Like there’s a black hole that’s feeding, it’s eating a lot of stars and that creates this super luminous effect that we call quasars. Now I know Peter Russell’s also talked about this right in terms of you’ve got black holes, you’ve got a white hole in time. It’s kind of the other side of that as well. I don’t know, I mean we haven’t seen any anomalies that I know of in astronomy, that kind of would indicate it being a white hole and having that kind of characteristic to it. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but just there’s nothing I know that would kind of fit that example of what that might look like. Now in terms of the cyclic universe theory, yeah that’s one of the leading theories that people thought about. It’s like, well maybe there’s a big crunch before the big bang. And they thought, well is the universe going to expand to a certain point, have enough energy to bring itself back, and have a big crunch again? That was before the discovery of dark energy. Now with the discovery of dark energy, the overwhelming energy of the dark energy is going to push the universe further and further out, so it expands more and more and more without any point of return in the future. Now it doesn’t mean we know everything that’s going along, going on with this because predicting the future of the universe is really tricky because we can’t even predict the weather for next week. So, predicting the universe a trillion or quadrillion years in the future is, I think, just impossible. Right? It’s so complex, it’s so creative, it’s so emergent that to say, “Well, here’s the trajectory now and it’s going to be like this in the future,” don’t get depressed about that because people have gotten depressed about the future of the universe in the past and really, you’re underestimating the universe when you do that.
Rick: Yeah, and I’d be tempted to say, “Well, we’re not going to be around, so we don’t have to worry about it,” but I would also say, “Well, we are going to be around, but we don’t have to worry about it.”
Stephan: Yeah, well, but also, it’s important, this larger picture gives us kind of a framework for meaning. At the end of the 19th century, they thought, oh, physics has discovered everything, right? And thermodynamics says things are going to run down and the universe is going to die of heat down in the future. And people are actually committing suicide as a result of this. Well, what’s the point? Everything’s going to run down. Well, what’s the point of living, right? And now we know that we live in a fantastically open universe. It’s going to continue doing universe things for a long time. So, it’s open, it’s evolving, it’s this process of revelation, it’s a joyful expression of itself. I think there’s a much better reason to be alive now, considering what we’ve discovered. It’s totally open.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, there are plenty of reasons to be alive regardless of what happens to the universe trillions of years from now. I mean, yeah.
Stephan: Yeah, but I think, you know, it’s a positive kind of direction for the future, right? This kind of emergent revelation that we’re part of.
Rick: Yeah, I would say whatever happens, it’s all in the interest of evolution, you know, again, there’s this cosmic, there’s this evolutionary prerogative or tendency that the universe has, which it will have regardless of how it dies or reincarnates or whatever it’s gonna do.
Stephan: Yeah, well, and also on a personal level, well, and you know, having a big perspective can really be hard during tough times, but also to learn to trust the process as well. And by trusting the process, I mean trusting the process of the universe, but also trusting your own experience of the universe in that moment.
Rick: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, you’ve heard the story of the Chinese farmer.
Stephan: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. I won’t tell the story for the umpteenth time, but you know, whatever happened, the farmer would say, “We’ll see.” You know, and then something else would happen, and it would turn out to be, “Oh, okay, it was good that other thing happened.”
Stephan: Exactly, exactly. So, you know, once again, it’s the power of perspective, right? You don’t know how it’s going to turn out until you have that larger perspective.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: Yeah.
Rick: Okay, so let’s wrap back around to mystics and whether subjective means of gaining knowledge can be verifiable and reliable. As people know, in objective means of gaining knowledge, scientific means, scientists have certain procedures they follow, and when they publish a paper, they explain exactly how they did their experiment, and even down to what kind of equipment they used, and what steps they took, so that others can replicate their experiment, and either buttress they’re finding or perhaps refute it. But in subjective means of gaining knowledge, there are so many different spiritual traditions contemporaneously, and in the past, and they all have different methodologies. And even if they all have the same methodology, like maybe you go to a zendo and you’re all practicing the same zen meditation technique, everybody in the room has a different nervous system. So, it’s like a bunch of scientists who are all using different instruments and trying to do the same experiment, they’re all probably going to get different results. So that’s a tricky thing. I mean, you know, I have friends who doubt very much that any subjective findings that mystics have come up with are reliable. For instance, you know, let’s say you have the experience that, “Oh, consciousness is unbounded, it’s infinite.” How do you know that’s not just your brain producing that experience? Maybe LSD could do the same thing for you. And is there any evidence that consciousness really is infinite, or is it just your brain creating the hallucination that it is?
Stephan: Yeah, yeah, great questions. And people have thought about, well, can we study consciousness scientifically? Have scientists become mystics, teach them to meditate, and bring their scientific training to their own subjective experience and learn what they can learn about it. And I don’t know if you ever had Charles Tart on your show, but he was a tremendous… He just passed away a few months ago, but he was collecting mystical experiences of scientists and what they learned about, you know, themselves and the universe through studying themselves and studying these processes from a scientific perspective. And he’s collected a whole archive and I think it was called “TASTE: The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendental Experiences,” something like that, but the Taste Archive where people who are actually trained in the process of science and discerning, you know, truth from falsehood, were going through these experiences learning something about it. Though people, you know, try to kind of come up with what you call it, catalogs of different types of experience and varieties of spiritual experience and find some way to kind of standardize and see what we’re learning from all this. I think that’s really interesting that people are trying to do that and look for, you know, overarching themes and this is what happens. And yet I also wonder, you know, do we need that? I mean, we do and we don’t, right? Because if we’re each unique center for the larger whole expressing itself, does it have to be coherent? Do we have to have a grand unified theory of everything that includes spirituality and science? And even in the process of science or in cosmology, people are starting to lose hope in this idea that there’s some grand unified theory. Like when I was, you know, growing up and studying science, it was all about, okay, once we can unify all these four forces, we can find some grand unified theory that brings it all together, and then that will be done. But now we’re discovering is that, it’s not as easy as we thought. The universe is more complex than we thought and there might not be some grand unified theory that brings it all together. Because the universe just simply may be more diverse and complex than we could have imagined. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe we have to sort of recognize that we don’t live in a universe, right? A unity-verse. We live in a pluriverse, right? A unity that expresses itself in a plurality of different ways. There might be many different ways that are maybe in direct contradiction to each other, but are still expressions of the whole. You see what I’m saying?
Rick: Yeah, and they may seem like contradictions. They may seem like contradictions to each other from our perspective, but perhaps from the perspective of the universe itself, everything is nicely reconciled, that it’s just our feeble brains that see things as contradictory. Yeah.
Stephan: And maybe it’s a principle that the universe has to be kind of self-coherent but not coherent to our, you know, smaller…
Rick: I mean, who are we? We’re not calling the shots. And, you know, the laws of nature got along just fine before we began to understand them. Gravity, apples were falling from trees before Newton got bonked on the head with ones.
Stephan: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. But I’ve also seen this trend in, you know, kind of philosophy of mysticism where in the past there’s this idea of the perennial philosophy.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: Like okay, all these different, you know, spiritual paths are, you know, different paths up the same mountain. When we get to the top, there’s this kind of unitary experience that, you know, it’s just seen from different perspectives. That’s kind of fallen by the wayside, at least in terms of what I’m aware of with recent terms of thinking, right? Jorge Ferrer wrote a wonderful book in the 1990s called “Revisiting Transpersonal Theory,” where he argued that this idea of one unitary perspective that we’re all looking at from different perspectives is very limiting in terms of how diverse human experience is. That maybe it’s more like an ocean where all these wisdom traditions are streams that go into the ocean, this ocean of oneness, this ocean of unitary experience that they can all agree upon, but where they enter the ocean and how they enter the ocean can be very different than one another.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Stephan: They’re not always consistent that way, but they can be very different but also still agree on the same aspects of deeper nature or true nature, whatever you want to say, as the primordial essence of things.
Rick: Yeah, speaking of perennial philosophy, my friend Dana Sawyer wrote a biography of Aldous Huxley and I have it on the shelf behind me, I think, and a quote, I heard Dana quote Huxley as having said that he felt that the greatest innovation of the scientific revolution was the scientific method itself, and in particular the concept of the working hypothesis. And ever since I’ve heard that, I’ve thought to myself, you can take any idea that any mystic brings up or anybody else and just don’t regard it as something you should believe in or not believe in or whatever. Treat it as a working hypothesis and, you know, see what evidence can be collected for it to support it or refute it.
Stephan: Fantastic. I love that. I mean just even take the hypothesis, right, I am universe, right, or I’m the universe expressing itself in this moment. Walk around with that and just see what your day is like.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: And do the experiment and just see how’s my day different, what do I discover with this? Well, just the idea that we live in a pluriverse, right, where there’s a multiplex of perspectives and this is a new insight for me, because when I’ve talked to, you know, some of the indigenous people, they say we don’t need need Big Bang Theory. We’ve got a perfectly acceptable and working way of engaging with the universe that’s worked for thousands of years. And especially in Latin American cosmologies, there’s this idea of the pluriverse. It’s not just a universe, but there’s a multiplicity of ways of knowing reality that are each distinct and each autonomous in themselves.
Rick: But are they equally valid?
Stephan: It depends what you mean by valid. I mean, they’ve worked for these indigenous cultures for thousands of years, right? They’ve got very rich spiritual traditions that are working very well and they don’t need to know that their story is part of a larger story.
Rick: Yeah, but if they think that a giant tortoise is holding up the earth, it might work for them, and you know, they might like that idea, but it doesn’t mean there’s actually a giant tortoise. Or, you know, there’s people around these days who think the earth is flat and it doesn’t flatten the earth in the least for them to think that.
Stephan: Oh yeah, I know and you know and of course, if it’s a working theory it’s actually going to lead, it’s going to yield fruits, right? So, if you think well the universe is made out of pink elephants, well can you do an experiment and verify that or does that actually reveal something new? Are there fruits to that approach? And if so, it might be a valid way into the universe but if not then maybe it’s just a figment of someone’s imagination.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, I think somebody, Kayleigh McEnany or one of these people was having a conversation with Jake Tapper and he said something about, “Well, it’s a fact that such and such happened,” and she said, “Well, we’ve got alternate facts,” and his jaw dropped like, “What?” I mean, but it’s kind of an oxymoron. I mean, I’d like to believe that, you know, we’re all blind men feeling the elephant. We’ve all got a little bit of a glimpse of what the total elephant is, but there is actually an elephant, regardless of how accurate or comprehensive our particular feel of it is.
Stephan: Oh yeah, and also how the elephant reveals itself to you depends on the way that you’re, you know, both the way and also which part of the elephant you’re feeling.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: The universe may reveal itself in different ways depending on which mode of interaction we’re interacting with it.
Rick: Yeah, so I respect all the wisdom of the ancient cultures and obviously many of them have done a better job than we have of respecting nature and all. And a lot of that wisdom might be metaphorical and actually be pointing to something that science has yet to discover that might be factual. But nonetheless, I kind of, on the flip side, I do feel like there is some reality and it’s not, it doesn’t conform to what we believe, it is what it is and we should attempt to conform to it as best we can.
Stephan: Mm-hmm. You know, I’m also wondering about that at this time, it’s like, you know, is the reality that we interact with, does it, – let’s see how to say this – are we seeing it as it is or are we seeing it through our own interaction and relationship with it? I’m not getting at the…
Rick: Yeah, I think you said it. Yeah, I mean, in other words, are the windows of our perception clean or not? And can we perceive, what is it Blake said, eternity in a wildflower and infinity in an hour or some such thing? Or can we not because the windows of our perception are foggy, cloudy?
Stephan: Yeah, well I’m also thinking about, you know, in the last chapter of Cosmic Conversations, I interviewed Rick Tarnas, and he talked about the tale of the two suitors. Do you remember that?
Rick: I interviewed, I didn’t get that far in your book, but I’ve interviewed Rick, but remind us all about that.
Stephan: Yeah, so Rick, I think this might be in Passion of the Western Mind, this tale of two suitors, there’s two ways, you know, imagine you’re trying to court reality and learn something about her secrets. You could come in, you know, with a club and try and bludgeon the secrets out of her and say, “Tell me the truth,” right? Or you could try to woo her as a lover, and you might get different results depending on how you approach reality. And so, if we approach reality as a lover, we might find different results are revealed to us than if we try to, you know, beat the truth out of her, in that sense. I mean, it’s kind of a crude example, but just the kind of the way we court reality might, reality may respond in particular ways.
Rick: Give me an example of, you know, someone doing this, either of those, or both of those two things, two different people approaching in those two ways.
Stephan: Well, you know, I think about, you know, Francis Bacon, the Renaissance philosopher, said we need to put reality on the rack and torture, or nature on the rack and torture to reveal her secrets.
Rick: Lovely.
Stephan: And he’s thought to be one of the founders of the scientific method. It’s like, you know, here’s this dead objective universe and we’re just going to kind of dissect the body and learn how it works and this whole kind of idea of a mechanistic universe. Whereas what if we, you know, come with the openness that, well maybe reality is living, interactive, and also desires to know us as well. It’s like a lover and beloved, which of course is a spiritual idea as well. And what if we look at science as maybe a love affair with reality. It’s like, “I want to know your secrets. I want to become more intimate with you.” Would that lead a different relationship with reality, but also a different experience of reality as well? Would reality unfold in a particular way that would be different than the first way? So, I’m saying not just the way we look at reality, but the way we approach it may yield different results too.
Rick: Yeah, what that elicits in me is, look what our technologies have done. I mean, some of them have been a blessing and some of them have brought us to the verge of extinction, and very often they’ve been motivated by profit or by the desire to kill lots of people or whatever. So, you know, the one is, they seem to spring from those two types of motivations you just described, you know, approaching nature respectfully and lovingly and and, you know, with the desire to benefit as many people as possible, or, you know, just sort of trying to understand certain laws of nature so that we can get rich or, or be victorious in war.
Stephan: Exactly, exactly. And we have this kind of extractive approach to nature now, right? Nature a collection of resources versus a web of relationships that we can come into more intimate connection with.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: That could also be, you know, a similar motivation for science. Do we want to do science simply as a way of gathering more knowledge, right, and filling up more encyclopedias, or you want to do science in a way that brings us closer to the nature of reality and in harmony with ways of being.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: And the same is true of any human endeavor, spiritual practice, or what’s our motivation, right? Is it to extract something from the situation or is it to come into harmony or alignment with the dynamics of being in the universe?
Rick: Yeah, this is a deep point we’re considering. I mean, it applies both to spiritual practice and to science and more kind of worldly endeavors, the underlying motivation, you know, why are you doing the thing? I mean, there are people who pursue spiritual practice or who take on the role of a spiritual teacher because, hey, it’s a good way to hit on women or to make lots of money and not have to work a regular job.
Stephan: Right.
Rick: And there are others who have much more sincere motivations. So…
Stephan: Or, they want to get enlightened, right? Or something like that. It’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna get enlightened. I’m gonna do spiritual practice.” Right?
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: Yeah.
Rick: Perhaps a little bit of an impoverished understanding of what enlightenment actually is and how long, you know, how long it might actually take to achieve, if it’s ever achievable, because there are a lot of people who achieve what some have referred to as premature immaculation, where they kind of think, “Okay, I’m there, I’m done.” And, “Oh, by the way, I’m the greatest avatar to ever walk the earth.” I’m actually literally quoting a couple of people I can think of who said that sort of thing, where there’s really a rather impoverished level of ego development or personal development mixed with some kind of experiential breakthrough. It’s a bad combination.
Stephan: Yeah, well and people forget that reality is open-ended, right? It’s always revealing more of itself.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: So even if you think, well this is it, well that’s true, but maybe you say this is it now and see what else is going to come from that because a lot of people I find say, “Okay, I found it.” Well, you found it for now, but remember, reality is dynamic. This is a cosmogenesis, not a cosmos. It’s evolving, it’s changing, it’s revealing more of itself over time.
Rick: Yeah, I think that’s really important. It’s really important for both scientists and spiritual seekers to realize that, yeah, and you’ve given us an example of scientists once having said that we know everything there is to know about physics and perhaps other fields, and of course they were wrong. And the same with spirituality, you know, you’re never done.
Stephan: Exactly. Yeah, you know, I’ve got a spiritual friend who says, “Okay, this is where I’m perching right now. It’s not where I’m going to stay, but this is my perch right now.”
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: Some profound state of inner peace. Okay, well, that’s my perch right now, and maybe I’ll be in, you know, ego rage next week, right? That’s where I am now. But it’s the process, right? It’s aligning with the process and you could say going with the flow, right? But seeing that everything is process, everything is unfolding, in that sense, everything is a wisdom stream that’s trying to teach us in every moment.
Rick: Well, if St. Teresa was right and God himself is on the journey, then certainly, we are.
Stephan: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. I think another question came in. Let me just see here if I can find that quickly and easily. A second. Here we go. From Kenny Hogan, Hogan in Scotland. We seem to be able to imagine the whole known universe and the evolution of the universe in our tiny individual minds. This implies that our consciousness has existential scope and potential. Am I confusing myself about our apparent capabilities? What do you think? You get that?
Stephan: Well, you know, we’re a bunch of smart primates on a rock circling a star trying to figure out something vaster than we are. So, we’re doing the best we can, and I would say that we’re certainly not that any answers about the universe in any definitive way, by any means. But this seems to be what it looks like now and in a thousand years it’s going to look different because people in a thousand years are going to say, “Oh, they thought that dark matter was this, they thought that dark matter was that.” Now we know it’s, you know, I think we’ve got a lot of the basics down, right? That we come from the stars, that we’ve got this evolutionary perspective, that we’re made out of stardust, that there’s this kind of unfolding process called universe that’s differentiating and creating more communion and subjectivity. I think what we’re going to discover in the future is we’re seeing a larger context. It’s like, oh, we didn’t see that this is the larger process that’s going on of which, you know, we only knew a subset. And of course, we’re going to learn more about the details of the process, but we’ve got a lot of good physics to kind of back up our account of the universe, but it’s by no means complete. I mean, if 95% of it is unexplained, we certainly don’t have a good working theory of the whole at this point. Oh yeah, he’s certainly right. But also, you know, the future is going to bring a bigger context, and that’s going to make a difference. It’s like, oh, this is what’s happening, right? Because oftentimes when we have a revelation, it’s really a shift in our contexts. Like, oh, I thought I was this, but I’m really this. So, I think that’s the direction that our future science is going, is, you know, filling in the details to some extent, but also changing the context in which we’re understanding those details.
Rick: Yeah, and it’s accelerating. I forget who said it, but you know someone was saying that the amount of knowledge that we have increases exponentially. It’s, you know, it’s the hockey stick. It’s increasing faster than we can imagine, especially with AI now.
Stephan: It’s like doubling every three to five years or something.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: Which is staggering. I mean, it took us 200,000 years as humans to get to this point, and now it’s doubling every three to five years. It’s certainly pointing to some kind of acceleration.
Rick: Buckle your seat belts. It’s quite a ride.
Stephan: We’re on the wild ride already.
Rick: Yeah. Okay, I’m going to loop back to something we were talking about earlier that I wanted to explore more with you and that is, you were talking about different spiritual traditions and they all have their different perspectives and so on. And perhaps even different, you know, I think it matters a lot. You know how it is, like if you’re sitting around having a conversation with friends about some far-out thing, you know, maybe astronomy or philosophy or something, and you kind of get high just having that conversation. It shifts your consciousness, it puts you in a different state to, even right now I’m feeling that way, having this conversation with you.
Stephan: Me too.
Rick: Yeah, so I think, you know, that’s in a way what a spiritual tradition is, is a bunch of people who, you know, get together and form a worldview based upon, you know, maybe some ancient knowledge or something that their leader has begun to experience or they’re experiencing because of what they’re practicing and so on. And it shifts your mentality as well as your experience. It shifts your thinking, your attitude, your understanding, as well as your visceral experience. And cults do that, too. You know, people get into very strange belief systems because there’s social reinforcement. The people, they’re, you know, clustering together. So, I think that, you know, with our blind men and the elephant analogy, I think, and Ramakrishna talked about this, Sri Ramakrishna, how there are all these different branches of Vedanta, which have been arguing with each other for a couple thousand years about what the truth is. And he kind of like said, they’re all right. You know, they each have part of the picture. So, I guess I’m saying this just because it helps to culture humility a little bit, perhaps, that we don’t fall into the trap of thinking that our way is the best way and everybody else has it wrong. You know, we’ve got a piece of the puzzle and we’re perhaps contributing to the totality of human knowledge by our own evolution, our own exploration, but it’s a collaborative effort. And it’s good to, in my opinion, I mean, there might be a time in one’s spiritual development where it’s good to just focus exclusively on one thing so you don’t get confused. I think there are other times where it’s good to be eclectic and, you know, poke your fingers in all kinds of different things and explore.
Stephan: Yeah.
Rick: So, I guess you have to decide which is the right time for you to do that. But personally, I prefer the latter approach now, and just to be open-minded and to just keep exploring. And the more I do that, the more I realize how much there is to explore and how little of it I’ve explored.
Stephan: Yeah, oh absolutely. Absolutely. Well, and also, I think what you’re pointing to, Rick, and this is kind of the point of podcast, is a revelatory power of conversation.
Rick: Right.
Stephan: It’s like something comes out, right, in the field between two people when they’re kind of inquiring together or just they’re in dialogue together. I mean, one, it gets us out of our own fixed point of view that I know what things are and you know, you know, things are we’re kind of, you know, fixing that way. But when we’re in this kind of genuine, authentic conversation where something’s traveling back and forth, something new is being revealed. And I would say that’s something new in a cosmic sense. Like, never before in 13.8 billion years has this conversation taken place. And there’s just something momentous about that. Like there’s an evolutionary edge that’s happening in this interaction right now. And so that’s really what I’m hoping people appreciate, is that there’s a cosmic dimension to this moment and this relationship and this revelation and this context right now that’s never happened before. So, let’s pay attention, let’s listen to that.
Rick: Yeah, and not just you and I, but everybody in their own lives. There’s, yeah, every moment is fresh.
Stephan: And you’re right, how am I in relationship with myself in a way that’s leading to new insights revealing, you know, themselves. So, it’s this idea of relational emergence, which I think is really coming to our culture much more strongly these days. And you could say there’s a feminine, feminine movement, this idea that we are more than we are together, like the African term Ubuntu, I am what I am because of who we are together. Other cultures have words for this, but this idea of kind of being a we as an entity instead of just a me. And we’re in the phase now where our culture where we’re kind of being pointed towards the direction of, well, what’s the “we” of us? What can we discover through the experience of us together? But that’s also a new path of revelation.
Rick: Yeah. Another thought that what you just said triggers in me is just that every moment is pregnant with evolutionary opportunity.
Stephan: Yeah.
Rick: And even in the most mundane, trivial things, you’re shopping at Walmart, you’re going through the checkout line, whatever, there’s every little interaction, every moment, there is evolution taking place and things are happening in a way that present you with opportunities for some sort of growth. It may not be dramatic in every little moment, but nature kind of arranges itself to have you experience what will be most conducive to your progress.
Stephan: Yeah, yeah. And what you’re pointing to is what I, you know, what I call or what we call it the deep network, a deep time perspective, right? We’re in the moment, we’re in the revelatory potential of the moment with an appreciation for, right, the larger whole that led to this moment at the same time. It’s like holding the whole “whole” at the same time, holding the moment, you know, simultaneously.
Rick: Yeah, it’s funny, I think I have like three pages of questions here that I cooked up and I haven’t even looked at them. [Laughter]
Stephan: Let me just mention one other thing is, you know, one reason why I wrote the book Cosmic Conversation, I called it Conversations or Dialogues, is I don’t want it to be just an interview. A lot of people I talk to, they don’t want to be interviewed because they’ve been interviewed before, but I want it to be a dialogue, right? So, giving a model for discovering something about the universe through relational conversation, like we’re doing now. And so, it’s more than, you know, in an interview where you say, “Well, you know what my view is or, you know, gather information for me.” It’s like this discovery process together. And so, these dialogues were transformative for me. And that myself and the person I was dialoguing with, we were both changed as a result. Something changed, something evolved through the process of that conversation.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: I was hoping that’d be a model for people to kind of take into their own lives. How can I be in dialogue with each other, with the universe, in some sense?
Rick: Yeah, I mean, doing this show has been a real powerful technique for me, as a spiritual practice. It’s been a big engine on my train.
Stephan: I can imagine, yeah. And just to think about how that kind of showed up as an idea in your head at one point, right? There was some kind of, what I would call an allurement, right? “Oh, I need to do a show about this.”
Rick: Yeah, I was out in the garage working out on a Bowflex machine listening to an Adyashanti tape and I thought, “I should do an interview show.”
Stephan: Uh-huh.
Rick: And that took a while to figure out what it was gonna be and all but yeah.
Stephan: But it wasn’t just a passing thought, I mean you actually paid attention to it, right?
Rick: Oh, yeah, it wouldn’t let me go! It was like one of those things that you know held on, as George W. Bush once said “like a pit bull on the pant leg of opportunity.” It’s like “gotta do this!”
Stephan: Yeah, yeah, and look where it’s taking you.
Rick: Yeah
Stephan: Yeah, so I’m just pointing out that there’s a cosmic dimension to that.
Rick: Yeah
Stephan: There’s…
Rick: It’s funny, you know, because the subtitle of the show used to be interviews with spiritually awakened people. And then we had to change it to interviews with spiritually awakening people because awakened implied finished, and then yeah then everybody’s complaining I talk too much. So, we said, okay, let’s change it to conversations with spiritually awakening people.
Stephan: And I love this awakening, right? There’s a directionality to it. There’s a process to it.
Rick: Yeah.
Stephan: Once again, it’s back to cosmogenesis, right? It’s an unfolding process.
Rick: Yeah. So, this deep time network thing that you do, is that something others can join in? How do you, what is that? But what else do you do that people can participate in?
Stephan: So, one thing we’re doing now is we’re doing a leadership program based on the practice of auto-cosmology, right? So, you think about autobiography? This is auto-cosmology where people kind of reflect on their life story and they look for patterns of, basically, how they’re learning from the universe through their living. Brian Swimme recently wrote a book about this called Cosmogenesis, about his own life story.
Rick: Yeah, I read that and interviewed him about that. Yeah.
Stephan: Yeah, yeah. And so, he’s actually been teaching courses on this and he taught a course for the Deep Time Network this fall about the process of auto-cosmology. It’s like this kind of reflective process of writing or exploring your life story and learning how the universe is reflecting itself through that story. So, we’ve sort of taken that on as our main practice in this leadership program and asking people where is the universe guiding you? Right? We’re being called more into greater differentiation, subjectivity, or communion. Where are you being allured to at this time. So, we’re paying attention to the fine grain of your life and seeing, well, where is life calling you? Because that’s a leadership question, it’s leadership prompting. So, the Deep Time Network has programs like that, but also lots of other great programs, like, there’s one coming up on May 20th about the wisdom of Thomas Berry. There’s a profound figure, but also, I think a sage, really, understood a lot about the universe.
Rick: So, would this be for people who consider themselves leaders or want to be leaders, or do you just use the word leadership loosely and this could be for anybody who, you know, wants to?
Stephan: In this cosmic perspective, everyone’s a leader because everyone’s on the leading edge of cosmogenesis, right? We’re all the center where the universe is evolving from. So, in that sense, whether we’re a householder or, you know, a banker, we’re a leader, right?
Rick: Okay.
Stephan: And really, it’s the universe leading us.
Rick: And this is presumably this is all online or maybe you have retreats occasionally or something.
Stephan: For the most part it’s online, although we had an in-person gathering last April at the Homedale Horn Antenna in New Jersey, where they first discovered the signal of the big bang. It actually looks like a big ear.
Rick: Yeah
Stephan: And so, they had the 60th anniversary of that and it’s actually been uh dedicated as a public park and so we gathered there and had a gathering about that. We’re just releasing a film about that on May 8th.
Rick: So that must have been fun.
Stephan: Yeah,
Rick: Let’s see, a couple more questions have come in. I’ll be asking one in a second. While waiting for the next one to come in, just let me ask you at this point if I could like carefully look at my notes and probably come up with more questions, but is there anything that you feel that you would like to cover in our remaining time that I haven’t yet brought up.
Irene:I sent three questions total.
Stephan: Three questions?
Rick: Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, think about that. But then while you’re thinking about that, here’s one from Tim Sanger in Edmonton. “I’ve learned about cosmology and cosmogenesis from Brian Swimme, Steve Martin, and others. It’s clear that the universe is always evolving from simple to complex. Is there also evidence that the broad arc is towards unity, more compassion, greater cooperation, greater empathy.
Stephan: Hey Tim, you know I know Tim so I really appreciate his question. I think I do. So, we talked about these three governing themes of moving towards greater differentiation, deepening subjectivity, but we didn’t talk about communion so much. Communion is the interrelationship of everything with everything else. And so the universe is seeking greater interrelationship between all the parts and each of the parts in the whole. So, it’s seeking that we’ve ever greater intimacy with itself in between all aspects of itself. So, I would say in the sense of union is bringing more parts of itself together. It’s a natural direction of things. So, I would say, yeah, that’s the general tendency that things tend to go towards is greater complexity but also greater interrelationship.
Rick: That’s interesting. If you think of, let’s say, the Amazon rainforest, it’s brimming with life, tremendous diversity and so many different kinds of animals and plants, and yet it’s, you know, everything kind of is interdependent and intercooperative. And because there’s a kind of a fecundity, a richness, a nutritiousness to the environment there, they can enable such diversity and yet unity. And so, what would be the ground for humanity that would make it a kind of a rain forest in terms of our flourishing and our harmony at the same time?
Stephan: You know, I think we’re there. I mean, we’re on a paradise planet. I mean, there’s no other planet in the universe that we know that is like the earth, that is as amenable to life on earth, where rain and the water that we need for life actually falls from the sky for free. Sunshine, it’s like we’re surrounded by grace in every moment, right? The sun we need to grow our crops just shines down from the sky, the rain falls from the sky, it’s all here for free, and we’re in paradise, and we’re sharing this planet with 10 million different species and we’re wondering, well, what’s the way forward? We’ll look around and see how life is moving forward already and see if we can align with that. Does our action increase or diminish the life systems of the planet of which we’re embedded in? If it does increase the diversity and the life systems, then we can say, well, that’s a good direction. If it doesn’t, then we need to make a course correction because we’re not aligning with the sustainable direction of living in harmony with the planet. It’s not just a matter of being sustainable, it’s a matter of survival, right, because 99.9% of the species that have ever existed on earth are extinct because they didn’t adapt to the changing conditions. So, if we want to be in harmony with Mother Earth, Mother Earth has some rules we need to follow. And if we don’t follow them, you know, we may not be welcome at the party anymore.
Rick: It’s interesting, the current administration is doing what it can to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Stephan: Well, so what would Thomas Berry say about that, right? Is it increasing, you know, differentiation, subjectivity, and communion? And if it is, it’s aligning with the directionality of the universe and also, the Earth community, right? Because Earth wants to be diverse, right? I mean,
Rick: I think that, you know, like you said, the Earth is a paradise. Well, a lot of people would say, “Well, that’s not my experience,” but I think it’s potentially a paradise. There’s no reason it couldn’t be. It’s just that, you know, human beings muck it up.
Stephan: What are we going to make of this? Well, yeah, right, in astronomy we call this a Goldilocks planet, right? It’s not too hot, it’s not too cold. I mean, we’re searching desperately for planets around other stars that have these conditions. And there might be something like a hundred million Earths in our galaxy alone. But we don’t know exactly, you know, how far they are from their parent star, if they’re under right conditions, and or the chance for life to evolve as well. We don’t know, but we know that we’re it. I mean,
Rick: You say 100 million to mean 100 million in their Goldilocks zone around their stars? Because, I know that almost every star has planets. They know that now.
Stephan: Yeah, yeah. I think the latest results were something like 100 billion, actually, Earth-like planets. And so, you think about some significant fraction might be in the Goldilocks zone for that star system.
Rick: I mean, we have about 100 billion stars in the galaxy, don’t we? And so, what you’re saying is there might be on average at least one earth-like planet around every star in the galaxy.
Stephan: Latest results are we have at least 200 billion stars in the galaxy.
Rick: Okay.
Stephan: And there might be more than one earth-like planet in the system. Now there might be at least, you know, several trillion planets, but some are giants and some are Neptune-sized, and some are, you know, tiny ones, but Earth-sized is in the order of, you know, 10 to 100 billion, is what people estimate at this point.
Rick: Interesting. And then we’re talking about one galaxy out of trillions.
Stephan: Two trillion at last count, right? But who’s counting?
Rick: Yeah, which is an inconceivable number. But my sense is that the universe is teeming with life. Absolutely. Because, I mean, even the earth is teeming with life in the most inhospitable places, you know, at the bottom of the ocean and in volcanic, you know…
Stephan: Events and things like that. Absolutely.
Rick: It’s like, oh, it wants to happen.
Stephan: Exactly. Yeah, life is waiting to happen, right? It’s like life is sort of waiting for the right conditions to burst forth, right? It’s like that sense of it’s all there in potential, just waiting for the conditions. So, I think this is also a good lesson, you know, kind of for our listeners too, it’s like, well, where is new life waiting to burst forth in my life? And how can I create the conditions for that life, that livingness to come forward in my life most fully? And part of that is aligning with our creativity, but also having a sense of openness to being guided by our allurements, but also this larger sense of the whole as well. But it’s a great question to kind of reflect upon is like well, how can I make my life as life-friendly as possible? Whatever I see as the larger dynamic of life that’s present.
Rick: Okay, don’t mean to throw you a woo-woo curveball at the end. But do you think that we will make contact with other, extraterrestrial civilizations in the relatively near future, or perhaps that we already have and not too many people know about it?
Stephan: You know It’s not my expertise, but Seth Shostak, who’s one of the leading exobiology or exoastronomy thinkers about these things, thinks we’re going to make contact within the next 10 years. He’s an optimist, so I don’t know. I don’t know what that means.
Rick: And he’s a serious guy. I mean, he’s not just a…
Stephan: He’s talking about, we’re listening for radio signals from outer space, and we’re at the point where we’re scanning enough and we’re listening enough.
Rick: Do you think we’ve actually already been visited? I mean, there’s a lot of people who have a lot of experiences that…
Stephan: I don’t know. You know, I keep looking for UFOs through my telescopes. I haven’t seen them yet, but I’m still optimistic. I still keep looking.
Rick: Okay. Some people say that, you know, they’ll get in touch with us when we deserve it, you know, when we’re mature enough not to shoot them out of the sky or whatever.
Stephan: When we’re ready for it, yeah. Or they might come through other means of knowing, right, versus scientific ways of knowing might be dreams or you know other ways of gathering information or experience, you know, experiencing the universe.
Rick: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, it’s fun to contemplate that, too, as a working hypothesis.
Stephan: I mean just I love talking about all these questions, right, because astronomy is just so much fun and you know the universe is just such a fun place to hang out and ask questions in too.
Rick: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate getting to know you and having this whole conversation. It’s very inspiring and enlivening for me and hopefully has been for our listeners.
Stephan: Yeah, thanks Rick. Thanks for the opportunity to have the conversation and for bringing me on the show. I really appreciate it.
Rick: So, you’ll have a page on batgap.com and people listening to this will, if you go and look in the description field underneath the YouTube video, you’ll see a link to that page and you can go there and then from there you can link, you can go to Stephen’s websites and, you know, see what’s going on and that you can participate in.
Stephan: Yeah, you know, the Deep Time Network is free to join and it’s open to everyone.
Rick: I’m going to join.
Stephan: Join it, absolutely, it’s free and we’re having a great time. So come see what we’re about.
Rick: I will. Thanks. All right, thanks to everybody who’s been listening or watching and we’ll see you for the next one. Visit our new website. It’s been radically redesigned since you may have seen it before and I think you’ll like it.
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