Canticle for a Quantum Creation

In the beginning was the Void…

... not cold dark empty space; but nothingness to the infinite power.

Except for the shimmering EggSeed, which occupied no space in the Void.

Yet all that was, is and will be - everything, everywhere, everywhen –

Was there when there was no ‘there;’ back then when there was no ‘when.’

Then, the Unfolding; the cosmic chord cluster. And being became. I-am is

Since there were as yet no photons, no light flashed.

Since sound can’t travel in non-existence, the Void was silent and grasped it not.

But in the expanding envelope of existence, the echo still rings from all those eons ago,

As you can hear at www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994320

And of all the questions that confound and perplex us, there is none like this:

What immortal hand or eye conceived this all-filled symmetry?

God, Tao, Brahma, superstring, demiurge, nada who art in nada?

Intentional; self-generated; random quantum fluctuation? 

Nested in an infinite Russian doll-like cosmos; or a bubble on the froth of the multiverse?

Can potential will kinetic?  Can evolved beings reach back to initiate their own emergence?

As the super-dense, super-hot cloud of being expanded, it began to cool.

And as it did it wrinkled and fractured wonderfully, like shook foil,

To rupture the plasma-smooth surface of space-time.

Quarks and leptons came to be; positive and negative charges.

It was the beginning of The Other: antagonism, tension, anxiety.

Til forces came to be: strong, weak and gravity.

The beginning of the bond with An Other, without which there is no harmony or balance.

No quarks and leptons?  No strong and weak force?  Then no Hydrogen or Helium.

So no Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Iron.

Or Molybdenum, Thulium, Unnilquadium, or even Ytterbium.

Energy cooled enough to become stuff; stuff became alive; life became aware.

And the universe is still in its teens. What’s next?

Who could foresee energy forming as suns to fuse chemicals? A hard night’s journey into day.

Or heavy chemicals blasting out of first-generation solar furnaces,

And organic molecules forming in planetary pools?

And when amino acids appeared, who foresaw hummingbirds, bougainvillea, W. C. Fields?

Rub your fingertips together: everything you feel and everything you feel with,

Every quark and lepton in every atom in every molecule in every cell,

Still oscillates from the first Unfolding, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

Did things have to be as they are? Is there a universe where π has no remainder?

It’s enough to know this-which-is simply is. In the face of that, language is annihilated.

We are enfolded with a subtlety and elegance accurate to 15 places right of the decimal.

Stand naked before the mirror, navel next to sex in the center of our being:

Behold the bond with all ancient mothers; the catapult for all generations to come.

We are living nodes on the web of being, woven into the warp and the woof of the world.

We are not links in a hierarchic chain,

Nor are we fallen angles, condemned to a lifetime apologizing for our existence,

Meant to suffer this corruptible world until we reach our true home in a great beyond.

We are stardust, sunshine and seawater come alive, and become aware. Really and true.

We are exquisite antennae with eyes, ears, skin to sense the spectrum at so many frequencies.

And the star-spangled sky is blown-out debris from a still-unfolding event,

Of which we are the conscious fraction whose observations, in fact, make it real.

In the face of all this, words and creeds are meaningless.

Better to stand in silent awe than speak of certain truth. And that’s okay.

It’s when we claim ultimate knowledge of the ultimately unknowable, we get in trouble.

So strive, seek, find and never yield….

But in the meantime, better to be humbled by the utter stupendousness of it all.

Here’s to all the forms our elements took in ages past:

Sunburst, seashore, child’s eye; learning from each iteration.

Here’s to all the forms yet to be:

White dwarf, supernovae, and beyond the infinite; growing in wisdom, age and grace.

Septillions of atoms in our bodies; septillions of stars in the sky.

On a logarithmic scale we are midway between a quantum and the cosmos:

The better to see in all directions, and understand that nothing’s not connected.

So alone, or with a trillion other civilizations, we ask:

Is the cosmos – visible and dark - self-aware?

Is the uni-verse truly one singer, one singing, one song?

If we’re conscious - accumulated quarks and leptons - why not the whole she-big-bang?

Bell’s theorem; Geller’s bent spoons; quantum weirdness, spooky action at a distance…

The universe is even stranger than we can imagine imagining.

And each quantum is a hologram of the cosmos;

And the cosmos is a single wave function, the EEG of a self-aware universe.

We’ve been here from the beginning; we’ll be here til the end.

Rest easy with yourself and others. We belong here. We are at home in the universe.

Look into the evening sky: witness our genesis; behold our destiny.

In the beginning was the Womb ...

… warm, dark, moist and fertile.

Then a pulse, the Unfolding of energy into emptiness.

And suddenly, the quivering EggSeed in its blissful singular self.

It floats in fluids filling belly and lungs; its insides are out; its outsides are in.

No search for nutrition, no strain for relief, no stress for tomorrow, just becoming-to-be.

Until the womb-universe collapses in the cataclysmic crunch.

The head enfolds; fluids flush; the endtime is at hand.

And isn’t over until it’s clear that bliss is gone.

Now squeezed into a place of opposites:

Wet/dry, held/released, full/empty, sound/silence.

The wondering one looks back along the umbilical thread.

And sees two, like Cherubs of old, the flaming red gates of The Garden fold.

And all we’ll ever take from this, until we grow much older,

Is the primal urge to regain the serenity when all was one, and one was all.

Our ancestors sought that on the Westward Walk, from the Fertile Crescent to the Golden Gate.

And they recounted their discoveries along the way:

Exodus, Odyssey, Acts of the Apostles, Koran, Gawain, Divine Comedy, Don Quixote;

Leatherstocking, Huck Finn, Grapes of Wrath, On the Road, Zen and the Art…

Some gave a name to Truth: ‘the one who is anointed of God.’ 

And they came from the East; from the Ganges, the Bo tree, the Yangtze, Mount Fuji…

And some of them gave a name to Truth: ‘one awakened from within.’

Tribal beliefs from three great river cultures were universalized in the lives of two men.

It only remained to harmonize the awakened Buddha and the anointed Christ

To form a global yin-yang of wisdom.

‘Truth enlightens from within.’ ‘Yes, and Truth anoints from without, as well.’

Instead, silos of sanctity were sown; worse, grace was decoupled from nature.

The ancient walks are over now; there were no new lands to explore.

So we stand on the verge of a new frontier, one that goes downdeep and farout:

SETI, COBE, rDNA, µp, nanobots, biochips, tachyons, branes and black holes.

Yet we’re taught to see a Sunday School God, twenty miles above us on a marble throne.

The awesome is revealed now in deep space and deep time, but in language stripped of awe,

While the sacred is still portrayed to us as bearded shepherds and angles with feathered wings.

And we manipulate the atom, gene, bit and synapse in a ‘value-free context.’  We are meshuga!

Ancient assurances are blasted by uncertainty, indeterminacy and relativity.

The nucleus falls apart, the core cannot hold. Mere radiation is loosed upon the world.

The best lack all conviction; the worst are filled with polarized intensity.

“The world is black and white, and we are on the side of the angels!”

(Okay, but better check with Schrödinger’s cat first.)

December is the coolest month, and I sit here on a Western shore.

Once, the Ohlone and the Esselen hunted in these hills and fished these abundant bays;

Tool-less, Stone Age people who lived to give, dancers on the brink of an enchanted world.

Now in these parts, Dr. Moore’s 1965 technical prediction has become a moral imperative:

The pace of life must double every 18 months if we are to keep up with our ingenuity!

Lacking boundaries, yet en-cubed, we work late to buy gee-gaws and gadgets for un-held kids,

Then collapse before images of violence and salaciousness, titillated by wars and rumors of war.

And a single September morning showed us we are as much victims as managers of our tools. 

Not even a crisis could bring the golden mean and the golden rule to a silicon society.

The green trees, the blue sky, the red blood of the young; all sacrificed for the sake of numbers.

A disaster bears down on us, but don’t think twice, it’s all right.  It’s the way of the world.

Nessun Dorma! Nessun Dorma! (Fall not asleep! None must sleep!)

Like dawn, the egg of history regularly cracks open to punctuate the equilibrium.

And the wretched of the earth will be graced for their clean hands and straight eyes.

Divine justice and the karmic wheel always return to sunny side up.

Here where the mountains of light meet the sea of peace, it seems so clear:

If mass and energy are the same, just measured different ways…

If chaos is simply unrecognized order… 

If time is both arrow and boomerang…

If the cosmos is both open and closed…

Then natural and supernatural are the same, too.

Hidden from those who only see and hear; made manifest to those who look and listen.

How could it be otherwise?  Then this would be a bi-verse, not a universe.

The Ancients understood that science and technology are simply the means to:

Seek the truth, make the beautiful and do good. We’ve made them ends in themselves.

Yet if energy is measured along the electromagnetic spectrum, and kindness is energy unfolding, 

Then we must include kindness in our science.

If empathy is evident in the envelope of existence (remember those quarks and forces),

We must not frustrate the nature of nature itself.

If technology can so powerfully leverage our muscles, our senses, our brains,

Then it can also leverage the yearning for serenity and the inclination to compassion.

If beauty, truth and goodness are revealed in art and song, so also in science and technology.

But capability, absent responsibility, neither anoints nor enlightens, only afflicts.

It comes to this: the cascade of creation, the longing for reunion, reconnect with each breath.

The in-spiration of wonder, the ex-halted ‘äh’ of reverence, are expressed down all the years:

Heard as yähweh, äbba, alläh, täo, ä-om, brähma, äsher, sophiä; seen in the double-slit test.

We shall not cease from exploration, but though we climb to the dome of the sky to find it,

And swim to the ends of the sea to retrieve it, that which we desire most is with us all the time. 

For by us and around us and within us and without us and through us and over us and under us, Grace and nature are Unfolding as one. We need only recognize that; then we are truly home.

Tom Mahon

Silicon Valley/Big Sur, California

December 2003