Long have we been looking around to this world and his skies, asking ourselves : “what are we doing here, what are we and where do we come from. Never in the history we have known more than now, and that makes it so interesting to try to answer these questions again in the light of today. A time ago I read the book “The Grand Design by Steven Hawkins and Leonard Mlodinow. In there introduction they claim that philosophy is dead. That the important questions of life can not be answered by philosophy.(quote)
“Traditionally these are the questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”
I do only partly agree with this statement, because I believe that it is time for a new philosophy based on science and based on a new vantage point. Almost all philosophies were based on the assumption that humans are special. That we were living in the center of the Universe. That we were so important that there are even God like creatures looking at us and noting down all we do.
The vantage point has to completely change, we will try to use the vantage point of the Universe and try to look at reality as objective as possible. To really see ourselves and understand who and what we are, we need to look at ourselves from a distance. We need to take a step back. Now we can see our Earth much better, because we were able to look at it from a distance.
How much distance can we or dare we take from ourselves and look back?
Awakening
Since I was a small boy I wondered about life and death. I remember very well one late evening when I was 6 years old. We had a family visit with my parents to some relatives who lived in a far away farm land, somewhere in Flandres. It was a very clear winter evening. When we came back out of their house, my father showed me to look up to the sky. I still remember it as the day of yesterday! It was as if I was sucked up by those bright stars and it was as if I could breathe freely. I thought, wow there is more than this world and the life I m living… That was the start of my interest in the Universe.
To be able to explain to you my thoughts clearly, I will give you a summary of what we know today about the Universe and about life.
Aristotle would only teach students if they had done a fasting cure of 2 weeks. So they would be really ready to grasps and understand his teachings. I am not so mean,…but before I will tell you about my philosophy, I want to go through a summary of the basic things of what we know today about life and the Universe. As a refreshment! An image says more than a thousand words they say, so I will show you some short movies.
First we will have a look where we are in the Universe. Further in the text we go on a journey of the evolution of life till we are where we are now. The last short movie will start at the beginning of the Universe with the Big Bang. How the building blocks of the world around us came to be and the right environment for life to start.
I don’t know! The thing I like most about science is the fact that they say, “We don’t know” This in my eyes is the most powerful thing you can say. It liberates your mind, you keep your mind open and it keeps you asking questions. For instance the Standard model of Cosmology explains a lot and looks like a good explanation of what we see around us. But we can not explain everything with it, like dark matter, dark energy and the inflation during the Big Bang.
Not to know is an important part of reality, for us. It is hard to do for humans, because we want to know, because we want security in our lives. Even if we don’t want to do it we will unconsciously fill in the spots we don’t know with what we think should or could be. It is as like the mechanism that our eyes use to fill in our blind spot that is caused by the optic nerve in the eye. Our brains fill in the image with the image we think corresponds, without us knowing about it. It is a natural phenomena, if our brains wouldn’t do it, we would always see an empty area, the size of a thumb at an arms length.
Nowadays we have so much more knowledge than our ancestors! With the internet all this knowledge is accessible for everybody with a pc or smart phone and an internet connection. Even the difference in knowledge between 100 years ago and now is mind blowing. Our view of the Universe is much broader now than how Newton or even Einstein saw it. Not that we are more intelligent, but we can see further and clearer in the Universe and world around us. It was said by Isaac Newton in 1776 “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” We are standing on the shoulders of the shoulder standers.
The human mind and his world view has had some big revolutions. We call this mind blowing, drastic change in world view a Copernican revolution, referring to the first big revolution in our thinking about the world.
The first Copernican revolution placed the sun in the center instead of Earth as center point. The second Copernican revolution was the realization that the stars are suns like our own sun. The third Copernican revolution was the discovery and understanding of our Milky way and how many stars there actually are in a galaxy. The fourth Copernican revolution was the discovery of galaxies outside our Milky Way. Hundreds of billions of galaxies and we are still counting… The fifth and the sixth Copernican revolution is probably on it’s way and will show that we are 1 Universe out of many and that there is other life in the Universe.
Of course one of the biggest revolutions for the human mind is still going on today and was caused by “The theory of evolution” by Darwin.
In this movie you see the start of life approximately 4 billion years ago. The origins of life running through our veins is quite old.
What is reality?
You need a lot of imagination to understand reality!
Reality is difficult to understand for the human brain. Because the Universe is so big and old that it is almost impossible to grasp. And the laws that govern the quantum universe are completely counter intuitive to our understanding of daily life. An objective reality is impossible to grasp for human beings. We create the outside world in images we can process with our brains. Steven Hawkins gives a good description about this and calls it model dependent realism. (Quote)
” Our perception and the observations are not direct, but are rather shaped by a kind of lens, the interpretive structure of our human brains. The brain, in other words, builds a mental picture or model. According to the model dependent realism, our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, other people, stars, … These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality!”
Actually reality is invisible for humans. We only see the shadows of reality through our senses and through the interpretation of it by our brains.
Humans have always developed stories and myths to explain what we didn’t know about. This is a natural reaction for survival. We need a certain level of emotional security to be able to survive in this strange and vast outside world. What we know now is so much more than the understanding of our ancestors. Our ancestors also filled in the unknowns with what they thought was true. If we would use the same believes as our ancestors did, it would be like still driving in a steam engine car. Many of the believes that govern today are old traditions of our forefathers and mothers, who tried to understand reality. Unfortunately still today many people act like and belief those old projections and traditions. Even laws that govern our societies are based on it.
My philosophy
Our bodies are built out of the building blocks made in the center of the stars. The atoms and molecules we are made of, we can find them all across the Universe. The forces of the physical laws pushed the elements and molecules to organize and form life. We are an inseparable part of this Universe, we are build out of it from matter and energy. We are even completely interconnected with it. If you look at us on a very small scale, then you see we actually consist of 99% of empty space and are even connected with all that surrounds us, like the air we breathe, the ground we walk on, cosmic radiation, other creatures….
We are energy that flows through our cells and becomes consciousness in our brains. It is nothing different from the energy in a bear, chicken, ant or tree. It is like electricity. We are energy, similar with all the energy in the Universe. Our brains for instance work on electricity formed by our metabolism. We are living creatures, like all the other living creatures around us. We are different in that part that we can think abstractly and ask questions about ourselves, because our brains evolved more than most mammals.
We are 100% Nature, what else? To see us separate from Nature is an illusion! In a way we are programmed by Nature to do our thing and continue the life cycle. We are like biological computers. We think we are separate from the outside world, but we are the world. We are nature, we are a part of her and we are all of it, our body, thoughts and emotions. Every little bit of us! We are in the Universe and the Universe is in us.
We are the Universe!
Think about a snowflake! Every snowflake is unique in its structure, the way the water molecules crystalize is different for every one of them. Imagine a snowflake, after a journey in the skies it falls straight back in the ocean. What happens? The crystalized water molecules will melt and dissolve in the ocean where it came from. The snowflake is gone, but not its energy/matter in this case water. As a matter of fact the snowflake became part of the ocean. It became the ocean. The original crystal structure of the snowflake has gone. We can compare this with what would happen when we die. Our unique energy/matter combination that makes up our identity, will disappear when we die, but our energy/matter goes back to the Universe, of what we are already a part. We will become the entire Universe.
When we die we can almost say that we go back home! A human life of +/- 80 years, in a Universal year (13.7 billion years), would only take 0.2 seconds. So the rest of the Universal year we are death, which is probably our natural state!
This movie gives an idea of the start of the Universe during the big bang and the many supernova explosions that formed the building blocks of our earth and bodies.
About death and life.
It is very difficult for us, humans, to imagine our death! To imagine that we will not be there anymore is hard to do. To be gone, to become nothing. I think one of the reasons why it is so hard to imagine we are not anymore is because we see the world from our vantage point. We see all around us from our point of view, from our consciousness. We see the world through our eyes. It is as if we are somewhere in our head behind our eyes. Dying is like going back from where we came before we were born. We didn’t exist before our birth. We are not afraid about what was before our birth, but we are afraid of what will be after our death. Why, we will go back from where we came to nothing and we will not exist anymore, again. What is there to be afraid of? Every living creature will die eventually. Imagine there is something rather than nothing! Then there is a possible reason to be afraid.
As Sheakespeare said so in his famous text from Hamlet
To Be are not to be…..
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune , Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: but may be to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
I consider death more of a going back to our natural state of being Nothing, or in other words a part of the Universe, or everything. Anyway our life only takes a very tiny space and time in this Universe. (See Universal year)
The only thing that dies is our illusion that we are something rather than everything. We are a small part of this Universe. The idea that we are separate from this Universe is an illusion. We are this Universe, a small part, like a drop of sea water is part of the ocean. When we die we become part of this Universe which we are already part of. Dying is only the idea that we are separate from the Universe that dies. If you already know that we are the Universe, then death is just a letting go of a temporary state of being, our body (matter) and consciousness (energy). A change of the state of the energy.
In a way it makes more sense to be afraid of life than to be afraid of death! Life can be painful and full of dangers. Death is Nothing and nothing to be afraid of! If we add up all the energy and matter in the Universe, it adds op to 0 (nothing) The entire Universe came out of nothing, a singularity. (during the Big Bang) Everything and Nothing may well be the same thing!
Dying is like waking up out of a dream and becoming the entire Universe, everything and all that is in it.
Conclusion :
we are the Universe!
We are build out of the building blocks forged in the stars and our awareness, our self-consciousness is energy flowing through our body, cells and brain. The energy is also coming from the stars out of the nuclear reaction in their center. The matter in our body and our energy are 100 % nature and are an inseparable part of this Universe. We are really made of stardust and starlight (energy). That means that we are the Universe and 100% Nature. We are the entire Universe already, we only believe and see ourselves separate, but that is an illusion! It is an illusion created by nature to survive and procreate as a species.
Dying is like a snowflake falling back in the ocean after a very short journey.
Lives are born out of the ocean of energy in the Universe and go back once they end. The energy is, in my eyes, like an ocean of Love where we are born from and go back to.
Dying is like coming home where we came from, the ocean, the Universe.
We are the Universe 