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The embryo that starts to grow in the womb relies on billions of years of intelligence, memory, creativity,
and evolution. The individual seamlessly flows into the cosmos when we are talking about fetuses in the
womb. Why should this merging stop there? The fact that you experience your desire as individual
doesn t negate the universe from acting through you, just as the fact that you consider your children to be
yours doesn t negate the fact that they are also the children of a vast gene pool. That gene pool has no
other parent than the universe.
At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your
breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world s rivers, between
your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover. Every shift in the ecosystem has affected you at the level of your
genes. The universe remembers its evolution by leaving a record written in DNA. This means that your
genes are the focal point for everything happening in the world. They are your line of communication with
nature as a whole, not just with your mother and father.
Set aside what you have read about DNA as a string of sugars and amino acids strung in a double helix.
That model tells us what DNA looks like, but it says almost nothing about what is actually going on in the
dynamics of life, just as the wiring diagram of a television tells us nothing about what s playing on the
screen. What s playing through your DNA at this moment is the evolution of the universe. The next desire
you have will be recorded in memory, and either the universe will move forward or it won t. We tend to
think of evolution as a straight-line march from primitive organisms to higher ones. A better image would
be of a bubble expanding to take in more and more of life s potential.
" As you accessmore intelligence, you are evolving. On the other hand, if you constrict your mind to
what you already know or can predict, your evolution will slow down.
" As you accessmore creativity, you are evolving. On the other hand, if you try to use old solutions to
solve new problems, your evolution will slow down.
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" As you accessmore awareness, you are evolving. On the other hand, if you continue to use a fraction
of your consciousness, your evolution will slow down.
The universe has a stake in which choices you decide to make, for the overwhelming evidence is that it
favors evolution over standing still. In Sanskrit, the evolutionary force is calledDharma, from a root word
that means  to uphold. Without you, Dharma would be confined to three dimensions. Even though you
spend almost no time thinking about your relationship to a zebra, a coconut tree, or blue-green algae,
each is your intimate in the evolutionary scheme. Human beings extended the evolutionary scheme when
life reached a certain limit in physicality after all, in physical terms, the earth depends on blue-green
algae and plankton more than on humans. The universe wanted to have a new perspective, and for this
had tocreatecreators like itself.
I once asked a physicist if everyone in his community accepted by now that reality was nonlocal. He
conceded that they did.  Isn t nonlocality the same as omniscience? I said.  There s no distance in time,
no distance in space. Communication is instantaneous, and every particle is connected to every other.
 Could be, he said, not exactly agreeing but letting me go on.
 Then why did the universe bother to become local? I said.  It already knew everything. It already
includes everything, and at the deepest level it already encompasses all events that could possibly
happen.
 I don t know, my physicist said.  Maybe the universe just wanted a vacation.
This isn t a bad answer. Through us the universe gets to play. Play at what? At giving someone else the
controls to see what he or she comes up with. The one thing the universe can t experience is getting away
from itself. So, in a sense, we are its vacation.
The problem with dilemmas like free will and determinism is that they don t leave enough playtime. This
is a recreational universe. It provides us with food, air, water, and a great deal of scenery to explore. All
of that comes from the automatic side of cosmic intelligence. It continues on its own, but the side that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]