The Call of the Cosmos: Aligning with Cosmic Evolution & Its Creative Impulse

Deep Transformation - Roger Walsh and John Dupuy

A transformative dialogue with cosmologist Stephen Martin explores the evolving universe, consciousness, and humanity's place within cosmic evolution. The conversation bridges science, spirituality, and personal meaning.

Key takeaways

• Cosmos is not static but a dynamic, self-organizing process

Transcript preview

Welcome to a profound and potentially transformational conversation with astronomer and cosmologist Stephen Martin. Stephen shares powerful knowledge and wisdom that helps us break through our existential loneliness and reconnect with the mysterious, beautiful and creative universe that is our home and is us. thinkers, contemplatives, and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy. My name is John Dupuy and this is Dr. Roger Walsh, whom you know probably from our other podcast and our times together. And we have a real, not a cliche delight, but a real personal delight to have with us Stephen Martin, who is an astronomer, a cosmologist. I'm just finding out we haven't talked together for a few years. I'm also very close to his brother, who's also brilliant and a therapist. And I don't know, 25 years ago, we invited Stephen, my wife and I, we had started a wilderness program dealing with a young people, over 18, having issues with addiction and alcoholism and lots of other issues too. And we brought Stephen out there to teach us about it because we thought that when we, to kind of locate ourselves in the cosmos, who and what's going on, this great mystery, that somehow somehow, that somehow, that somehow, that puts our own little struggles and our own issues in life in a much larger perspective and can be very liberating and very inspiring. So I've been trying to get Stephen here for quite a while and he's also an author and he's got books coming out. We'll talk about all that later. But, see, is there anything else you'd like to let people know about who you are and what you do before we get into this? Well, first of all, John, with kind of mental health, because mental health and cosmology are interrelated, right? How we kind of frame ourselves within an unfolding universe has effects on society, culture, and our mental health. So that could be something we could touch upon in our time together as well as relationship with cosmology and mental health. And what we've learned about the cosmos and say the last hundred years is just extraordinary, you know, I mean it's just with the advent of astronomy and the web telescope and everything that we've learned and the information that's constantly coming in, the vision is constantly expanding and constantly affecting me deeply. I was saying before we started that I'm amateur when it comes to all this stuff, which means from the original Latin as I'm a lover of. So this subject matter is very dear to me and my own way been putting my feet or dumping in the river and trying to absorb as much. So Stephen Berry is so very welcome here and it's great to have you have you. And one to mention, Stephen has also been as part of the Ridwan school with A. H. Almas, as you who are familiar with our podcast, we've had this ongoing dialogue with Hamid Ali, his other name. And it has been extraordinarily impactful for both Roger and myself and from you who've been listening to, from what we hear from the feedback. So it's really great to bring these two parts of my love and my interests and for all you are listening to us right now this should be fun. Sounds good John you know and for many years I taught a course on Cosmos and consciousness right because we need both to cover the immensity and the mystery of the universe that we find ourselves involved in we need to cover the Cosmos right kind of the outward expansion of space and time but we need to cover consciousness right which is you know the subjectivity right the inner dimension that which is also the mystery around us so a comprehensive view requires both. pointing to that in the get-go. So these are all things we can spring board on in our conversation. Yeah, in physics and science, they really have a problem with bringing consciousness into the picture because it's not measurable as far as I know. I may be I-Q test, but that's not really consciousness, that's something else. And so in large way in looking at the nature of things, reality through materialistic scientific realism, we've left out consciousness because it just doesn't fit into the equation. to work it out mathematically one time and he said there were just too many variables and he gave up on it. So I think it's very important to not only what we know about the universe but what do we know about the fact that something exists and the fact that we're here and the fact that what kind of ground and being makes it possible for science to exist and for us to be here talking about it right now. So take it away. You know, these are all fantastic questions that are really really leading questions in the field. You mentioned we're in a transformational time of understanding consciousness in a new way and where it fits into our theories. We're also in a transformational period about understanding what does it mean to be in a evolving dynamic universe. You mentioned the past hundred years. I was just stargazing with a group a few nights ago and we were seeing the Andromeda Galaxy just rising over the northeastern horizon. It's a beautiful thing to see with telescopes. binoculars or even your naked eye in the fall and we're just starting to see it peak over. And it's a very significant historical phenomenon because it's the closest galaxy like our own to the Milky Way. We live in a galaxy called the Milky Way which consists of two to three hundred billion stars in a spiral pattern. And in 1924, so just over a hundred years from now, Edwin Hubble and other astronomers made the first measurements to the Andromeda Galaxy, which is called the Andromeda Nebula at the time. because we thought there was one galaxy at the beginning of the 20th century and that was the Milky Way. The entire universe was one galaxy which had always been present, right? The universe was static and eternal. This is the universe that Einstein grew up in. This is the idea that he had in his mind when he wrote down the equations of general relativity and you may have heard about Einstein's greatest blunder. Have you all talked about that before? I don't believe so. Maybe we'll just mention it briefly. But he had this idea about the idea about the idea about the universe about the universe about the universe about the universe about the universe about the universe about the universe about the and as it to everyone, until Edwin Hubble measured the distance to Andromeda and found it was way further away than people previously thought. Far enough that they discovered this is another island universe, right? What they call galaxies were island universes. So essentially a hundred years ago, the size the universe doubled. We went from one galaxy to two and then astronomers began measuring distances and velocities and found, oh, there's more than that. And as last count, you know, the James Webb Deepfield, we now estimate there's two trillion galaxies out there. I mean just gotta take that number on two trillion galaxies in our part of the observable universe. And up till the time of Hubble, they looked into the deepest space they could and they saw these little things and they thought they were to stars out there and it turned out they were galaxies, you know, millions of galaxies. Now we're talking about trillions of galaxies. That is... Greens of galaxies and you know one thing they also discovered soon after that in the late 1920s was that in the late 1920s was that was that was that was that was that was that the galaxies are moving away from each other. Well, you know, if you have this model the universe where it's expanding and this came from George Lamatry and other cosmologist, you run the tape backwards and it points to an initial beginning for all of this, right? So a big bang. In the night sky, we see the evidence through our telescopes that we live in an evolving dynamic universe. So we don't live in a cosmos, right, which is a static, fixed, unchanging hole, we live in a cosmogenesis, right, in evolving, in evolving dynamic, process that's creative, that's emergent, that's abundant around us, that includes everyone and everything. So it's a huge transformation in our framework of what reality is to go from being in a Cosmos to a Cosmogenesis, and we can unpack that further because there's a lot to imply with that. But even that was too much for Einstein, I mean just to kind of briefly touch on Einstein's greatest blunder. In 1915 he wrote in his equations of general relativity, which is how matter, matter shapes And in the equations, they implied that one solution was that the universe was expanding. Well, he said, no, no, everyone knows that the universe is expanding. It's always been the way it is. So he added what he later called his greatest wonder, which was a fudge factor, another term to actually cancel out the implied expansion of the universe, so that what the equations were telling him fit what he had in his mind about the universe. So he thought the universe was not expanding, is that right? you know a solution where the universe was expanding couldn't be true and so we added you know a mysterious constant to kind of cancel that out so that reality would fit his picture of it inside his mind so if Einstein could do that we're all guilty that to some extent well absolutely we might be still doing that today chances are we almost certainly are but you know within ten years he looked through Hubble's telescope saw the evidence that the universe is expanding later called us his greatest blunder and began to accept you know an evolutionary model as the way things are. So Stephen, you're pointing to this dramatic shift in our understanding of the universe from a static, extendedity to this not only dynamic and constantly changing, but in some way evolving. And what are we to make of the evolution? It seems like it's heading towards greater complexity, and that there's, at least in that sense, a direct to it. On the other hand, much of science is based on a materialistic productionism which assumes that chances on the clashing of atoms is deterministic with no foresight or plan or direction. So how do you wrestle with that conflict? Well I wouldn't say that that completely describes the view from science because in the late you know 70s and 80s we had the emergence of complexity theory right of non-linearity. Right where these these systems that are completely deterministic but yet unpredictable in the results you could begin with you know a particular set of parameters and let it run through and you get a completely different result every time so it shows that we're in this knife edge in this universe between ordering chaos right or if you want to use the word take a case you could use the word spontaneity right some people were you know putting in new terms rather saying random you know like quantum particles right actions are random, they're unpredictable. We might say that they're spontaneous, which implies a certain degree of freedom. And you know, one quantum physicist friend I have who says that the particles exhibit a quality of spiritedness, right? They have this kind of capacity to make their own choices in a way that's completely different than the terms of the past. In this period where we're kind of questioning the terms that are we're using because they imply certain things that don't necessarily apply to what we're discovering. Now random is important for a mathematical distribution perspective and you know atoms still behave in deterministic ways and large assemblage of them right this is statistics basically in quantum theory false statistics but the individual actions of the atoms you could say is spontaneous right which implies a certain kind of freedom and you're pointing to something else here even as a possibility and that is also the idea which is associated with Eric Johnson of the and his book title was the self-fdom organizing universe, which is again seems like a pretty dramatic shift in perspective. How's that fit in? You know, it's really interesting to bring in the idea of self-organizing, because I just went to a seminar a couple weeks ago about Thomas Berry. Do you want to know Thomas Berry? Thomas Berry was a theologian, he was a passionate priest, he was an evolutionary thinker, he was very foundational and kind of this framework that we now called the new cosmology. And this presentation was on the seven selves of what Thomas Berry said are properties of the universe and all the components in it. Right, it's self-fulfilling, self-organizing, self-determining. Now in the West we have an issue with idea of self, right? Because we think there's a static self there that's, you know, kind of running things behind the scenes and making determine choices. The original Greek term might be autopoeasis, right, self-making. understood the self in a very different way. But in other words, it's not happening through some external influence. There's no outside director saying, well you go there, you go there, you go there. It's determining its own creative emergence from within its own capacity. So the idea of things are kind of self-organizing and Eric Jance should, you know, he started a whole revolution and is thinking about this. Oh, it's like the whole thing is organizing itself. Well, how does that happen? We don't have a full comprehensive understanding about how that But the idea here is that the universe is developing in every aspect of itself from every place within itself from its own self-determination self-making capacity. Yeah and in science we talk about entropy where things are winding down you know and losing heat and going back to just the basics but in complexity theory we find things moving into more complex, more functional new problems. properties more beautiful if you will from a stage that prior to that was a little more random a little more chaotic is that in the ballpark you could say that's one of the self-organizing dynamics of the universe is to sort of take energy from the system usually to organize itself in a way that's kind of negentropic right it goes against the entropic direction there is it does seem to be a theme in the universe towards greater self-organization greater complexity greater interrelatedness just to touch on Thomas Berry again because I think he's good about these broad themes. Thomas Berry said there are three great governing themes that determine kind of the pattern of the universe over time in terms of how expresses wholeness. And we can go into them individually, but I'll just say them in broad strokes, right? These are differentiation, subjectivity, and communion. And just to kind of unpack them a little bit, differentiation is the development and creation of unique centers of experience of experience of experience. You begin with a cloud of plasma or energy, you know, early on 13.8 billion years ago, very quickly as the universe expands and cools, it coalesces into particles, particles, particles, and now the complexity of the world we see around us. When we look around, we see a highly differentiated reality. It's not a simple reality that's uniform and homogeneity. And now the complexity of the world we see around us. When we look around, we see a highly differentiated reality. It's not a simple reality that's that's uniform that's uniform and homogenous. but is differentiated. We've got 8 million, you know, 8 billion different humans on the planet, each one completely unique. So there's this dynamism in the universe that seeks to express itself through unique centers of experience. And we could talk more about what that means to be a unique center of experience, but just differentiation is kind of built into the dynamism of the universe, which means increasing complexity and the way you're speaking about it. And what you personally, I personally, I make this person, infer from that. philosophically what does that tell you about the nature of things and the nature of you and me and the people that are listening here? One of the purposes of being a participant in an evolutionary universe is to be your unique self, to express your unique gift to suppress your unique essence. So in other words, it's honoring the unique expression of each of us as an aspect of the whole. And Thomas Berry referred to each of us, every being as a mode of the universe. a particular way the universe is knowing itself and expressing itself in a very unique way. I love that to be a mode of the universe, right? An inflection point for the universe's reflection upon itself is expression, its creativity, its self-organizing dynamics. It's all happening right here at a unique way. Now it also means that each person's uniqueness is something to be honored. Every redwood tree, every plant flower and blue. is unique and precious and so he was very concerned about species extinction as I am I because it's the loss of these unique modes of knowing of the universe of the universe knowing itself so that's a dynamic yeah and I want to say in music I played the guitar you have modes that are scales but the different modes had a different flavor exactly there's a certain emotional something uniqueness in each mode so you learn those to be able to explore different dimensions in the neck guitar and the music that you play. I love that. And you know because using these musical metaphors you could say each one of us is a note in a comic symphony which other people have used as well. But a particular voice that needs to be heard and needs to be recognized and acknowledged. So differentiation is this dynamic by which the inverse creates ever more complex and unique centers of experience over time. And we're now touching into the interface of cosmology and consciousness which is something you raised earlier. So there are innumerable questions here but let's start with the big one and one question is is consciousness an emergent out of the universe or if so when etc or what's the relationship here and I'm not and there's a there's an underlying epistemological question isn't even possible for us to know. know, but I can point to Thomas Berry, right, that his second dynamic, we have differentiation, we have subjectivity and communion. By subjectivity, he means the subjectivity of the whole is expressed in each of the particular part, or in each particular differentiated center. So he would say that each of us is a particular expression of the whole, the conscious of the whole, being refracted through each individual. center of awareness. So he's pointing to more of a panpsychist approach. You might say monistic idealism. I mean these terms are kind of coming back in the favor these days, you know, in the conscious community. Not super well accepted in the physical sciences at this point. I mean there's still much. Can you explain panpsychism before we get to a minutes further? Pan-psychism is the idea that everything has some kind of psychic capacity or some expression of psychic, not meaning paranormal but just meaning mental or consciousness. I mean mental or consciousness. I mean you. I mean you. I mean you guys. I mean you guys. I mean you guys. I mean you guys. I mean you guys. I mean you guys. I mean you guys. I mean you guys. I mean you guys Particulous for that. But the idea that consciousness is a pervasive quality that exists everywhere and whether it's emergent in you know nervous systems to have a certain level of complexity brings about its own issues right with the emergence problem how does something that seems so mind-like you know emerge from something in this material this is the thing is mind-body problem that's plagued Western culture for you know hundreds of years many people are solving this with different aspects of idealistic monism my idea that there is one consciousness that expresses itself different ways. And of course, integral theory, you know, Johnny, as you know, is very good about this. And partially said there's consciousness from the beginning and it's all aspects of consciousness. But like, you know, I would appreciate your guys' input as well. I mean, we can have a dialogue about this, but what do you all think? Well, there's an underlying question for me, Stephen, and that is, how would one is, doesn't seem that science is particularly well equipped, as John was saying earlier, to investigate consciousness being subjective and science being an examination of the properties of objective phenomena. But then there's the subjective, the contemplative approach of investigating one's own awareness and coming to some understanding of that and almost anyone who does deep. contemporary practice draws some understanding about the nature of consciousness, many of whom assume that, come to assume that it's primordial and outside space time ever-present. And Amide Ali, who's in one of our ongoing, the most esteemed guests, is certainly under that conclusion and holds it. But as you say, it's probably not, it's, these are two different worlds in many ways. haven't been brought together in mainstream thoughts. So anyway, that's just a starting point for you to take off. Sure, well, you know, and I think we're pointing in the direction of maybe 21st, 22nd, 23rd century science and conscious studies, right? So the consciousness studies needs to include the insights of science as part of what is studying as well, and science needs to include, If you're going to include everything, you have to include everything as part of that. You can't just say it's physical stuff. The other thing that's really interesting in terms of what we're pointing to here is that the universe is participatory, right? What data we get back to the universe depends on the methods that we