EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE IS CONNECTED

Ever since I was a young child I was determined to understand how the entire universe worked and that fascination led me to develop a passion for reading in myself. Years after being a student of knowledge I  think I am slowly kind of maturing out of it and entering the world of people. It turns out that the world of people is more complex to understand than the entire universe. But I'm trying to stay with it, and in the process of trying to comprehend the complexity of social world, I've managed to score some observations about people. 

Today via this blog I want to share with you a little bit of what I've learnt. In this quest to understand people, I gotten very interested in the gaps that still remain for us as human beings and us as civilization, relative to the challenges that are in front of us. 

One of those gapes that I have seen is around this concept and the concept is really simple one, It's the concept that "Everything Is Connected". You've probably heard this many many times, in fact, it's an element of almost every spiritual tradition of humankind throughout all of history but whenever I hear people talk and mention this phrase that "we are all connected”. They do so in a way that they wish they could believe was true. This concept seems very abstract, esoteric & unprovable. But they just really wish the universe was like that wherein everything and everyone was connected.

I will try to describe that everything is really connected and not in an abstract, esoteric way but in a very concrete, direct and understandable way. I will do so with three different stories;

1) A story of the heart

2) A story of breath 
 

3) A story of the mind.
 

So let's begin.
 
Story Of Heart

All the living people on the face of the globe including you and me, our hearts are beating right at this moment and the reason that our hearts beat is that we need to move this molecule through our blood called hemoglobin and hemoglobin carries this smaller molecule that is called heme B, which you can see in the below picture.

 Now at the heart of heme B is a single atom of iron. So in a way at the heart of our heart is this little iron atom. This is actually really a central part of the hemoglobin molecule because this is the thing that allows us to bind oxygen and move that through our circulatory system but one thing that you may not know is that the only way that iron is created in the universe is through supernovas and through supermassive stars.

So the universe started basically with  no iron at all, and it was at the core of dying stars this element got created. Exploding stars and formation of new satrs gave birth to iron that now courses through each of our veins. But the story doesn't really end here.

Why do stars keep forming?  Actually, after a supernova happens, it may be a long time before those gases come back together to form a star. So in order to understand how this works we need to understand why stars would form. Even though there are a couple of different ways that stars form, one of the most robust is this process called galactic collision. What the process of galactic collision would look like.

So across the top in the picture you get galaxies slowly coming together and in the bottom three frames you see them smashing into each other and their interstellar gases mixing and in the process of doing so they set on fire with new star formation across the entire galaxy and whatever remains after the collision. Even here is not the end of the story. Because why in the world would galaxies collide? This doesn't seem like a thing that should just happen for no reason. So to understand this we'll have to go back  in time, way back, to this picture.

We're at the level of seeing about 100000 galaxies.  So last slide two galaxies this slide 100000 galaxies. Every one of the dots in the picture is a galaxy that is in our super cluster and the red dot in the picture where it says "You are here" is our galaxy and these glowing lines are not galaxies they are the trajectories that these galaxies are going to take through gravity over the coming billions of years. In this beautiful gravitational dance of all galaxies swirling together in a gravitational structure that people call "Laniakea" which in Hawaiian means the "Immeasurable Heaven", in this process of the gravitational dance, 100000 galaxies swirling together, which drive the process of galaxies colliding, which derive massive star formation, which drives the process of creating the iron that course through each one of our veins with every heartbeat. In this way, every one of our heartbeats is connected. 

Story Of Breath 

Taking a deep breath is one of the simplest ways to connect with our own bodies, a deeply grounded, calming breath. But taking a deep breath was not something that was possible on this earth three billion years ago. Earth had about the same amount of nitrogen but almost no oxygen at all. So taking a breath wasn't possible  three billion years ago. Earth actually had a huge amount of carbon dioxide, so the net effect was an  inhabitable planet. 

The only organisms that could exist that time were single-celled organisms inside of stromatolites and other closed spaces. Lucky for us, one of those organisms that were alive at that time was  Cyanobacteria. This organism had a special trick that we call "photosynthesis", the ability to take energy from the sun and transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. Over the course of billions of years cyanobacteria kept doing just that. Sarting from two and a half billion years ago little by little these bacteria spread across the planet and converted almost all that carbon dioxide in the air into the oxygen that we now have. It was a very slow process. First, they had to saturate the seas then they had to saturate the oxygen that earth would absorb and only then, finally, could oxygen begin to build up in the atmosphere. 

Just after about 900 million years ago oxygen starts to build up in the atmosphere. About 600 million years ago something really amazing happens, the ozone layer forms from the oxygen that has been released in the atmosphere. It sounds like a small and quick thing but it's connected with eons of causal chains... We talked about the ozone a couple of decades ago but it actually turned out that before the ozone layer existed earth was not really able to sustain complex multi-cellular life. We had single-celled organisms we had a couple of simple multi-cellular organisms but we didn't really have anything like you or me. Shortly after ozone layer came into place, the earth was able to sustain complex multi cellular life. There was a "Cambrian explosion" of life in the seas and the first plant got onto land. In fact, there was actually new life on land ahead of that. 

Nothing that you are familiar with today could exist without the contributions of those tiny organisms over those billions of years. Where are they now?  Well,  actually, they never really left us. The direct descendants of the Cyanobacteria were eventually captured by plants and they are now called chloroplasts. If you see the zoom in of a plant leaf you will find tons of little chloroplasts are still trapped contributing to photosynthesis and making energy for the plants that continue to be the other half of our lungs on earth. In this way, our breaths are very deeply united. Every out-breath is mirrored by an in- breath of a plant and their out-breath is mirrored by our in-breath. 

I'm going to take a little aside here for a moment with this story. Because imagine for a moment and this is a thought experiment image you were one of these little organisms two billion years ago. You might be born, you live a couple of weeks, you die and you kind of feel like well, nothing really changed. I mean, I had no purpose in this life. Like the world I came to is exactly the same as the world that I left. But what you wouldn't have understood is that every breath that you took contributed to the possibility of countless lives after you, lives that you would never see lives that we are all a part of today. It is worth thinking that maybe the meaning of our lives are actually not even within the scope of our understanding Because it is true of every one of these organisms and may also be true of us.

          The last story of connection is the story of mind. This is not our minds are connected in some psychic way or some scientifically unexplainable way. I'm going to explain the connection of mind through the simple story of this instrument call piano. A beautiful thing about this instrument is it is so nuanced and so textured and so complex and so much beauty can be created from it that people can make an entire career, they can make an entire life out of playing this instrument. Professional musicians, concert pianists get to know this instrument deeply, intimately and through it, they are able to create with sound in a way that just dazzles us and challenges us and deepens us. But if you were to look into the mind of a concert pianist, and you used all the modern ways of imagining it, and I stressing thing that you would see is how much of their brain is actually dedicated to this instrument, the ability to coordinate ten figures. The ability to work the pedal, the feeling of sound, the understanding of music theory, all these things are represented as different patterns and structures in the brain. Now you have that thought in your mind recognize that this beautiful pattern and structure of thought in the brain was not possible even just a couple hundred years ago, because the piano was not invented until the year 1700. This beautiful pattern of thought in the brain didn't exist 5000 years ago. In this way, the skill of the piano the relationship to the piano, the beauty that comes from it was not a thinkable thought until very very recently in human history. The invention of the piano itself was not an independent thought it required a depth of mechanical engineering, it required the history of stringed instruments, it required so many patterns and structures of thought that led to the possibility of its invention and then the possibility of the mastery of its play. It leads me to a concept that I'd like to share here which I call "The palette of being".

Because all of us are born into this life having available to us the experience of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn't exist for people 5000 years ago. It was a color in the Palette of being that you couldn't paint with. Nowadays if you are born you can actually learn the skill, you can learn to be a computer scientist another color that was not available just a couple hundred years ago. Our lives are really beautifully for the following reason, we're born into this life, we have the ability to go make this unique painting with the colors of being that are around us at the point of our birth. But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity to create a new color. That might come from the invention of a new thing-  A self-driving car , A piano , A computer . It might come from the way that you express yourself as a human being. It might come from a piece of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being , these things that we put out into the world through the creative process of mixing together all the other things that existed at the point that we were born allow us to expand the palette of being for all of society after us and this leads me to a very simple way to go frame everything that I talked about  because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind of the marvelous universe  but we think of this universe as we're this tiny , unimportant thing . There is this massive physical universe and inside of it, there is the biosphere and inside of, there is society and inside of us, we're just one person out of seven billion people and how can we matter? And we think about this as like’s container relationship where all goodness comes from the outside to the inside and there is nothing really special about us. But the palette of being says the opposite. It says that the way we are in our lives , the way that we affect our friends and our family begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future , begins to Change the way that communities then affect society , the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet and the universe itself and if it is a possible thing for Cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of planet , it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing . It leads to a really important question for the way that we're going to do that , the manner in which we're going to do that because we've been given this amazing gift of consciousness and because of this gift we have the ability to deeply understand our connectedness in the way we haven't seen other animals having the opportunity to do so and because we can deeply understand our connectedness we're the ones that have the decision on how we're going to use  that knowledge , how we are going to use it to build our societies and shape our lives . I think the reason that all the spiritual traditions have got this concept of "we are connected inside of it "is because the societies that actually deeply adopt this idea  are the ones that over time deepen their level of consideration , deepen their level of expression , deepen their level of understanding of each other. This is the reason that this idea pops up over and over at the core of spiritual traditions. I hope through this talk you see that the reason that it appears at the core of science is it’s actually something that is just literally true of the physical universe at every single level of organization and every single manifestation of matter, energy, and life. So I'd like to us all to come together with this knowledge and understand this truth about how the universe is that...because our hearts our breath and our mind are connected in this way. We need to challenge ourselves to understand what it means to live from this truth.