The cosmic mind gives every event a purpose.

Physician Deepak Chopra and physicist Menas Kafatos write in You Are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters: “It’s an axiom in science that the relevant questions are about ‘how,’ not ‘why’.” Yet, “the evolution of life keeps bringing up issues of why. Why did moles abandon the light to live underground? Why do pandas eat only bamboo leaves? Why do people want children? Some kind of purpose and meaning had to enter the picture. Or did a conscious universe contain the seeds of purpose and meaning since the beginning? As matters stand, such speculation is met with considerable resistance by the scientific community. The standard view holds that the universe has no purpose or meaning. So before offering a new model for how life began, we must dismantle conventional thinking first.” 

 

If consciousness is fundamental, as Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger and others have argued, then the universe is conscious. Therefore, our consciousness is derived from a cosmic consciousness. In a conscious universe, everything is alive already. The observation that life comes from life turns out to be a cosmic truth. And we can see this in quantum physics, for quantum particles “behave in a totally lifelike way (i.e., making choices, balancing stability and spontaneity, efficiently harvesting energy, and so on).” Quantum effects in organisms “introduce behavior that isn’t predetermined the way oxygen atoms are when reacting with other atoms.”

 

Chopra and Kafatos assert: “A universe is defined by the creatures who inhabit it.” This is not only true for humans, but for all the creatures we share the earth with and any creatures elsewhere in the universe. Furthermore, it is true because the purpose of the universe is creating creatures that share in the creativity of cosmic consciousness. 

 

In a stunning short paragraph Chopra and Kafatos answer several significant “why” questions: “Why is the human mind creative? Because the cosmos is creative. Why did the human mind evolve? Because evolution is built into the fabric of reality itself. Why do our lives have meaning? Because nature proceeds with a drive toward purpose and truth.” In our universe, “the cosmic mind drives every event and gives it a purpose.”

 

Robert Traer, Extraordinary Experiences: On Our Way Home (2021), 247-248. Quotes from Deepak Chopra and Menas C. Kafatos, You are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters (2017), 215, 178-179, 183, 198, 229, 248.