O God of
Love.
May your grace and peace come, may your will be done, on earth as in heaven.
Keep us healthy and humble 'til our time has come.
And as we forgive those who've done us harm, forgive us for the harm we've done.
And keep us safe from temptation and evil.
For you are the Way, the Truth, and the Light, now and forever.
Amen.
In the Christmas story told in the gospel of Matthew a bright star guides three strangers to a stable where a baby named Jesus is born. The three men, known as “wise men” because they studied both the stars and the scriptures of the Jews, bring gifts to a child destined to change the world.
The story links the mystery of the universe with human life on earth. As an adult, Jesus would teach his followers a prayer that begins: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The life of Jesus embodies this prayer and more than two billion Christians continue to say this prayer and to celebrate the birth of Jesus.
Every person who has ever lived, however, is also a child of the stars. In their book Journey of the Universe authors Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker write that “the stars are our ancestors.” In the heat and pressure of stars, and then in their supernova explosions, stars give “birth to the elements that eventually form our planet and our bodies.” Stars are, Swimme and Tucker affirm, “wombs of immense creativity.”
The star in our galaxy we call the sun makes life on earth possible. And as its temperature has increased, the earth “has adapted itself so as to remain in the narrow band that enables life to flourish. By drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere via photosynthesis, Earth altered the composition of its atmosphere to keep itself cool, as the Sun grew hotter. This adaptive dance between life and nonlife changes our thinking about our planet. Earth is not just a big ball upon which living beings exist. Earth is a creative community of beings that reorganizes itself age after age so that it can perpetuate and even deepen its vibrant existence. This dynamic or reorganization is possible because of life’s most essential capacity—its power to adapt.”
“The deep truth about matter,” Swimme and Tucker explain, “is that, over the course of four billion years, molten rocks transformed themselves into monarch butterflies, blue herons, and the exalted music of Mozart.” We are, however, “the first generation” to learn that our sun is one of trillions of stars “in one of the billions of galaxies in an unfolding universe.” Our human responsibility “is to deepen our consciousness in resonance with the dynamics of the fourteen-billion-year creative event in which we find ourselves.”
The universe story, Swimme and Tucker suggest, “has the power to awaken us more deeply to who we are.” For “as the Milky Way is the universe in the form of a flower, we are the universe in the form of a human. And every time we are drawn to look up into the night sky and reflect on the awesome beauty of the universe, we are actually the universe reflecting on itself.”
The scientific story of the universe was unknown to Jesus, but he knew the earth story offered us the challenge of doing “on earth as in heaven” the will of the one he called “Our Father.” May we be inspired this Christmas to “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) in these stories.
Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (Yale University Press, 2011).
Scientist Jim B. Tucker writes: “How might the larger part of each of us—the Dreamer—be connected to the other dreamers? In looking at the way our world works so seamlessly—once I observe the outcome of an event, the result is set for any future observers—I think the unique consciousness in each of us must be part of a larger whole. Each of us is contributing to a tapestry of existence rather than creating our own individual work.
”The I in my nighttime dreams, my character in the dreams, is part of a bigger I, my larger mind out of which my dream world arises. All the people in the dream are arising from the same consciousness, in the case of my nighttime dreams, from mine. In the same way, all the individuals in the physical world may also arise from the same consciousness, from some larger conscious force.
“This doesn’t necessarily mean that everything that happens is planned or intended by this Mind. I don’t control or plan the events in my nighttime dreams, and I know my mind creates those. The physical world may work the same way. This conscious-created reality may include painful or negative events that happen randomly without any conscious intent or control. Even so, we may be able to reduce them by appealing to the benign aspect of this larger Mind.
“Since part of us seems able to transcend the various dream worlds as we move from one to another in different lifetimes, there must also be existence outside of these worlds and outside of space-time—an existence of pure Mind. Each of us may be like a single train of thought in one large Mind. We seem to be like a chain of islands as William James suggested, separate when seen above the water but connected at the ocean floor. More than just connected, islands turn out to be projections that are so many small parts of a single larger object, the planet. Likewise, each of our minds may turn out to be small streams of consciousness that are all part of a larger Mind, a ‘cosmic consciousness’ as James said.
“I know this is a long way from children’s past-life memories. But as each step has followed the other, this is where the journey has led. A little boy who repeatedly relives the exact details of the terrible death of a young World War II pilot challenges the mainstream understanding that consciousness is always created by—and confined to—a physical brain. Exploring quantum physics then produces a way to understand such events because it leads to a rational conclusion that the physical world grows out of consciousness, meaning that consciousness must not be limited by the physical. A child in Louisiana remembering events from the life of a pilot from Pennsylvania offers a glimpse that consciousness survives across lifetimes and that experiences separated by great distances and many years can nonetheless be connected and intertwined.
“This connection, along with the seamless way in which observation from countless observers create our holistic world, indicates that a single individual consciousness is only a tiny piece in the act of creation, that all the pieces work in concert as part of a bigger whole, and just as our physical world grows out of consciousness, so the entirety of existence grows out of this bigger whole, this Ultimate Source. As mere streams of thoughts from one large Mind, we are not separate; we are all in this together. And just as our experiences in life can enrich our individual minds, if this awareness that we are all part of the Ultimate helps us be a little more patient, a little more accepting, a little more loving, if it helps us focus more on our shared experiences and less on our differences, then perhaps in some small way, we will be better able to enrich the Ultimate and, with it, all of existence.”
Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives
(St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 195-219.
“I no longer imagine that we go to another place when we die. Instead, we have another dream. The idea of some entity—a soul or a consciousness —moving from one world to another places too much emphasis on the physical worlds. Instead, the new experiences continue to be creations of the mind. If the shared dream model is correct, there need not be just one afterlife. Each individual starts another dream at the point of death, and the nature of the dream can vary from person to person.
“Near-death experiences (NDEs) are, as the name suggests, the events that people report having when they come very close to death before being revived. The specifics of these experiences can vary. Just as people’s nighttime dreams are affected by their previous experiences, I would expect afterlife events to be affected by experiences in life, and this seems to be the case. In particular, though there are common features of NDEs across cultures, there are also cultural differences.
Allan Kellehear, medical and public health sociologist at the University of Bradford in the UK: “reviewed reports of NDEs that had been published from a number of countries. Looking at the parts of NDEs that are common in the Western cases, he found that the major features seen across cultures were going to other worlds and encountering other beings. An out-of-body experience was present in the NDEs of most cultures, and the life review was present in several. With the model I’m presenting, differences would be expected when people experience their next consciousness-created reality, their next dream.
“Our cases [involving past life memories] involve young children who have not been close to death and in fact usually aren’t old enough to fully comprehend the concept of death, yet their reports can be quite similar to NDE reports—thus posing a problem for psychological explanations offered for NDEs. Both phenomena—near-death experiences and intermission reports from young children [of an afterlife experience before being reborn]—may in fact be glimpses of the afterlife, and they are both consistent with the model of conscious-created reality.
“With the past-life memories they report, the children in our cases seem to be returning to the world in which they lived a previous life. A better way of describing this is to say that regardless of whether the children have an intermission experience, they fall back into the same dream they were in before—meaning this world. They have to be a new character as they continue, since the previous person has died in the dream at that point. Imagine that you are sleeping at night; you are awakened in the middle of a dream—perhaps you are startled awake by something traumatic that happens in it—but then you fall back asleep quickly and continue on in the same dream. This is completely analogous to what happens in our cases.
“Dying young increases the likelihood that a child will later report memories of a previous life. With the model I’m proposing, this makes sense. Individuals whose dreams end prematurely—by being brief or through an abrupt ending—are more likely to return quickly to the same dream. This idea of returning to the same dream also explains another pattern. The previous person was from the same country as the child in over ninety percent of our cases, often having lived fairly close by. Cases involving ordinary deaths are more likely to be same-family cases. The families are more likely to be strangers when more exceptional deaths were involved, meaning when the previous person died an unnatural death, died younger, or died unexpectedly even when the death was from natural causes.
“Nonetheless, there is no evidence that most children have such memories and thus no evidence, even if you accept our cases, that everyone is reborn back into this world. I see no reason to think that other mind-created worlds, other shared dreams, wouldn’t exist in addition to the world we know here. Just as we don’t usually return to the same dream when we sleep at night, the same pattern may well be true for our lives. Though individuals occasionally return to this shared dream, it might be more common to begin participating in a different shared dream after we die.
“Likewise, your life experiences could affect the mind-created worlds that follow after you die. Many Christians say your actions or beliefs determine whether you go to Heaven of Hell. But if I am right about existence being like a shared dream, then there might not be just one Heaven or just one Hell. There might be an infinite number of shared dreams, some heavenly, some hellish, and some like this world—heavenly at times, hellish at times, and most of the time somewhere in between. I do find it notable, however, that in this model I’m suggesting, the religions are right that the decisions and actions you make in this life help determine the kind of existence you have next. Though this would not involve a Judgment Day of any kind, you could experience a ‘good’ afterlife or a ‘bad’ one based on your life now, in what would be a purely naturalistic process.
“I don’t think there is our world and then the real spiritual world. Our world is as real as it gets. It is created by Mind, but that is also true for all other worlds. Existence grows out of consciousness. The world is indeed like a mind-simulated virtual reality, in a way, but it’s as real as reality gets. Along with my character in the short-lived dream, I as a dreamer also have my real self that exists apart from the dream. Likewise, I think we each have a larger part of us that transcends the individual dream—the individual lifetime—and continues to take part in creating other dreams, other lifetimes or worlds.
Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives
(St. Martin’s Press, 2013).
“Despite appearances,” reincarnation researcher Jim B. Tucker argues, “the universe was not created in one fell swoop in the Big Bang. Instead, it continues to be created, one observation at a time. Events in the distant past such as the paths of photons billions of years ago—even events all the way back to the Big Bang—remain in suspended animation until they are observed, at which point one particular outcome occurs. This does not mean that we human observers had to come into existence. Different life forms might have evolved here or in other places in the universe. Observers had to develop somewhere, however, in order for the world to exist.
Wheeler’s theory of genesis through observer participants is known as “the strong anthropic principle. A universe that supports the development of observers is the only kind that ever could come into existence. It might seem that humans on this little planet, or observers anywhere in any galaxy, are far too small and unimportant to have any significant function in the universe, much less bring it into existence. Observation, however, couldn’t create a smaller universe, not because of size per se but because of the time required to produce life. As Wheeler pointed out, to produce heavy elements like carbon out of hydrogen, thermonuclear combustion is required, and it needs several billion years to cook inside a star. And for the universe to provide several billion years of time, general relativity says it must extend in space several billion light-years. Any observed universe would have to be as big as ours is, in order to have observers.
Stanford physicist Andrei Linde writes: ‘I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers.’ And this leads him to assert: ‘I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness.’ “French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat argues: ‘The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.’
“Conscious observers eventually evolved in the universe . . . and then created that very same universe. How does that make sense? One answer is that individual observers are the result of evolution, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean that consciousness itself is. For people like me who are open to the possibility that consciousness is more than just the result of physical chemistry and electrochemical potentials—that there might be more to existence than just the physical universe—the way out of the paradox is for consciousness to be primary. The physical world grows out of it.
“The findings of quantum physics have challenged the worldview of materialism from the outset; at the very least, they have undeniably shown that the world does not function at the smallest level in a way that common sense suggests it does. The findings point, not just for me but for a number of physicists as well, to the fundamental importance of consciousness. Something has to be outside the quantum system to register it, to observe it. My answer is that consciousness is outside the quantum system, interacting with the physical universe but also existing beyond it, as it registers and creates that universe. Consciousness does not exist because the physical world does; the physical world exists because consciousness does. As Max Plank said, we cannot get behind consciousness.
“The picture that emerges from quantum physics is a world in which events do not occur until conscious beings observe them. One way to comprehend this is to realize that it is quite similar to another world we know very well—the world of our dreams. When we are dreaming, people only come into existence there when we interact with them. There are differences, to be sure. All sorts of nonsensical things happen in the dream world. It is undeniable that the possibilities are more limited in the physical world. Events that begin through observation become fixed, unable to be altered by other observations. The overall process, however, is very similar. Possibilities exist, and one of them becomes a fact when it is observed.
“The analogy to dreams is so apt that the world can be thought of, not as the giant clockworks of Isaac Newton’s mechanistic universe, but as a dream that all its observers share. Its pieces only come into existence when one of its dreamers experiences them. When something is not being observed, it may as well not exist.
“We are the physical beings living in a physical world that mainstream science tells us we are. But we also have consciousness that is more than just a product of our brains. Though we have physical bodies with limited life spans, we also have a conscious piece that is part of something bigger. Consciousness is independent of the physical world and is even the creator of the physical world. And a portion of it is in each of us.”
Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives
(St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 165-193.
In what is called the double-slit experiment, “you have a light source, along with a photographic plate that records the light that’s emitted. Between them, you place a screen that blocks the light. If you cut a slit in the screen for the light to pass through, then a fuzzy image is created on the photographic plate that corresponds to the location of the slit.
“What happens if you cut a second slit in the screen? You might think you would get two fuzzy images, matching the two slits, but you don’t. Instead, the light appears to pass through the slits as waves, producing an interference pattern on the photographic plate, of alternating light and dark bands. Light sometimes acts as if it’s made up of particles, and other times it acts like waves. But here’s the thing about the double-slit experiment: when you turn down the light source so low that the light goes through the screen one photon at a time, guess what happens? Somehow, you still get the interference pattern. As theoretical physicist Paul Dirac said, ‘Each photon then interferes only with itself.’ It’s as if each photon hasn’t made up its mind about which slit to choose and goes through both of them simultaneously.
“In case you think these results are simply due to the strangeness of light, its particle-wave duality, you should know that the double-slit experiment has now been done with electrons as well. In fact, similar experiments have been done with neutrons, atoms, and even larger molecules. Not just light but actual matter also acts like waves, seeming to go in two places at once and interfering with itself. The famed physicist Richard Feynman said the double-slit experiment was ‘impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way’ and it ‘has in it the heart of quantum mechanics.’
“Most of us learned in science class that atoms, the building blocks of the universe, consist of electrons circling a nucleus like small billiard balls. Quantum physicists tell us instead that electrons are better seen as smears of probability, with their locations being potentials rather than definite places. As strange as it may seem, it is only when an electron is measured that its location goes from a smear to a specific spot.
“In the double-slit experiment, there is one thing that can force the photons to make up their minds and go through one slit or the other. If you set up sensors to observe them as they travel, each photon is seen going through just one of the slits. The interference pattern on the photographic plate disappears, and you get two fuzzy images corresponding to the two slits instead. The observation leads to one path, one definite outcome, rather than the two potential outcomes that existed before.
“Similarly, take a small particle that can travel down one of the two paths, with a fifty-fifty chance of going down each one. According to quantum theory, until someone looks to see which path it goes down, with a measuring device for instance, all that can be said about the particle is that it has the two probabilities. Common sense says it goes down a path but we just don’t know which one until someone checks. Common sense, however, can be misleading at the quantum level. Until the particle is observed, it does not actually go down either path. It simply exists as a fifty-fifty probability wave for going down each path.
“To say that light and matter only exist as probability waves until they are observed raises the question of what their existence in such a state would mean. As Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum physics, noted: ‘The atoms or the elementary particles themselves are not as real [as any phenomena in daily life]; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.’ With a measurement, one outcome snaps into place. ‘The transition from the possible to the actual takes place during the act of observation,’ to quote Heisenberg again. The measurement somehow causes one of the two possibilities—or in other situations one of many possibilities—to become the reality that is seen. Measuring something thus creates a reality that did not exist before.
“Imagine that you do an experiment in which a photon can take one of two paths, and a measuring device can be set up on one of the paths to determine if the photon goes down it. The device failing to detect it on that path would mean that the photon must have taken the other one.” Quantum physicists examining this situation “found that observing the absence of a photon on the first path collapses the wave function just as much as observing the presence of it would. Since nothing is actually measured and only an absence is observed, this indicates that the observation—not the measurement itself—is the critical process in wave function collapse.’”
Moreover, Tucker writes: “it’s not the observing per se that produces a result, it is the knowing produced by the observing that does. By seeing that a particle doesn’t go down one path, an observer can deduce that it must have gone down the other one. Since no other result is possible, the observer ‘knows’ which path the particle took, thereby collapsing the wave function and producing the result.” As John Hopkins physicist Richard Conn Henry wrote in the journal Nature, ‘The wave function is collapsed simply by your human mind seeing nothing.’ This led him to conclude, ‘The Universe is entirely mental.’
Another physicist, Helmut Schmidt, conducted experiments “to see if conscious effort could produce nonrandom results even if the effort occurred after the events had already been recorded. He got positive results in the five studies he did, with odds against chance of 8,000 to 1. He recorded random events such as red and green light flashes, and the series of flashes was then stored on a floppy disk. Days or months later, the sequence was shown on a computer while a test subject tried to mentally cause one of the colors to flash more. As long as no one inspected the recordings beforehand, the mental efforts of the test subjects could cause the results to be nonrandom, with more of one color appearing that would be expected by chance. The test subjects’ success means that the collapse of the wave function did not occur when the recording device initially measured the flashes of light; the collapse only happened when the recordings were later observed.
Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).
“The answer,” Tucker suggests, “lies in being aware that science involves more than just scientific materialism, the concept that the world consists entirely of physical matter. On the basis of materialism, most mainstream scientists would dismiss the cases out of hand because they say that no part of us can continue after our bodies die. As I’ve learned more about scientific knowledge as it exists today, however, I have discovered that the picture is actually much more complex.
“Findings in physics over the last hundred years—particularly in quantum physics or quantum mechanics, the study of the universe’s smallest particles—have shown that the physical universe is much more complicated than it appears. These findings strengthen my view that there is a consciousness that exists separate from the material world. I now believe that the physical grows out of the mental, meaning that the physical world is created out of something you can think of as Mind or consciousness or the spiritual. Our cases, and the possibility of children remembering past lives, then fit in nicely with a new understanding of existence.
“Materialism—the belief that physical matter is all there is—has become practically synonymous with modern science, and it is unquestioned by many, though certainly not all, scientists. It relegates religion to antiquated folk belief and consciousness to purely a product of a physical brain.” Nonetheless, “A recent study found that a quarter of scientists from top research universities regarded themselves as spiritual, which many viewed as separate from religious. Even twenty percent of the atheist scientists considered themselves ‘spiritual atheists.’
“What most mainstream scientists seem unaware of, or at most only vaguely aware of, is that the most fundamental findings of physics have now disproved materialism. Valuing a special place for consciousness or spirituality can be incorporated into an overall understanding that includes the insights gained through science. Work in quantum mechanics has undermined many of the basics of what we thought we knew.
What is described as our “Big History"[1] affirms the materialist story: “The universe gives the appearance that it sprang into existence approximately 13.8 billion years ago. According to the Big Bang theory, all matter and energy present in the universe today began then as a single point. It expanded with the Big Bang to create the still expanding universe of today. After 300,000 years or so, hydrogen and helium molecules began to form. Another 300,000 years later, clumps of matter formed and began coalescing into galaxies. Our sun was formed around 4.5 billion years ago, and the planets followed after that.
“By appearances, eukaryotic cell organism developed one and a half to two billion years ago, followed by multicellular life. More complex organisms developed, leading eventually to the variety of plants and animals present today. Humans were the accidental result of natural selection. As their brains evolved, their frontal lobes grew and produced the experience of consciousness. As conscious observers, humans were eventually able to examine the world and learn how it came into existence.
“I believe,” Tucker writes, that “this story is seriously incomplete. Consciousness is not merely an incidental byproduct of evolution. The logical conclusion from various findings in physics is that consciousness actually creates the universe. And its creative process continues to occur in every instant. As Max Planck, a founder of quantum theory, said, ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.’”[2]
[1] See Big History Project, https://www.bighistoryproject.com/home. The web site states: “Big History examines our past, explains our present, and imagines our future. It’s a story about us. An idea that arose from a desire to go beyond specialized and self-contained fields of study to grasp history as a whole. This growing, multi-disciplinary approach is focused on high school students, yet designed for any seeking answers to the big questions about the history of our Universe.” Unfortunately, these answers assume a materialistic view of science and the cosmos, as I’ve explained in an essay entitled “Evolving Consciousness” at www.doingfaith.com/consciousness/evolving-consciousness.html.
[2] For my explanation, written before I read Tucker’s book, see “Consciousness is Fundamental” at www.doingfaith.com/consciousness/fundamental.html.
Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).
Alexander T. Englert, “We'll meet again,” Aeon , Jan 2, 2024, https://aeon.co/essays/kurt-godel-his-mother-and-the-a...
