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The universe is expanding. All the galaxies, stars and solar systems are flying wildly outward in all possible directions. So far as anyone can tell, this has been happening for between 10 billion and 20 billion years, and so we say the edge of the universe is that far away.

Apart from stating that the edge of the universe recedes from us, there is no way to locate it. At the cosmic scale space is identical with time, and since light travels faster than any other physical phenomenon, the distances of objects beyond the solar system are measured by the time it takes light to travel between them. The edge of the universe is thought to be somewhere around 13.7 billion light years away.

Saying the universe is expanding at a rate beyond any real human understanding solves a lot of cosmological problems for science. One problem it helps solve is Olbers' paradox. Wilhelm Olbers pointed out in the early 1800s that if the universe is infinite, then there must be an infinite number of stars, and if there is an infinite number of stars, then the whole sky should be flooded with light all the time. There should be no darkness. In an expanding universe, however, light from most of the stars that exist has not yet reached us, and so the night sky is only lit in spatters.

It is also an apparent fact of physics that the luminosity of a star declines in proportion to the square of its distance from the Earth. This is because the star's light expands spherically outward from the star, and the more it expands, the more space it has to fill. By the time the starlight reaches the Earth, it is filling an enormous volume, and that volume is expanding even as the light fills it. The same quantity of light, presumably, fills a geometrically expanding area, and so it is diluted, and so another reason the sky is dark may be that there simply aren't enough stars living long enough to generate that much visible light.

The sky is nevertheless filled with light of all kinds, although we see only a small portion of it. "Visible light" is electromagnetic radiation moving in waves which are between 7000 and 4000 angstrom units in length. An angstrom unit is about .0000001 meter, and the range of wavelengths visible to us is tiny in comparison to all the light that exists. Light of just slightly longer wavelengths is called infrared light, and wavelengths somewhat longer than infrared are called radio waves. Wavelengths just slightly shorter than visible light's are ultraviolet. Shorter than ultraviolet are different kinds of X-rays, and the shortest wavelengths of light anyone knows about are gamma rays, a form of intense radiation.

In 1964 two scientists were wondering what the fuzzy noise on their special radio all the time could be, and they figured out it was electromagnetic radiation left over from the Big Bang. They had found hard evidence that the universe was finite, that is, that it had a beginning.

Most present-day cosmological theories propose that the universe began at a tiny point containing all potential energy. It exploded and began to radiate outward. It formed atoms along, maybe, cracks or strings in the fabric of the expansion, and then where clumps gathered, the materials which eventually became galaxies formed. One problem with this theory is that 13.7 billion years does not appear to be long enough for galaxies to have evolved. Cosmologists are working on it.

An offshoot of this theory is that the universe's expansion grows slower and slower as time goes on. All the matter generated in the universe exerts a gravitational force that brakes and eventually stops the expansion. At some point, not any sooner than 10 billion years from now (states the theory), the universe will stop expanding altogether and begin to contract. It will contract faster and faster until it collapses back to its original pinpoint of potential. Then, sufficiently compressed, it will explode again. One problem with this theory is that no one has been able to take a measurement showing enough matter in the universe to exert a gravitational tug big enough to slow down the expansion. On the other hand, many cosmologists think that up to 90 percent of all the matter in the universe is "dark matter" anyway, at the moment undetectable to us.

The general idea that the universe had an explosive origin is not really new. The first verses of Genesis, as most people have noticed at one time or another, make a striking figurative parallel with the Big Bang theory. And the idea that the universe runs forward and then halts and runs backwards again is not new either. In the Statesman Plato explains such a story in some detail. Today's scientific models differ from Biblical and Platonic myths, of course, in the body of factual and mathematical evidence, together with four hundred years of scientific reasoning, brought to bear on solving physical problems of space and time.

The problems of spatial location are intimately related to problems of chronology. Einstein showed through his mathematics that time and space are essentially the same thing. Not surprisingly, the ancients intimated this, as well. In the ancient world time was measured directly by the motion (motion meaning changes in spatial location) of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. The celestial bodies formed a living, moving image of eternity, and were in quite literal senses divinity itself, or the aspect of divinity you could detect with your eyes. Light is also a powerful symbol of God.

***

Time tumbles on. In modern terms the universe is a perpetual series of statistical accidents. The world looks like it does and moves like it does because of a tendency for things to become disorderly. In other words, there are always many different ways for a clump of things to exist apart in a jumble, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle for example, but only one way for them to exist together in order. Since the universe is in a state of constant flux, when things change they tend to arrange themselves in one of the many chances for disorder, rather than in the single lottery-like chance for order. This tendency toward disorder is called entropy. Another theory of what might happen to the universe is that all matter could burn itself out of order and devolve into radiation. It will be a universe of pure light-chaos.

There are of course some perplexing exceptions to the rule of entropy, and they seem to get ignored in basic textbooks. For example, if things tend toward disorder, then why did galaxies - which are in general fairly orderly, compared to the scale on which groups of stars could be disorderly - form? Why are stars, highly complex beings, constantly coming into existence, persisting for long periods of time and then extinguishing in one way or another, only to form new stars from their remains? Why are the stars, in most galaxies, circulating serenely and obediently around a central point?

And why do the gargantuanly huge spaces between stars cause the stars to seem utterly stationary and orderly, even after moving thousands of miles per second for tens of thousands of years? Why do the constellations circle so predictably, century after century, revolving in yearly, and even longer, cycles? You can always tell where you are and what time of year you occupy by observing the Big Dipper and Polaris carefully at the same time each evening. Despite the appearance of constant local decay, an innate order clearly underlies the perpetualities of the universe. The evidence is everywhere, available to the senses, the intellect and the intuition, among other things.

Even more exceptional, in an entropic universe, is life itself. The universe is expanding superhumanly outward, and following the rule of entropy, most everything is collapsing in its wake. But meanwhile life has emerged on Earth, if not elsewhere, and has burgeoned ever since. And not only has it burgeoned, but contrary to the dissolution all around it, it has become more complex, that is to say, created more intricate levels of order as it goes. A bacterium is a long-lived animal, and some say the best-adapted creature in evolutionary history because it has survived nearly the whole time while orders of other organisms have struggled up and died out across a few or many millions of years. Good for the bacteria, and good for us, who use the bacteria to keep alive.

It is a long way from an amino acid electrified by lightning to a human brain. Life on Earth, we are told, evolved quickly in the beginning, and then leveled off for quite a while. The first cellular fossils date to about 3.5 billion years ago, which means life took about a billion years to organize and appear. But the first multicellular animals do not show up until almost 3 billion years later, about 600 million years before the present. In the next approximately 70 million years, multicellular life-forms somehow constructed all their basic frameworks.

Then in the Cambrian period, in a space of time lasting between 5 million and 40 million years, there was an explosion of diversity and complexity in life forms. No one has any verifiable idea at all why this happened. One way to begin explaining it is to say that evolution tends toward complexity, which seems clear enough, given the difference between a bacterium and a human brain. Some argue, however, that evolution does not tend toward complexity. Given the "success" (meaning survival) of many simple forms and the relative paucity of successful complex forms, biological complexity appears to be accidental. Those who argue this openly admit, at the same time, to having no idea why there was an explosion of complexification 570 million years ago.

The fact, as science now understands it, is that biological life has for millions upon millions of years been expanding outward from a single point, making its way out of deep water into shallow, and from shallow water onto the beach. It has gone from the sea to the foothills, and from the foothills to the mountains. We have been looking up at the Sun and Moon, and considering their distances, long enough to create a network of inventions and collaborations complex enough to send men and robots there to look around.

The idea that this could be accidental is more mystifying than the idea that it results from some innate necessity. It is not clear how a purely accidental universe can give rise to a lower limit to the complexity of life. How can it give rise to any consistent limits or order at all? Science, while maintaining its view of a stochastically evolved material universe, is nonetheless simultaneously engaged in aligning its theories with parameters that apparently exist in nature. Here we are in the vicinity of either a contradiction or a paradox.

***

Two interesting points about the human species concern its youth and its antiquity. Human beings, in evolutionary terms, are new to the planet. It depends on who you call human, but if you decide the first tool-making animals were human, then you are speaking of an animal, beginning with homo habilis, about 2 million years old. Since evolution seems to have begun 3.5 billion years ago, this is an infant life-form. No one knows, of course, when human beings started speaking to each other, but the first campfires date to about 500,000 years ago, and it seems reasonable to think that if fire technology was being shared, it was probably happening through some kind of verbal instruction.

It would be hard to imagine verbal instruction, at such a time, which did not include storytelling. If any of this has any accuracy at all, it means that human beings have been telling stories to each other for half a million years. I wonder if any of the stories from the campfires of homo erectus have evolved along with us and still exist in stories of, say, Hamlet or Polaris, or if they have vanished into a universe characterized chiefly by deterioration.

By 50,000 years ago, we were essentially who we are, homo sapiens. What stories did Cro-Magnon humans tell about the stars? Have we, or our minds, become more or less complex since that time? Could Cro-Magnon tribes, given the tools and methodologies, have built and flown Apollo 11?

Some scientists say so. But pretty surely our most distant conscious ancestors, when they looked into the sky, saw a different kind of order than we see. We have learned to see rock, gas and fire objects of varying sizes and temperatures. They saw, apparently, eternity continuously revolving. They noticed the stars moving with nearly perfect cyclical regularity, and the planets wandering through internal cycles of greater and lesser complexity.

To speak meaningfully of the order obviously inherent in eternity, you need to say things that relate as intimately to human beings as to the figures themselves. To express what happens in the sky for all time, but lacking objective technologies and information, you would frame stories that interconnect the life of a human being to the life of the cosmos.

Life is in the stars. The Great Bear circling Polaris is not merely an act of fantasy for purposes of entertainment on frozen North American nights, but an unfolding figure of the track the stars make around a central axis. If myth can be believed in any sense, the idea of what is central has been important to human beings for a very long time. We have been calculating the locations and distances of the stars for tens of thousands of years and only recently reduced them to terrestrial measures, like miles or light-years.

In ancient times, what was central was outward. The whole sky turns around a point due north, and the wanderers themselves revolve on paths along a plane parallel with the turning. If there is a central place or time, it is not here on Earth, but at a place in the sky around which all things somehow revolve. Since all things turn in order around the center, it must behoove a human being to align him or herself with that outward center too. Lacking the physical magnitude or power to vault oneself into the stars, a human being, in trying to center him or herself, would turn inward. The real orientation of a human being to the stars depends not on individual physical proximity, but on a relation. The relation is established inwardly. The journey outward is for human beings a journey inward to establish a relation with the cosmos. Even feats of sending robots and people to other planets are primarily acts of imagination, acts of the mind orienting itself to particular conditions of the universe and unfolding, in this case, physical possibilities.

Orienting ourselves to the physical sky has not, however, brought us closer to the center. In fact our relation with the universe is much more tenuous than it was when Kepler set out to prove the divine mathematical harmonies of the planets four hundred years ago. We now occupy a place so far from the center that we are thirty million light years away from it - the center is a black hole in the bulge of our galaxy - and we are in any case of no account whatsoever, being an accident of chemical chance to begin with. In our universe there is no inherent order. The revolution of the seven stars of the Big Dipper is an illusion of purely physical motion. The change of the pole star every few thousand years is a chance alignment caused by the wobble of the Earth on its axis - the precession. We have, that is to say, no relation to the universe except that we seem to occupy it.

Even the central myth of order in our time, evolution, begins to be interpreted as a meaningless stochastic process. Although with certain peculiarities.

***

Relativity suggests that in an expanding universe, every point is its own center because everything is flying equally away from everything else. This may only be a hopeful way of saying that there is no center.

Everything, at least, is in motion. All the stars and galaxies are flowing in definite directions, and all subatomic particles are moving with some uncertain velocity or location. All life, including individual organisms and entire species, is in motion. Everything is coming to birth, growing, decaying and dying, all moving outward.

When the universe exploded into being about 13.7 billion years ago, it went from a condition of pure potential to a condition of pure energy, and from pure energy to matter. Stars formed around clots of atoms, and then formed galaxies. It was all, as far as anyone can tell by the scientific evidence, a process of one thing transforming itself into another thing, abiding by parameters of physical behavior which, for one reason or another, were necessary for anything to happen at all. Where and how the parameters originated is so uncertain it may never be more than a matter of armchair conjecture for scientists. Things were on fire. Other things grew cold. Nothing lived for a long time.

About, perhaps, 12 billion years after the catastrophic opening of everything, something strange happened to some large organic molecules on the Earth. No one knows what it was, exactly. Surely it had something to do with how energy becomes physical matter. In the quantum universe, this implies it was a matter of pure chance, though it might simply have been following one of those inexplicable parameters of necessity. Something came alive.

This, as we say, was progress.

For 3 billion years it simply lived, if more and more diversely. Then it entered a period of complexification comparable on its own microcosmic scale to the original explosion. The basis for every anatomical structure now known on Earth took form and began to experiment with growing larger, occupying a particular place, or moving upward out of the primordial wet. Boneless sacs. Trilobites. Ammonites like periwinkles the size of cars and houses, swallowing things. Fish with grotesque protuberances and terrifying maws. Dinosaurs. Mammals. Human beings. The brain of homo sapiens sapiens. Evolution, it seems, has been happening against all the odds. It's as if the parameters of necessity that guide the unfoldment of the universe had blown life itself into kingdom come. The biological universe, however slowly, is expanding. The fact that no radically different anatomical form has appeared in the last 500 million years is no argument at all against a tendency toward complexity in evolution. It took a billion years for a single cell to converge and 3 billion more for multicellular forms to appear, and there is no reason why the next level of multicellular forms won't take another billion yet. Meanwhile, during this diverse formal stability, familial affection, social behavior, morality, and rational consciousness have unfolded from the forms.

This may or may not be progress, but it is qualitatively different from the grisly horrors of the middle stages of terrestrial life, represented in the grotesque forms of spike-backed dinosaurs and gape-mouthed reptiles. A frog is a cold-blooded, frightening thing. The gullets of some shellfish sweep the seawater completely outside the organism. The evolutionary efforts to establish a surviving form weirdly disfigure fish, the direct lineal descendants of beings from 500 million years ago, with strange whiskers and sprouting globs, spines and mashed faces. Think of a hammerhead shark, one of the oldest surviving species: It is ugly almost beyond imagination, with its shark body signifying alarming danger, its gaping mouth, and its squashed perpendicular head with eyes screwed onto the ends, like an early experiment in factory machinery.

In a mechanistic sense there is no reason to think these things are any more or less pretty or necessary than any other evolutionary organ, like the mammaries of a woman or the mane of a horse. Mechanically, the only problem is survival. From this point of view, bacteria are the greatest accomplishment of all because they have survived for virtually the whole living time and it's reasonable to expect them to keep surviving long after humans are extinct.

On the other hand, there is the physical form of a horse. Horses are not the most intelligent of all creatures. Their survival has depended on an instinct and a physical disposition for running and traveling long distances. They also have a capacity, like many other mammals but few (for example) reptiles, to learn, and part of their flourish in this day and age results from a collaboration with human beings, who are at the top of the food chain. Human beings are at the top because we, too, can learn. We can learn because of the unusual complexity of our brains.

The human brain is the latest development in complexity. Part of its complexity involves capacities to respond to the world which don't have any clear bearing on physical survival. When we see horses grazing in a field, with their rich coats and the extraordinary proportions of their haunches, shoulders and necks, the outline of the muscles in those proportions, and the ease and economy with which they move, most of us are struck in one intensity or another by the beauty of that form. We distinguish between the grace of a horse and the grotesquery of a hammerhead shark. I don't know whether dogs respond similarly to such images, or whether frogs do, or goldfish. I don't think so. Even if they do, I doubt that they make the same distinctions about their responses that human beings do; and they certainly do not feel compelled to try to understand them.

This is because their brains do not operate with the same complexity - one might safely say, the same level of complexity - as the human brain does. This is not a paean to the superiority of the human brain. It is an expression of an intuition of complexity. Arthur Koestler makes the altogether plausible case that the human brain is a doomed creature, an "evolutionary blunder." Its principal distinguishing feature, the neocortex, looks like an evolutionary makeshift slapped onto the original limbic system common to mammals. It's as ugly and ungainly in an abstract sense as the handles of the hammerhead. The addition of the neocortex to the mammalian brain (instead of an internal reshaping) might be responsible, argues Koestler, for the virtually schizophrenic behavior of humans in their ability to think rationally but their inability to act morally. Koestler writes, of course, with memories of the two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, the holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the communist purges, Korea, Vietnam, and countless other moral depravities fresh in mind. He points out that the sudden appearance of the neocortex in the last half million years has been compared to an evolutionary tumor.

But although it might be a dead end, the brain is nonetheless something different, even something more than the static recurrence of trillions upon trillions of individual bacteria. It could not have come first. It developed from a particular necessity, which is that the appearance and diversification of complex life must follow the appearance and establishment of simple life. If the physical evidence means anything, it means evolution has at least a two-dimensional movement - it branches outward from a point of origin.

A human's response to the beauty of a horse is qualitatively different from a bacterium's response to its surroundings. It's as though the bacterium, when it coalesced and first lived in the primeval ocean, awoke, in a way, from the stasis of inert matter. For 3 billion years it lived and propagated, and then something - an impulse or a necessary accident - caused it, or its relative, to expand into the plethora of biological forms. Against all the odds of entropy, life persistently and reliably forms and re-forms its own order, almost as if it had its own determination and will. Life runs against the stochastic currents of the universe.

***

The universe, we are told, is expanding from a state of pure potential energy toward a state of total inactivity, or total entropy. At time zero the universe was infinitely hot, and then it blasted open and for 300,000 years poured itself through an era of radiation toward a cooler, stabler era of matter. At the far end of time is a totality like the inert material substrate of the cosmos, a virtual death like that pictured on cold, rocky moons, in burnt-out stars and at the center of the Earth, what medieval theologians called Holy the Firm. It's a total material entropy that may grind everything to a halt and suck it back together 10 billion years from now.

Life too expands, but in the opposite direction, as if time and life were two screw-holes spiraling headlong into each other. Life screws toward activity and energy, toward order, while the universe screws toward disorder. Life strains and persistently jams against the spirals of time which rush it toward extinction. Bodies are born, and in a burst of energy completely counter to the decaying elements around them, they grow and come to adolescence and adulthood, where they are profoundly geared to make the prodigious expenditures of energy which create more order. The 5,000 pieces of a jigsaw puzzle will fall into place by chance sooner than two clots of seawater-like chemicals will form by chance a human brain. And after their creative energies are spent, physical bodies slowly succumb to the frictions of the expansions, as if a body was a rock and time was the relentless ocean pounding it with waves and tides, grinding it into sand. The bodies, being part of the physical universe despite their efforts, are finally obliged to unwind with the universe.

All life, including the birth, creativity and death of species as well as individuals, moves against the tide of time. The entire process of evolution is a pattern of starts and stops, headway followed by unwinding. In quick, quirky bursts, like small Big Bangs, life twists up out of emptiness. At the bottom of the world are the first clumsy, violent efforts toward order. Generations of bacteria diversified and expanded, and became multi-cells in the effort. Their progeny tried on appendages and bulbs of slime, shells and rudimentary eyes. From ammonites to hammerhead sharks, and from sleeker fish to eagles and the form of a horse. The horse itself is another station along the way. And the inner response to the horse's beauty is another.

The material universe is a motion toward an outer stasis, toward a moment of nothing which can do nothing but collapse back into itself. Simultaneously, life moves not outward toward the edge of things, but toward a center. It assembles energies. The fact is that, for millions upon millions of years, life has been expanding from a spark on the outskirts of infinity, from a point where creation has unraveled to virtually nothing. Evolution is an innate motion back toward a source, at the singularity which held all potential.

Our deepest intuitions are of the existence in eternity of an origin, which science as well as religion recognizes. Why the universe should detonate, what animated organic molecules, or how the energy in photons sparks the union of a sperm and egg, science cannot explain. They are unanalyzable, perfectly whole moments where greatest simplicity and greatest complexity balance in total harmony, total potential, undifferentiated. Our deepest religious revelations revolve around this point beyond all order and disorder, at the stillness central to all motion. We live both scientifically and religiously in an intuition of that origin. Even our moral impulses spring from a perception of the unity of our species, and sometimes further, from a perception of the unity in ecologies and in whole environments. Even morality in its role as survival mechanism is a phase of complexification.

Moral impulses, intuitions of origins, and religious revelations are phases of the expansion of life toward the center of the universe. "All that is visible," it has been observed, "must grow beyond itself into the realm of the invisible." Life branches upward toward a pinnacle, like a spruce tree, because of a desire, not just for survival of the species or even the survival of life, but because of a desire to live inside the center of the universe. We are working our way toward the One. The realm of the invisible is pictured in the motions of the stars, which are the edge of the visible universe. While matter expands outward in perpetual dissolution, life expands back toward the central moment of creation, in an effort to align itself with the original universe.

***

Plato tells us first that the universe is a living creature, and second that it runs cyclically back and forth in two directions. In one direction, the universe and everything in it moves toward order and harmony. All living things grow not older but younger, and they do not decay and die, but return to the source of their being, which to us seems like a nothingness of pure potential. After a necessary time, this cycle comes to its end and the universe reaches a climactic moment when it shifts direction and moves toward disorder and chaos. All living things then grow older and decay until they die, when time runs in this direction. "It would take long to tell of all the changes that befell the various creatures" of this direction, he says, "and show whence they arose and how they were effected, but man's story is shorter and more relevant for us now" (Statesman, 274b).

Strangely, despite his antiquity, Plato describes in figurative terms the same cosmogonic and evolutionary outlines described by science: the universe will expand outward and then run backward, human history is a brief flash in comparison to all that came before. We regard Plato's stories as myths, or inaccuracies, because he could not test his notion of cosmic cycles or the brevity of humanity. In any case, Plato's description suggests an unwinding universe runs backward, whereas our entropic universe is clearly - so we assume - running forward.

And Plato's stories even 2,400 years ago were already part of "a mass of ancient legend." Their accuracy, our scientific epistemologies must hold, probably declines in proportion to their distance from us in time because human knowledge is a cumulative process whose time zero is about, perhaps, 1453 when Gutenberg invented movable type. How ancient are Plato's ancient legends? And who devised them?

In the Timaeus we learn that the Egyptian priests, long before the time of Socrates, themselves received the stories from ancient tradition. The Egyptian priest told Solon - who was young when he spoke with the priest and elderly when he spoke with Socrates - that his city was founded 8,000 years before. "There have been, and will be again," the priest told Solon, "many destructions arising out of many causes ... Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies the declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth" (Timaeus, 22c). The ancient myths pretty certainly were not invented wholesale in 3500 BC upon the invention of writing. And it is no easier to believe they originated even 10,000 years ago, since the human brain as we know it has been operational and creative for at least 50,000 years. And having a knowledge of this sort of antiquity, we also verify Plato's assertion that man's story is far shorter than the whole story of evolution.

The whole story of all life is in the stars, which is after all where we are. We have known this in one way or another for tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, and we have been telling stories about it. Not only bacteria evolve, but stories evolve, and minds, and stars and galaxies, everything grows as if it were in the throes of a perpetual explosion, like supernova light expanding from its center. And since space and time are identical, as Einstein shows us, its light unfolds not merely spherically, but four-dimensionally, through time as well as space. What cardinal direction time travels, exactly, no one knows.

We have an intuition though. If the circles of the planets and the stars, like a millstone grinding over the north pole, and the great whirlpools of galactic motion and attraction are evidence, the direction of the universe is not just outward in Cartesian space, but is crossing over, and spiraling into and out of those dimensions modern mathematicians show must of necessity exist - but which we don't perceive. We evolve toward a source whose location, like an electron's, is in principle profoundly uncertain.

Our very bodies are like subatomic particles, appearing from nothing, colliding and producing new bodies, then decaying as if to nothing. We behave like light even when we're most material, when the fantastic energy of E = mc˛ is locked up in skin, blood and bone and least in active evidence.

When we are in our noetic selves, we are virtually light itself. Our minds operate with the properties of photons, ideas and images appear and reappear from no apparent place, sometimes in space-time and sometimes out. Intuitions of reality emerge in Kepler and Einstein like light from excited electrons, as if, as Koestler says, from a dream. A knowledge of circumstances from across galactic times and distances - from the beginning and end of time - surfaces like bubbles that reflect the images of ancient myth or of mathematical logic. The originators of Plato's ancient legends saw and pondered the same starlight we do, but they described it by the inflection of moments rather than the infinity of mathematics.

The universe is filled with light, just as Plotinus says. It is full of lights twinkling and expanding, caressing and searing visibly and invisibly all existence. The universe is an evolving creature. It is the materialization of the potential at the origin of the Big Bang, it is full of itself, the pleroma, becoming all it can to the whole extent it can. And when it exhausts itself it will return to its original. This is not a matter of matter, dark or light, but of necessity.

Sources

• Ferris, Timothy. Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Anchor Books, 1989.

• Gould, Stephen Jay. "The Evolution of Life on the Earth," Scientific American vol. 271, No. 4, October 1994, pp. 84-91.

• Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Bantam Books, 1988.

• The I Ching, or Book of Changes. Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, trans. Princeton University Press, 1967.

• Koestler, Arthur. "The New Calendar," Janus: A Summing Up. Vintage Books, 1979.
    ---. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. The MacMillan Co., 1959.

• Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds. Princeton University Press, 1963.

• Plotinus. Enneads. Stephen MacKenna, trans. (4th edition). Larson Publications, 1992.

• de Santillana, Giorgio and Hertha von Dechend. Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission through Myth. David R. Godine, 1977.

• Zeilik, Michael. The Evolving Universe (6th edition). John Wiley & Sons, 1991.