MANY PATHS, ONE HORIZON
© Kit Constable Maxwell


Chapter 1.

SPACE AND MATTER

MANY PATHS, ONE HORIZON
The story of mankind's spiritual awakening, and of the part we play in it.
© Kit Constable Maxwell

1. SPACE AND MATTER
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The universe is vast, and it's still growing.... Like the most engaging of mysteries, the more we discover about it the less we understand its purpose. Our relationship with the universe remains one of mankind's most puzzling dilemmas.

Planet Earth - our small home in a boundless universe

When we view the nature of human evolution on this planet and of our planet's insignificant place in the solar system, we are confronted by the curiously unbalanced relationship of space and time to the history of human development. Evolution typically reflects the changing needs of the evolving species, and this has happened on our planet. But Space and the Universe appear to be, from a scientific viewpoint, largely bereft of constructive evolution, and we are left feeling more overawed than ever.

SPACE TRAVEL
In 1983 the US spacecraft Pioneer 10, launched eleven years earlier, officially departed our solar system, the first man-made object ever to do so. By 1997 this little craft had travelled some 5.8 billion miles on its epic journey out beyond Jupiter. Information being transmitted from its solar transmitter was now taking 6 hours to reach home.

But Pioneer's journey is only just beginning; racing away into space at some 6 miles (10km) per second, it is not expected to make a contact with a star for another 8,500 years. At this point, signals will take an amazing 3.8 years to reach home. It is heading for the constellation of Taurus, and it will take a million years to get there.

From our earthly perspective, Space appears unworkably big.

*      *      *

The absolute beginning of time defies description; without data and the changes that characterise the passage of time, comparisons are meaningless. We can't use descriptive adjectives unless we have some yardstick by which our observations can be measured. With no change there is no time; infinity and eternity are one....

The theoretical origins of all time reside in a suspended state of eternity; an unbounded void without content, light or dimension. No motion, no energy, no change. Much as we now describe outer space, an empty, inert and vacuous experience of absolute nothingness; a place where eternity stands eternally still.

BIG BANG
We don't know how long this pregnant state of subatomic vacuity existed, but we know it ended about 15 billion years ago, when a cataclysmic eruption of stupendous power and energy, known as the Big Bang, hurled superheated, super-dense energy out into the great boundless void of space. This trillion degree eruption comprised protons, electrons and neutrons driven out of any identifiable form by indescribable heat and immeasurable pressure. It wasn't for about 300,000 years that the temperature had dropped sufficiently for these split off particles to begin to clump together to form atoms, the first step in the chain of development into molecules of gaseous matter.

Through the ensuing aeons of time this hot, dense matter cooled and condensed into the rocks and gases of the galaxies we now observe. Some are now so far away that in 15 billion years their light hasn't yet reached us. But more remarkably, these giant bodies of energy are still hurtling out through space with relatively unabated velocity. Our enormous universe is getting bigger. What a bang it must have been!

BIG CRUNCH
When inertia and stellar gravity eventually overcome this velocity, the great galactic expansion will peter out to a fretful pause; and then, under the influence of its own force, slowly begin to contract. For the first time in stellar history the stars and planets of the universe will begin to move together. The process will continue with escalating speed and intensity until it recombines in a geophysical conundrum of inexpressible energy, with stars, planets and whole galaxies jostling for position and colliding in a statement of ultimate density and unutterable force. The laws of physics will break down and matter will destabilise into molecules, then atoms, and then into subatomic particles of errant energy, those protons, neutrons and electrons. These will then be driven out of existence and into a limbo state of non identity.

This is what the scientist Stephen Hawking calls the hypothetical 'Big Crunch', and this scientifically probable scenario could only have one obvious result - another Big Bang, every bit as formidable and titanic and cataclysmic as the last.

We have no way of knowing, therefore, how many universal cycles have preceded our own. How many experiences of life and time have been lived - and lost - since the absolute beginning of all time. The state of eternal emptiness that preceded the Big Bang can no longer be called eternal - because Big Bang stopped eternity in its tracks, and the evolution of life commenced.

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Table of Contents - click on any chapter to open it
Section
Title
Page
i
Prologue                   Click here...
v
ii.
Preface
viii
1.
Space and Matter This page
1
2.
Evolution of Life
5
3.
Birth of Awareness
14
4.
Spiritual Goals
28
5.
Psychology
43
6.
Evolution and Astrology
52
7.
Astrology and Fate
59
8.
Light, Love and Feeling
68
9.
Primal Scream
75
10.
World Religions
82
11.
Ethics of Caring
96
12.
Thought Conditioning
102
13.
Miracles and Prayer
108
14.
Shadow and the Unconscious
116
15.
Journey in Spirit
124
16.
Pantheism and Matter
131
Appendix I
Glossary of Terms
136
Appendix II
Bibliography
139
Appendix III
Acknowledgements
144