A Plain Man's Universe - No maths.

Let us take another quiet look at Universe and its reality.

As we are inextricably part of its process and our sight is therefore distorted by our involvement, it is better that we step outside and view it from its exterior, otherwise we are trying to study herd-management from within the mucky depths of a cow's omasum - third stomach.

Universe is biggish? Comparative to our size, yes, so let us reduce it to something more manageable that, like an amorphous balloon, we can hold handily before us for our inspection.

This is the complete Universe we have here, containing within it all that has ever happened in it. It is complete. It contains any beginning that it has ever had, whatever it may be, through to and including its final state, finite or infinite. It's all still there; it has nowhere else to 'go'.

From this perspective you may note - look, just there - the formation of the planet earth, never far in on this Universal scale, and on it the scum of life formed and eventuating, as on so many other planets on countless stars within countless other galaxies.

Universe, as seen from here, is very different from what humans normally perceive. For the chemical organisms that living things are, observation and perception require the action of their chemical processes as they move across space, so that their impression of anything and everything necessarily has to be always fleeting and transitory, from within a moving and limiting bubble of consciousness and with the illusion of 'time'. We can only see a moving universe instead of also the aspect of its 'timeless' stillness at all stages of what we see as its 'action'.

Suppose you take a photograph; this is the closest we can get to seeing a true state of Universe. The 'now' of the event still remains, as an ineradicable part of Universe, but your bubble of consciousness, as provided by the ever-continuing action of your materials in their movement with your consciousness in and across expanding space, has moved on. Say "now and now and now", and each 'now' is twenty miles removed from the last, as the planet girates onward on its path around the sun, apart from the movement of the sun around the galaxy, or the galaxy onward relevant to other distant galaxies. But the previous 'now' still exists and is no less real just because our fleeting 'awareness' is no longer inhabiting it.

So the reality, as we now see, is that 'yesterday' is still there, the microbial ancestors of dinosaurs still exist, and all the future to and including the final completed state is already there. Thus, as we see, 'time' does not exist; what the humans call 'time' is really only a relative position in space and distance in and across which our materials act, thus giving us the impression of 'time' and a view of Universe only 'in action'.

And now we can see that Universe is all formed of just one ingredient: space. Distorsions in mere space give the effect of sub-atomic particles, which combine to form the effect of atoms and their concomitant action, which combine to form the effect of molecules, and so animate and inanimate matter. It is this Universal action that on an atomic scale animates our materials and enables our observation and also our decomposition when our observation finishes and we are what the still-alive then call "dead".

Matter also gives the effect of binding energy of the atoms, their weak repulsive force when their stability is disturbed, gravity, and galactic repulsion over vast distances, which is caused by the distant expansion of space which carries the receding galaxies static within it. In fact, it seems that gravity and the binding energy are also the effect of the compression or concentration of space. And all these different forces are merely harmonics of the single force provided by these products of the same basic ingredient of space.

I will mention that you can neither add nor subtract a single atom to or from Universe. Furthermore, you cannot influence its totality differently in any way. You may thrash about in your own little locality within it if you wish, but if you do, then your wanting to and doing so was previously (prior in space) caused by the combination of your experience and the influence of your genetic programming, so that it had to happen and was always prescribed and predestined within the completed Universe, irrespective of what you might intend or try. If it were possible to run the process of this Universe a million times, it would have no alternative other than to happen in exactly the same way, every time. Every particle is as it has to be at any point in space, and when it has to change, due to external influence or to the instability of its composition, then it changes to the state prescribed by its circumstance. It has no other option, and in that respect, Universe is perfect. (Yes, I know, a bus parked on your foot may give you a different impression, but that is the difference between 'perfect' and 'ideal'.)

Incidentally, we can also see that the acceleration of expanding space causes these galaxies here to recede at many times the speed of light from those galaxies remote from them over there. It is simply a matter of sufficient distance between them. If this fact offends scientific decorum in some sense that's unfortunate, but that's just the way it is and complaints should be taken up with Universe.

Is Universe alive? Well, like some of the foregoing, that question may be a little 'unscientific' and depend on terminology and so on, though is none the less real or pertinent for all that.

Here is a grain of sand. With some more of the same it can be made into a silicon chip which, in a computer, can 'think'. But is it alive? Between my ears I have half a pound of somewhat yucky greyish meat, with which I am able to process evidence from my view of the world and to 'think'. Am I alive? (One moment . . . Ye-es, at the moment, still slightly so.) But Universe contains not only all of us, together with all other thinking life-forms that undoubtedly exist, it also contains everything that exists in the Universe, all interconnected by attractive and repulsive energies and electro-magnetism . . . Does it think? It would be very surprising if awareness and perception did not exist in it, in ways and means of which we presently can have no conception.

So, is Universe alive? Is it aware of us? - I remember forty-odd years ago 'scientists' pontificating gravely that "The only thing of which we can be quite certain is that it is unconscious of us". - Oh?

What is Universe? - Well, what is a grain of sand? No, WHAT is it?

Isn't Universe simple? Just one ingredient, already complete . . . In fact, since it is, and has no other option, it is absolutely simple. Is that simple enough for you?

We might even ask why 'scientists' should want to make something so sublimely simple so incomprehensibly complicated - as if we didn't know.

No maths? - Sorry, no maths.