
Design by Mills
YEARS UPON YEARS UPON years passed -- more than can be counted by centuries, millennia, or even epochs -- years upon millions of years, as the universe continued its vast, formidable expansion across endless distances measurable only in terms of light-years and more light-years upon them -- hundreds of thousands upon millions of years, as energy and dust and gas and matter coalesced and condensed to form stars and these stars in turn aggregated into clusters which in turn again gathered to form rotating galaxies, themselves but a minute part of the endless vacuity and distance that the aged span of the universe covers -- billions of years passed before, amidst all the revolving, colliding complexity of the heavens, a new phenomenon occurred which was to prove so utterly unlike any that had come before: consciousness.
Life, no small feat itself, had already long before begun to order and circulate on the minute point of spacetime held by a small planet which stood third in line from a medium-size star around which eight other planets revolved, and the entire system together was itself but merely a small point on the inner periphery of a larger spiral-shaped galaxy some 100,000 light-years across in diameter, one galaxy among about a million million others.
Yet on this small planet up through the depths of the ancient past, out of the chaotic interplay of its unstable atmosphere and topography, life emerged: simple at first -- yet impressive all the same in contrast to the indifferent universe surrounding it.
Gradually, however, after two to three billion years, simplicity gave way to successive generations of ever more complex organisms with more and more complicated behavior patterns to the web of life emerging on this small planet whose own birth was overshadowed by the universe's by some ten billion years or so.
With organismic complexity become norm, one species after the other soon followed, many rising and falling over periods of hundreds of thousands of millennia from the dawn of the Paleozoic era some 570 million years ago to the present--fish, amphibians, reptiles, then mammals--all issuing forth in periods of time that would prove to be but mere flashes in the scheme of the larger cosmos. For nearly four billion years, yet particularly within the last 350 million years, life continued its wondrous pageant of growth and diversification in contra-distinction to the inorganic stellar systems looming above.
Then a curious new species appeared sometime very late in the present Cenozoic era that began about 65 million years ago: little in stature compared to the dinosaurs preceding it; erect and up-right in contrast to quadrupedal mammals; naked and nearly hairless in comparison to the thick-scaled or -haired animals which shared its environment; but most importantly, possessing a central nervous system far more advanced and developed than any other species ever to appear on the face of the planet. And with them and their ambiguous origins came the capacity to know -- to have consciousness -- and the ability to share knowing via language.
Consciousness. Con-scious-ness. Con- (with) scious- (know) -ness (a state of being)--to exist with or in a state of knowing. This was to be the realm of mankind, which includes the knowing that one knows, and the appearance of consciousness and language were to usher in a new era for (if not region within) the universe, both arising in a time period that was nothing less than abrupt when considered in the history of the larger universe's time frame, for as far as we know, neither has occurred before.
Yet along with their sudden appearance, both consciousness and language as processes and interactions were far to exceed the complexity of all other interactions to exist before, to be a step, if not a leap, beyond even the long past extra-ordinary origin of life. For both transcend mere biology, while all the same remaining indebted to it; that is, to a point, as we shall explore. Indeed, "time" itself, as that which this brief portrait attempts to re-present, can be said to have been born solely of language, and to be at once both external and internal to human consciousness-
--From the manuscript "Worldviews in Revolution"
Go to manuscript "Preface"