The Infinite Supply Co

The Infinite Supply Co.

A bean, planted in the ground, sits still, and what it needs is given to it. Without “planning” to, it gives itself over to a succession of roots, leaves, blossoms and fruitful pods. Itself passively transformed by energy, it is thereby an instrument of energy; this energy is intelligence: and this intelligence is the cause of life and the cause of death. Intelligence trans-forms. Chuang tzu: “The destruction of life does not mean death; nor the prolongation of life an addition to the ‘duration’ of one’s existence.”

Every particle, however minuscule (and every wave, however insignificant) knows precisely what to do, at every instant and point in time or space. There is a word for this: omniscience. If all particles are infinitely intelligent, and every thing is composed of particles, then all things are intelligent (or, intelligence is all things). And it would not be proper to say that this is intelligence operating “within” Intelligence: there is but one intelligence. Intelligence is not separate from a single molecule; and this intelligence is undivided from each and every other molecule. No molecule is more the cause or the effect of this intelligence. We seem conditioned to conceive of order only from without, not order from within—spontaneous, “unordered” order, the order of bubbles in sea foam. We cannot compose an equation which embodies chaos and intelligence and order. We cannot envision something that autonomously originates without preference and automatically perpetuates

without choice. The profound (and singular) miracle is the miracle of auto genesis. Astrophysicist Paul Davies affirms of the Big Bang, “the initial singularity is truly an effect without a prior cause; for there is no pre-existing space or time—or anything physical at all—to contain this ‘cause’.” Stuart Atkinson, an astronomer, says succinctly of the Big Bang, “if everything that exists came from it, then nothing could have existed before it.”

This would seem to be obvious. Not until -1043 seconds after moment zero was the substance (which expanded to produce the cosmos) even as large as an atom’s nucleus. (Or, as Atkinson describes it):

“In the first fraction of a fraction of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, our universe was compressed into a tiny sphere smaller than the point of a needle.”

Clearly, given this density of mass, no “space” was yet available. And, since time is essentially a descriptive concept for measuring distance, there would have been no “things” in relationship which could be calibrated by time. Even though scientists speak, for convenience, of the relative time of the explosive event, neither time nor space (nor gravity) could have had any possible reality at all until Atkinson’s so-called “tiny sphere” had eventually ripped itself asunder. On an astronomical level, it seems to be similar to a proton emitting a “virtual” pion, “spontaneously out of the void,” as Fritjof Capra says, “formed out of nothing.”