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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hayward, Brett, 1956–, author
Existence : science, spirituality, & the spaces between / Brett Hayward.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-926991-11-5 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1926991-37-5 (ebook)
1. Life. 2. Meaning (Philosophy). 3. Science. 4. Spirituality. I. Title.
BD431.H39 2013 128 C2013-905513-4

Editor: Kyle Hawke
Illustrations: Tiffany Fok
Cover Designer: Kyle Hawke
Indexer: Bookmark: Editing and Indexing
Photographs: Front Cover © 2014 Ade Barnett;
Vetruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1490, public domain

Granville Island Publishing Ltd.
212 – 1656 Duranleau St. Granville Island
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6H 3S4
604-688-0320 / 1-877-688-0320
info@granvilleislandpublishing.com
www.granvilleislandpublishing.com

First published in 2014

I dedicate this book to my children,
Anne Marie and Madelaine,
as a means of leaving a piece of myself behind.

Acknowledgements

The ideas for this book came out of my head, but without a good editor like Kyle Hawke it wouldn’t have blossomed into this final product. Thank you, Kyle, for the ongoing course in correct English and open-minded diplomacy to effectively communicate to as many readers as possible.

There were other unnamed reader-editors, who were very insightful and maintained encouragement, while allowing me to fine-tune the language; their input was crucial. Thanks to artist Tiffany Fok for nicely standardizing my scratchy illustrations into a confluent whole. It might be a bit strange to acknowledge a society from five thousand years ago, but it was my learning of the Tuatha de Danaan, who possibly built the monolithic tomb at New Grange, Ireland, that clearly and precisely started this book, so they need to be credited.

Finally, thanks to my wife Deborah who allowed me the time to seclude myself in the man-cave for hours at a time, and occasionally pointed me back at the book when I wandered off to other distractions.

Getting Started

You who read this are a unique collection of one hundred trillion cells, all agreeing to work together, to intensely specialize into about two hundred different kinds of cells, conglomerating into organs, each with their specific job, so that you can exist.

You were originally one cell, just like a bacterium or an amoeba, when your mother and father each contributed half your DNA. Although just one cell, you were made up of billions of atoms that bonded together into complex structures like proteins, fats and nucleotides. These atoms were created long ago in a star, of which the Sun is the remnant, where intense heat allowed nuclear fusion to combine smaller atoms into bigger ones.

The final proportions of your atoms, like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulphur and nitrogen, both now and when you were one cell, are approximately the same as those of the universe. As the saying goes, biology parallels geology — or to put it simply, life stepped out of the rocks. We take this for granted, mostly because we don’t know how it happened, partly due to that kind of inquiry always spiralling into a fathomless vortex of mystery that leaves us unsatisfied. Add to that the complication of spirituality and the worldwide variety of viewpoints of God, and the big conversation about life shuts down.

When you were one cell, you started your life on Earth totally dependent on your mother for sustenance. The fertilized egg divided into two, then four, eight, sixteen, etc., until a ball of cells was produced that rolled around in the nutrient-rich elixir of the uterine fluids, gathering nutrients by simple absorption — much like the method that many tiny species of organisms still employ. When you became a little too big for the surface-absorption method of staying alive, a few millimetres in diameter, you adapted by sending down roots in the form of blood vessels, which eventually became the placenta, a clever interface you made between your mother’s blood supply, with all its oxygen and nutrients, and your blood supply. Most mammals, from mice to elephants, do this but the interfaces differ.

As you developed from embryo to fetus, your body went through stages that many other vertebrates go through. The earlier the stage, the more difficult it was to tell the difference between you and a fish, a salamander, a frog, a chicken or a dog — an embryo looks like an embryo.

I don’t mind being compared to other species — it doesn’t diminish my divinity, it augments theirs.

Near the end of your time in the womb, you grew hair. You weren’t eating, so there were few feces, but your body had metabolism, so there were wastes from the kidneys, which emptied urine into the bladder. Your bladder connected to your navel, where the umbilicus took the urine to the placenta where your mother’s blood took it away. The imagination runs wild with anecdotes about how long mothers have to deal with their children’s waste.

So you grew and then you were born, and that was a freaky event. A grown woman, your mother, pushed out another complete living being into the world, an absolutely unique person, the likes of which has never been before and will never be again — even identical twins have different fingerprints.

Now, as you read this, you are located on a planet that is travelling 100,000 kilometres per hour in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, a smallish star about 1.4 million kilometres in diameter and 150 million kilometres away. We live on the Earth’s thin crust and breathe a thin atmosphere of oxygen. These celestial bodies, the Sun and the Earth, are on the edge of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which is spiralling around like a pinwheel, and it takes 250 million years to go all the way around. There are other galaxies that swirl around themselves as ours does and a whole bunch of them also rotate around some kind of centre point. Distances get mind-bogglingly big and are measured not in kilometres or miles but how far you would go in a year while travelling at the speed of light, 299,792 kilometres (or 186,000 miles) a second. Stars and planets are so big that the Earth becomes an unseen speck.

So here we are — you and I, each 100 trillion cells — riding the thin crust on a speck of a planet in an incredibly enormous universe. We don’t ponder it much because, like the musings of life itself, it makes us uncomfortable and gets us nowhere.

Some people ignore it all and just live and die, like the dinosaurs did for 150 million years. Some people look, through science, at how to unravel all the mysteries, to know and hopefully understand our place in it. Then there are some people who need to find meaning in life. I dip in and out of all three groups, but the last one is where I live: life has to have a purpose bigger than one that I imagine — something closer to a universal truth. This book is one viewpoint in that exploration. There is so much that I want to know, and so I’ve dared to ponder. The more I discovered, the more I realized how little I know, so there was often the exhilaration of discovery tempered by the humility of limitation.

This book honours the ancient Greek method of observation and contemplation as much as it uses repeatable evidence from science, but seeks to also include God. If we sincerely desire the truth of our universe, we have to have the courage to look everywhere, which would include spirituality. The ancient Greeks, from 600 to 300 BC, cracked our world wide open, but with the crumbling of the Roman Empire, Europeans mislaid most of the ancients’ discoveries. Their knowledge was preserved in the Arab world and reintroduced to the Europeans through the expansion of the Moorish empire into Spain and by the invitation to Arabs by Italian scholars. After more than a thousand years of somnolence and ignorance, the re-awakening of the exploratory mind began with translations of Greek knowledge from Arabic to Latin and Irish Gaelic.

Extinction or Choice?

Scientists believe that 98 percent of the species that have existed on Earth have gone extinct. The process by which extinction is avoided, if only temporarily, is adaptation. This term does not denote that the winner is the fastest, or smartest, or strongest, or richest, but simply the group that had the ability to adjust to the changing circumstances to survive and thrive. Evolution only describes the genetic changes that occur and the selection of the most adaptive beings, but many people have expanded it to include the origin of life — which, as we shall see later, is not correct and confuses the issue.

It is in our best interests to look at the past to see the trends and assess what has worked in order to project where our best path into the future lies. The tricky part is that we don’t know what the next catastrophe will be that tests our viability as a species.

Is humankind at the mercy of evolution or can we make choices that are apart from that process? It might very well be that, just as one generation has to die to make way for the next one, our species must move aside to make way for the next hominid. There isn’t much genetic variation between us people for a stressor to test our viability, so we are all in the same species boat and our social adaptability could be the single greatest variable to survival. Our current way of being has followed evolution in that all of the beauty and horror of humankind has arisen in a free-for-all way, with ‘survival of the fittest’ governing who comes out on top, from researchers to violinists to politicians to athletes to painters to generals, you name it.

The overseer of this whole process has often been force in some way, and the net result of all those individual forces is the world of us Homo sapiens, the most complex and world-changing species we know of. Still, our numbers and activities have expanded without limit and are headed for collapse so, if we as a species plan on surviving on this planet, we need to invent new ways of being. Denial runs heavy, as most of us believe that the great Homo sapiens will find new answers to huge problems and so we don’t need to do anything. This was the path that Neanderthals took and the last living member of that group, on the northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea about 25,000 years ago, might have had some advice for us.

What Is Our Species?

Homo sapiens by name, but with lots of other descriptors:

Human race

There are races of people amongst humans, and humans are a species amongst other species, but to call the species a race is confusing. Maybe it’s a pun on our busyness.

Human

It denotes us as hominids that are more than animals, Homo sapiens with thinking and feeling.

Human beings

This looks like another layer of appreciation on top of ‘human’, which adds pomp and ceremony, like when spoken from the pulpit or lectern. Are there horse beings and fish beings?

Man

Over the past 200,000 years there have been some 85 billion Homo sapiens who have walked the Earth, and half of them were female, but women only got to vote in the last 100 years, so it’s obvious how the whole species has been denoted as ‘Man’. The species of horse isn’t called Stallion, nor pigs Boar, nor chickens Cock. Wait a minute. No, forget it. ‘Man’ is a species term that can be retired.

Mankind

Based on the evidence of the horrors we’ve done to each other, to other living creatures and to the planet, this is clearly an oxymoron that contains more hope than fact.

People

This is a warmer term that elevates the species into personable individuals, rather like referring to us as men and women, instead of the more categorically correct male and female, which appears on hospital washroom doors and on insect identifier pins.

Humankind

This is a more workable expression that denotes perhaps if we’re more human we’ll be kinder, and that our kind of hominid is human.

So, Homo sapiens is the species, made more personable by the term ‘human’, and when grouped together referred to as ‘people’, and to include every kind of people, we are ‘humankind’. Tidy. As Homo neanderthalis earned the nickname ‘Neanderthal’, we can get personal with our species by adopting the nickname ‘Sapiens’ — which means ‘wise’, by the way.

The Storyline

In the process of inquiring into how life works in order to prophesy which road we should take in the near future (or if we have no choice, just to understand how we came to be on the road to our destiny), it was necessary to roll time backwards, unravelling sequences back to their beginnings to understand how things built up. Back to the Big Bang and the very beginning of the material world, back to the Little Bang, DNA, the start of life and back to the Big Event, where Sapiens attained consciousness.

While there have been many crucial turning points, both before and after this Big Event, it was consciousness coming into being that defines who we are as a species — the becoming aware of time and space, of mortality and God. It is the hallmark of our leaving the animal world. It must have happened to one person in an instant and spread from that moment. From afar in time, the event could look succinct, but the closer we look, the more likely there were really several smaller events. The elegant poetry of a single event would not be lost entirely by its splitting into smaller divisions, because the process would still start with a single moment in an individual person who became aware, for the first time on Earth, of existence. For the first time ever, since the rocks washed into a slurry that produced life, life started looking back and wondering how and why.

This inquiry into existence includes spirituality and God, while touching upon some of the scientific disciplines such as biology, astronomy, chemistry and physics. Many people see spirituality and science as totally opposite but — in actuality — it’s sometimes difficult to separate them, because, as we will see later with matter and energy, one without the other may be meaningless.

Acknowledgements

Contents

1

Getting Started