PLEXURE: "The ability to see knowledge as through different lenses, that is, through different epistemological systems, to enter and hold different worldviews." [David Zindell, The Broken God]

Evolution

The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods.

What's beautiful is that a creator can be astonished by his own creations.

The true human being is the meaning of the universe. He is a dancing star. He is the exploding singularity with infinite possibilities.

For us humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.
Emil Sinclair

He spoke of human beings, of their freedom to grow into godhood, or to remain gloriously human, to become human for the first time.

Always, man had felt the urge to discover the true image of humanity, the shape and substance of what man might someday become. This is the secret of life, of human life, the true secret that men and women have sought as far back as the howling moonlit savannas of Afarique on Old Earth.

Information could be coded into signals and sent anywhere, given enough energy. Sent everywhere, this interflow of information. We could speak with the nebular brains of the galaxy. We could extend the galaxy's information ecology. We - every human being, Fravashi, oyster, sentient bacterium, virus, or seal - we could drive our collective consciousness across the two million lightyears of the intergalactic void to the information ecologies of the nearer galaxies, Andromeda and Maffei and the first Leo - all the galaxies of the local group were alive with intelligence and vibrated with thoughts of organisms as ourselves. Someday the time would come to interface with the ecologies of other groups of galaxies. Within ten million light-years off the local supergalactic plane of the local supercluster of galaxies were many groups of galaxies. Canes Venatici, the Pavo-Indus and the Ursa galaxies - these burning, brilliant clouds of intelligence and others enveloped our own small galaxy in a sphere of light four hundred million light-years in diameter. To speak with such distant galaxies would require the energy of a supernova, perhaps many tens of thousands of supernovas.

Each of us - gods, men or worms in the belly of a bird, in our every thought, feeling or action no matter how trivial or base - we create this strange universe in which we live. We create God. At the end of time, when the universe has awakened to itself, the past will be remembranced, and everything and everyone who has suffered the pain of life will be redeemed. This is my hope; this is my dream; this is my design.

And so at last he stood before the universe naked in his soul and saw it as it really was. He saw that if consciousness was just the flow of matter within his brain (or the vibrations of atoms within a rock), then the consciousness of the universe was just the flow of everything: rocks and photons and starfire and blood. And everywhere - in the great Grus Cluster of galaxies no less a cathedral on a small, ice-bound planet - this flow grew ever more complex.

This infinite organism that was the universe, in all its infinite patience and curiosity, brought forth endless new planets and peoples and stars blazing with infinite possibilities.

The way for humankind is not back after all. There is no return to simplicity this way. No true halla. I used to think of halla as a kind of perfect harmony of flowers and sunlight and good clean life and death out on the sparkling snow. A perfect balance that life might somdeay achieve - without war, without disease, without madness, without asteroids and wild stars that can annihilate ten thousand species of animals almost overnight. But no. The universe is not made this way. True halla is the vastening of life. The deepening into new forms and possibilities that we call evolution.

Source: www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultu...zindell.html