Weighing the universe

Context is bio-psychoactive. What you believe you’re doing when you sit down to meditate changes what happens in your body and your brain while you do it.

If that sounds like a stretch, start with the version everyone already accepts. The brain-mind can contribute to illness. Stress, fear and expectation show up in the body; we call it psychosomatic. If the brain-mind can contribute to pathogenesis, the origin of disease, it can contribute to salutogenesis, the origin of health. Right?

I saw this with my own students. We had been meditating on salutogenesis, the body’s own drive toward health and wholeness, as the object of attention. Some of them first talked through what a singularity is and how to imagine one. Their meditations afterward were significantly deeper. Nothing changed but the context.

So this is a context, and a big one. It asks for some mental heavy lifting. Buckle up. Bear down.

Part 1. Your body runs on 100 watts

For 13.8 billion years the universe has been doing one thing. Raw energy condensed into particles. Particles became hydrogen. Under gravity, hydrogen fused into helium, and stars forged carbon, oxygen and iron and blew them back out into space. Planets formed around new stars. Then a second big bang, the big bang of life: organisms with an inside and an outside, nervous systems, and eventually a human brain with more synaptic connections than there are stars in the known universe.

That brain runs on ordinary energy. Your body burns its fuel the way a fire burns wood, oxidizing food with oxygen from the air. On average you run at about 100 watts, the same as an old light bulb. In two minutes you use about 12,000 joules just to stay alive. That is your energy budget, and it is the same kind of energy that came out of the Big Bang.

Our best cosmology says all of it, every joule of matter and energy, came out of a beginning. Physics calls it the Big Bang. I call what it came from nothing: the vast, unbounded ocean of consciousness. Now two premises.

First: if the Big Bang produced all the energy and matter there is, then consciousness, the nothing it came from, held at least that much energy, that much creative power. Otherwise logic is for naught, and conservation of energy means nothing, even locally.

Second: Being held much more energy than all the energy that went into Becoming. Otherwise the physical universe would be all there is, and consciousness would have spent everything it had on making spacetime, energy and matter.

So Consciousness-Beingness used a fraction of its energy to form a single creative thought, and the Big Bang followed instantly. A portion of Being donated itself to evolutionary Becoming. Everything in the universe, including the body digesting these sentences, is running on some of that fraction. And it didn’t stop: matter and energy still arise from the vacuum of empty space. I suspect the void is where Being-Consciousness lives, but that is a topic for another time.

Part 2. Weighing the universe

How much energy is in your conscious attention? Here is how I would estimate it. Your attention holds at least as much energy as whatever is inside it. When you meditate, how far back do you stand? Just behind your eyes? Beyond your body? At the edge of the room, above the Earth, at the edge of the universe?

Physics says the total energy of anything at rest is set by its mass: E = mc². So let’s weigh what your attention can hold.

Your body. Convert an average 70-kilogram body entirely into energy and you get about 6.3 × 10¹⁸ joules. That’s about 520 trillion times the energy your body uses in two minutes to stay alive, and about 42,000 times the energy of both atomic bombs dropped in World War II. Your consciousness contains at least this much energy, right? If not, the laws of physics don’t make sense. Something came from the energy of consciousness.

The Earth. 6.0 × 10²⁴ kilograms. As pure energy, 5.4 × 10⁴¹ joules: 45 trillion-trillion-trillion times your two-minute budget. The energy in the Earth must be a small part of the energy of the one consciousness.

The Sun. 2.0 × 10³⁰ kilograms, or 15 million trillion-trillion-trillion times your two minutes.

The Milky Way. Every star you can see with your naked eye belongs to it, apart from a few smudges like the Andromeda galaxy. Count its hundreds of billions of stars and the dark matter that holds it together, about 3 × 10⁴² kilograms, and you get some 22 million trillion-trillion-trillion-trillion times your two minutes.

Everything. All the mass in the observable universe, including dark matter, is about 10⁵⁴ kilograms. As energy, roughly 9 × 10⁷⁰ joules. That is about 7 million trillion-trillion-trillion-trillion-trillion times the energy your body uses in two minutes. Wouldn’t you like to put that much energy into building a metacognitive brain-mind?

Now that we’ve weighed the physical universe: all of that energy came from somewhere, from beyond. And with awareness stretched to the edge of the physical universe, you can go further, into the subtle and the causal. The subtle must hold at least as much energy as the physical universe, and should hold much more. The causal must hold at least as much as the subtle, and should hold much more.

You can only be one with that of which you are aware.

The corollary is the practical part: you can only use the energy of consciousness that is inside what you are aware of. Your consciousness is one and the same with Consciousness itself. That energy is your birthright as a citizen of the universe. Why use only part of it? However far back you stood last time, can you stand further back next time?

Part 3. Compress the universe

What is a singularity? Here’s a sequence of thought experiments to give you the feel of one. It should feel like heavy lifting. Here is the original demonstration, with my voiceover.

Squeeze the mass of the Earth into a sphere the size of an apple. Pretty dense. Now the Sun into the same apple. Even more dense. Now the Milky Way, 250 billion suns and their planets. Incomprehensibly dense. Now the entire physical universe. Mind-meltingly dense, and we’re not there yet. Squeeze that apple down to the size of a seed. Then to the tip of a pin. Then to a single point, and let its diameter keep shrinking until it’s so hot and dense that all matter becomes energy. Then to zero.

You’ve just created, in your own mind, the conditions of the Big Bang in reverse. That’s a singularity.

If the numbers lost you, feel the feeling of it. That is the point. This isn’t a thesis, so significant figures don’t matter much here; physicists are famous for back-of-the-envelope estimates and for approximating cows as spheres. What matters is the context it gives you. Let it work. Context is bio-psychoactive.

In meditation, compress the entire field of consciousness into salutogenesis. Keep going past the point of exhaustion. Then go further.

A context this large produces what I call the salutogenic singularity. Like the Big Bang, it makes something from nothing: a source of self-organized conscious energy, freely available for growth and transformation. It fuels awakening to higher states of consciousness, vertical development, ecstatic joy, and enlightenment. That is why I have called the salutogenic singularity the single greatest discovery human beings have made so far.

The universe made something from nothing once, and it has been making something new ever since. That’s the context I still bring to the work at The New Human University: not how to get more out of the human being we already are, but what the universe is still making of us.

Good luck getting to sleep tonight.

Adapted from a three-part series I first published at The New Human University, November 30 to December 15, 2020. Read the originals: Part 1 ↗ · Part 2 ↗ · Part 3, with the original video ↗