Читать книгу Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos - James Mullaney - Страница 10

2

Life Elsewhere in the Universe

ARE WE ALONE?

One of the most hauntingly profound questions in all of science (as well as religion and philosophy) is whether or not we are alone in this vast universe. And as the noted physicist Lee DuBridge put it, “Either alternative is mind-boggling.” For if we are not alone—if we have sisters and brothers living on other worlds—it means there are other sentient beings “out there” with whom we may someday (or may already have, according to some) come into contact. But if we are alone—if we are the only living intelligent entities in all the cosmos—it brings with it both a realization of how unique and privileged we are and a deep responsibility to preserve that life as unbelievably precious. The writer Thomas Carlyle cynically summed up the issue of life on other worlds as follows: “A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.”!

But most of us who are absolutely convinced from the massive evidence of both science and basic logic that we cannot possibly be alone in the cosmos take a much more optimistic approach to this momentous subject. Here are just a few of the reasons for our conviction:

• There are more stars (other suns) within reach of our largest telescopes today than all the grains of sand on all the beaches and deserts on the entire planet Earth! Galaxies can host as many as a trillion stars. And there are an estimated 100 billion galaxies within the currently observable universe.

• We now know that most if not all stars have planets orbiting them. This is solidly based upon both theoretical and observational grounds.

• All the essential building blocks for life are scattered profusely throughout interstellar space and on countless other worlds. This includes vast amounts of water itself, which is found in the frozen, liquid, and vapor states—which, in the last instance, includes the outer atmospheres of relatively cool red-giant and supergiant stars as steam.

• We ourselves are literally made of stardust, for the elements in our bodies were fused inside of exploding stars eons ago. We are children of the stars!

• We seemed to have been genetically programmed to return to our source—to venture into that cosmos from which we sprang and join that galactic community of which we surely are a part. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer expressed it, “It’s a kind of homing impulse—we are drawn to where we came from.”

The beloved anthropologist and philosopher Loren Eiseley tells us in The Immense Journey that “So deep is the conviction that there must be life out there beyond the dark, one thinks that if they are more advanced than ourselves they may come across space at any moment, perhaps in our generation.” And in a similar vein, Sir Arthur Clarke’s classic science fiction short story The Sentinel (the basis for the famous movie 2001: A Space Odyssey) contains the following lines: “I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.” This remark refers to the fictional beacon set up by aliens that was triggered upon our reaching the Moon. But, in fact, the human race has long been inadvertently letting others know of our presence through radio and television broadcasts that leak out into space. (There has also been at least one enormously powerful message intentionally beamed to the stars from the huge 1,000-foot diameter radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.)

One of NASA’s former associate administrators, Wesley Huntress, has stated: “We used to think that life was fragile. But wherever liquid water and chemical energy are found, there is life. There is no exception. Life may be a cosmic imperative.” And it may well go far beyond this, for there’s a growing suspicion among many researchers that the universe itself is alive! As the radio astronomer Gerrit Verschuur expressed it, “We must think seriously about relocating the dividing line between living and non-living organisms. I no longer believe that it is at the edge of the body’s epidermis or at the edge of the atmosphere. It is at the edge of the Universe.”

In his superb fictional novel The Black Cloud, the late British cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle wrote one of the most brilliant and amazing accounts of such a possibility. As one of the very few works of science fiction that ever ended up actually being reviewed in the various astronomical periodicals, it’s so technically sound and convincingly written that many astronomers (including the author) believe Hoyle was attempting to share something he knew to be so sensational yet true through the safe medium of fiction. Many other famous names have also been thought to have done the same, including the late astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan in his novel and movie Contact, and Sir Arthur Clarke himself (particularly in his short story The Sentinel mentioned above).

But it’s not just scientists that suspect this. Visionaries and poets have also frequently hinted at such a profound possibility. Among them, Harry Elmore Hurd opened his haunting poem The Irreducible Minimum with the lines “Wonder of wonder, here am I, sentient to Earth and sea and star;” and concluded it by saying that we “… guess, although we cannot know, that Earth and stars and men are all one.” That was back in 1944. At the rapidly accelerating pace of modern astronomical, astro-physical, and astrobiological research, we may well know if this exciting concept is indeed true within our lifetimes. If proven to be so, the implications and ramifications for humanity will be utterly mind-blowing!

Cayce and Extraterrestrials

Given all of the above, what did Edgar Cayce himself have to say about life on other planets? While today’s popular terms “extraterrestrials,” “extraterrestrial life,” and “aliens” (this last in the context of other life forms) do not appear in any of the Cayce material, he did comment on this subject in several readings found under the search headings of “life in space,” “life on other worlds,” and “other worlds.” His negative response in two of these is often quoted when this topic comes up among ET skeptics. But as we’ll see, these must be taken in context. And in the others he does indeed indicate that there are other beings in the universe! (In fact, one reading contains a reference to other civilizations that’s nothing short of amazing for all of us who believe in or recognize Christ.) Here are the corresponding readings:

(Q) Are any of the planets, other than the earth, inhabited by human beings or animal life of any kind?

(A) No.

3744-4

(Q) Upon what planets other than the earth does human life exist?

(A) None as human life in the earth. This has just been given.

826-8

For, much might be given respecting those environs and as to how or why there have been and are accredited to the various planets certain characterizations that make for the attractions of souls’ sojourns in that environ. But these are places of abode. As in the earth we find the elements are peopled, as the earth has its own moon or satellites enjoined in its environ, so is it with the other planets. The earth with its three-fourths water, with its elements, is peopled; yes. So are the various activities in other solar systems.

541-1

The entity was among the priestesses of the Mayan experience. It was just before that period when those as from the east had come, and there were the beginnings of the unfoldments of the understanding that there were other portions of the same land, or those that were visiting from other worlds or planets. [GD’s note: Psychic experiences of prehistory? Space Ships, flying saucers?]

1616-1

(Bracketed remarks are often by the stenographer of the reading; in this case, Gladys Davis.)

Man may become, with the people of the universe, ruler of any of the various spheres through which the soul passes in its experiences.

281-16

It’s important to recognize in the first two readings that it is the planets of our own solar system that were being discussed. While those about other stars were speculated about in Cayce’s time, it’s only in the past two decades that they have been proven to actually exist and have become accepted as commonplace by the general public. So in these readings concerning life on other planets (as well as planetary sojourns), he was being asked about the familiar nine primary worlds of our own solar system. (Officially it’s now only eight since the demotion of poor Pluto to the status of a “dwarf planet” by the International Astronomical Union in 2006!) And modern research from both ground-based and orbiting telescopes, and especially from flybys of these worlds by spacecraft, certainly supports the fact that there are no others like us on the various planets of our solar system. There may well be aquatic life forms on the satellites of several of them that have ice-covered liquid water oceans, like Europa, or microbial life under the surface of Mars, or organisms floating in the atmospheres of one of the four gas giants, like Jupiter. But the Earth is the only body that can support humanoid life as we know it.

However, in the third reading, Edgar Cayce did speak about other solar systems as actual abodes of life—about their planets being “peopled”—and in the fourth reading he even talked about visits by beings from other worlds! The fifth reading actually refers to “people of the universe,” clearly implying that life exists throughout the cosmos. In these readings he was surely correct, for there is now very solid evidence that at least one planet in each solar system will lie within the so-called “zone of habitability” of its sun, where liquid water can exist and life-giving “solar” energy is plentiful. Had he been asked about the existence of physical beings on the planets orbiting some of our bright stellar neighbors—about their presence in the case of such well-known stars as Vega or Arcturus or Capella or Betelgeuse—his response might well have been most enlightening. But sadly, no one at that time thought to ask such a question!

A Cosmic Christ

So the Cayce readings on this subject (relatively limited in number as they are) do not rule out the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, but rather they accommodate and support the growing awareness that we are certainly not alone in this vast cosmos. And there’s still at least one other fascinating reading by Edgar Cayce that not only allows for the possibility that other worlds are populated—but strongly implies that they indeed are inhabited! We find this amazing statement: “Not the Christ, but His messenger, with the Christ from the beginning, and is to other worlds what the Christ is to this earth.” (262-71) The implication is that the Christ Spirit has enlightened many other civilizations throughout the long history of the universe. As the poet Alice Meynell so beautifully expressed it in these lines taken from her 1913 poem Christ in the Universe:

Nor, in our little day,

May His devices with the heavens be guessed

His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way

Or his bestowals there, be manifest.

But in the eternities,

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

A million alien gospels, in what guise

He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O be prepared my soul!

To read the inconceivable, to scan

The million forms of God those stars unroll

When, in our turn, we show to them a man.

In mentioning Christ, two well-known Bible verses have always seemed to the author as inferences about other planets and other beings. In John 10:16 we are told, “And other sheep I have which are not of this fold.” While generally taken to mean those outside of the faith, in a larger context Christ may well have been referring to those other worlds that His Father has created and populated. The other verse is “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” found in John 14:2. To my mind as an astronomer, “mansions” (sometimes translated as “rooms”) is a reference to other planets and “house” to the very universe itself!

Alternative Life Forms

When considering the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos as we have so far in this chapter, the assumption is usually made that it’s life in a physical form that’s being discussed. But as Sir Fred Hoyle suggested in his novel The Black Cloud, mentioned above, it may also be found in the form of beings without bodies—ones consisting of pure thought and energy. Interestingly, Edgar Cayce talked in a number of his readings about highly evolved “energy beings” consisting of individualized “thought forms” without physical bodies that came to our planet millions of years ago. Through a process known as “involution,” they pushed or infused their consciousness into the matter and primitive life forms existing on the Earth at that time. Here are a few of those readings pertaining to such entities:

… there came first those in the earth as thought forms that were able to partake of that about them; and so absorb them, much as we see in the lower forms of material manifestations in life, and moved by the spirit to become that they found or absorbed in their being.

5756-11

Hence as we find, when souls sought or found manifestation in materiality by the projection of themselves into matter—as became thought forms—and when this had so enticed the companions or souls of the Creator, first we had then the creation in which “God breathed into man (God-made) the breath of life and he became a living soul,” with the abilities to become godlike.