Hi. I think itâs time to take a break from writing to people all over the world and write the two most important people in my world. Hereâs what Iâve been working with. Let me see if I can pass it on to you.

Laura, youâve read science books all your life, since you were four. Especially, you like books about the way things work, everything from machines to the solar system, from magic tricks to metal craft.

Natalie, youâve been just as interested in the world, but you interact differently. For you, the important part of books was the pictures. And the world you want to be part of is the world of relationships. You sing to the world, it sings back--the songs of the land and the animals as much as songs of people.

When you girls were little, we, your parents, tried to give you the keys to the world. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The alphabet. Jobs to do and family to play with. Prayers before meals. Church on Sunday. Piano every day.

Dad taught you to add. "How many fingers on this hand?" "How many on this one?" "How many all together?" Did you know what a huge step you took when you learned to answer him without pointing with your fingers? When you learned to add with just your eyes?

The world gave us patterns, and we made choices as we passed them on to you. We tried to make sure you had as many of the best keys as possible. When you were little, it didnât matter that all the pieces didnât fit together. Adam and Eve held their own with Mr. Rogers, Star Wars and Sesame Street. The lore of the stars and planets was gotten from Twinkle, Twinkle or Gustav Holst, the Star of Bethlehem or Carl Sagan. What mattered then was the richness of experience in the things you got to do.

But now youâre young women, and itâs time to make connections.

Youâve noticed that not all the pieces fit together, and it makes you think they are not true. It might seem as if some of them are lies.

Theyâre not.

They are telescopes. They are all telescopes that have been crafted, aimed and focused, to show how the universe works and where we are going. What you see depends on where you stand, and how hard you look--maybe how hard you listen.

When anyone looks through a telescope to the heavens, that person is taking a trip through vast distances, and vast stretches of time. The light of the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, has traveled over 4 years to get to our eyes. To look at the most distant objects in the universe is to see the universe as it existed billions of years ago. (National Geographic, 1981)

And, in case you havenât thought about it, a telescope is always looking away from the familiar, away from yourself, perhaps even away from all life. This is worth noticing, for it is one of the questions asked by adults who think. "What is more real, the reality of gravity and atomic particles, or the reality of life and thought, of ideas and art?"

For thousands of years, people have asked, "Who are we?" and "What are we doing on this Earth?" For a long time, they answered the question with religion. Within the last few hundred years, the answers, for many of us, have come from science. Scientists have learned, a little at a time, to look deeply into the distant sky to find out how matter behaves, especially matter that is not disturbed by life. In a way, this is like looking back in time, for in our local world, matter behaves differently as it is used in all the ways we and other living things have come to use it. Here, matter moves against gravity, it goes against the flow of entropy, it combines and recombines in ways that had not been invented until recent times.

Besides looking at far-away matter, science looks also at the very small--the inner reactions of tiny particles within matter, the tiny relationships that are usually part of a whole, but which, if we can separate them with our minds and our tools, can yield surprising power or possibility for change. In a way, this too is a visit to the past, for in exploring structures that are basic building blocks of matter and biology, we are exploring fossil remains of ancient systems.

One of the main reasons for this kind of study is to gain power over the environment, and the other is to possibly understand ourselves, for if we are made of these tiny, unyielding material relationships, it seems they must hold the key to our future. Any being, if it becomes aware of these basic functions, might be able to redirect them. Awareness of these processes allows the tweaking of processes from the past in some way that is valued by the present.

Do you remember when you were little, and we talked about how we were all made of star-stuff? Carl Sagan told us that on TV, wearing his yellow coat, and talking about "billions and billions" of stars and galaxies. He explained that every atom on the earth, including the ones that make up our bodies, came from some exploded star. Your sister Amy always thought that was pretty magical.

Hereâs how it probably happened: Some five billion years ago, something like a billion trillion trillion trillion trillion hydrogen atoms must have been somehow affected by heat, rotation and/or magnetism to trigger the beginning of gravitational attraction between the group, becoming a cloud that began to pull together and collapse. As the distance between the atoms diminished, collisions became more frequent than before. Friction produced heat. Once this process started, there was nothing to stop it. It was slow, but inexorable, and eventually the cloud worked its way to the opposite extreme÷high density and extreme heat. After such a cloud (or part of it) heats up to about 10 million degrees Celsius, nuclear burning begins. This is a fusion process whereby individual hydrogen nuclei have so much energy and are moving so fast that their mutual collisions can fuse their particles into a helium nucleus. The energy released by this process is light and heat. This particular huge cloud, as it found some kind of balance between the attraction of gravity and the emission of radiation from nuclear burning, might have spun and flattened out somewhat. Eddies in the outer edges of this swirl could have cooled and solidified into planets, including our earth. (Chaisson, 1979)

So, our beginnings, and the beginnings of our solar system came from the endings of other stars. But where did those stars come from? (Is this the same question as "Who made God?"?)

Nobody really knows. Many people have spent their lives observing the heavens, studying all the galaxies near and far, counting events, sorting them and measuring them. They look at certain reactions and try to figure out how they work together. If they are scientists, they are not looking at "why," but "how."

From those observations, people try to figure out how everything came about. Just as there are many creation stories, Adam and Eve or the Spider Woman, there are different models of scientific thought as well.

Perhaps the universe always existed in its present state. The Steady State theory has been advanced to simulate this situation. For it to hold true, since galaxies are definitely moving apart, new matter must be being created to replace those galaxies that recede into the infinite distance. No evidence has been found, though, of the new matter being created.

Other ideas about the creation of the universe are more common. The Big Bang is the creation story in your science books. This story starts about 20 billion years ago, truly the beginning of time. It is commonly thought that at this point, the "universe" didnât exist. There was practically nothing. Not even empty space. All the matter and space in the universe was originally condensed into a small, extremely dense speck, sometimes described as the size of a head of a pin. This speck exploded, sending out particles that eventually cooled and condensed into galaxies, stars and planets, which are still rushing away from the original point of origin.

However it began, the rushing apart seems to fit scientific observations. The next question to be asked is to the question of whether the universe will continue to expand until all matter has distributed itself in such a way that no particles are able to interact with any others. Gravity, however, seems to want to work counter to the expansion process. Mathematicians and other scientists are working with the known measurable effects of gravity to determine whether or not the matter in the universe will eventually lose its outward momentum and begin to collapse toward the origin again. In this model, the universe could then repeat the cycle, continual expansion and contraction. Our universe could be just one phase of a continuing series.

A recent article in Science magazine described a study of the way light is bent by gravity near star clusters (called "lensing"), used computer simulation of density of matter, compared the results to those observed. Their results suggest a low-density, universe that will expand indefinitely. (Watson, 1997)

At any rate, even science doesnât give us just one creation story, but several, and people research and study and develop the stories that interest them and give the most valuable knowledge of what to do next.

Maybe youâve chosen the "beginning of the universe" idea that seems most likely to fit your knowledge and your experience. Most people do. But itâs useful to remember that the shape of our expectations has a big effect on the questions we ask and the answers we develop.

Look what philosopher Henri Bergson says about how our outlook makes us consider certain possibilities and not others.

Bergson gives us the concept that differences in development at the very beginnings of evolution would form types of matter that are entirely different. He says, "That new things can join things already existing is absurd." A truly new substance would most likely not resemble anything we could recognize. Therefore, the creation of new could be happening all the time.

Different universes could exist, different "bubbles," each in its own process of expansion and contraction. (This story is proposed by a young man named Gott from Wagner High School, who studied at Speed school and went on to become a nationally-prominent theoretician.) In a way, though, they couldnât be like bubbles. Bubbles have rules that they follow about their own and other bubblesâ space. When bubbles meet, they stick together and form different shapes because of the interactions. These bubble universes, though, wouldnât interact or overlap in any material way, (although Gott may have thought the effects of gravity between them would still exist) (Dillon, 1998).

This whole concept seems pretty weird, but we do know that different types of matter can be invisible to other types. Think about radio waves. They exist in nature, but, without a receiver, people arenât aware of them at all. Now that they have been used to transmit radio broadcasts, we are actually swimming in a sea of radio transmissions, yet they pass around us and even through us, and we donât know it at all÷NPR and country music all mixed together. In a comparable way, the bubble universes could actually all be occupying the same "space," except that even space is something that belongs to our universe. These bubble universes are separated, but not by space. They would be separated by inability to interact. And ability to interact seems to be the fundamental quality of existence at any level, from simple to complex.

Hereâs yet another idea that has been suggested for the creation of the events of the universe. This idea is a young one, one that is associated with the Copenhagen Theory of quantum physics. If Iâm explaining it right, the idea is that observation creates the universe out of which we come. Quantum physics seems to say that on the subatomic level, matter is not a kind of thing, but a tendency to exist or an event with a tendency to occur. Somehow, it is the event of observation that makes the difference between a particleâs existence being potential or actual.

This paradoxical concept is sometimes illustrated by the analogy of Schrodingerâs Cat. E. Schrodinger, who worked with Neils Bohr and Max Planck, suggested the ridiculous idea of penning a cat inside a steel box, setting up a gizmo so that the cat would be poisoned IF an atom of a radioactive material decayed and triggered the release of poison gas. The point of the story is that if the cat was left in the box for an hour, at the end of the hour, the box would be opened, the cat observed to be dead or alive. Before that time, however, the cat is neither one nor the other (neither dead nor alive). The catâs existence would be a mathematical probability÷"The Psi function for the entire system would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression ) mixed or smeared out in equal parts." (Schrodinger, 1935)

This is one of those ideas that seem as if it surely must be just an analogy, but the comments I have read seem to point to the fact that Neils Bohr felt that actual conscious observation was the event that triggered the actuality of the collapse of a wave function (probability) into some actuality.

I donât pretend to understand this, and it doesnât seem possible that human observation of matter could have been a fundamental aspect of the actuality of subatomic events, but there is an aspect in which observation could be said to be a fundamental aspect of the creation of matter and the universe. Think about what I said earlier about observation and interaction.

Iâm going to show you some ideas from my two favorite philosophers, Robert Pirsig, and Henri Bergson. These two men, from very different backgrounds, tell an exciting and positive story of the universe and our place in it.

Henri Bergson says this:

For a person to observe a cat, the person must have processes that match the observed event. The person and the cat are contained in one interacting system. Light rays have to bounce off the cat and be received and interpreted by the human brain, and patterns of the significance of cats must also be part of the personâs memory.

It seems to me that the fact of the catâs life or death is very much a factor of observation. This observation can happen at any level, and in the case of the cat, it seems that the observation happens at more than one. For the box to confine the cat, there must be an interaction of physical substance, inorganic patterns that tend to keep their own shape and repel "other" substances. This requires sophisticated observation between atoms and molecules. The molecules that make up the cat must be aware of the molecules that make up the box. For the poison to kill the cat, a more sophisticated type of observation takes place, as the substance of the poison must observe and get past the catâs biological defenses.

So it seems to me that events of observation actually do determine the outcome, but maybe not human observation.

Now that Iâve said that, I want to switch to a different telescope and notice that intellectual observation does in fact have a fundamental, perhaps the most significant role in the life and death of that poor cat. It is that event of a human deciding to explore a concept and choosing a cat in a box as a way to do it that is the ultimate factor in the catâs life or death. This is an intellectual event taking an inorganic system (the walls of the box) to contain a biological event (poisonâs effect on a cat) to use for its own needs. The whole process of explaining an idea to another, setting up a system in which one person can observe, interact and understand is social function in the service of the intellect.

This system of a chain of discrete but dependent events is the connection between the basic matter of the universe and the mysteries of the mind.

Letâs consider looking at Bergsonâs and Pirsigâs telescopes through the telescope of Stephen Hawkins, who revived an old idea, the anthropic principle. According to Hawkins, any meaningful cosmological model must be able to account for the appearance of life. He separates theories of creation into three types÷WAP, SAP and PAP.

Creation stories containing a Weak Anthropic Principle(WAP)say that "conditions and laws were such as to produce us humans."

Creation stories built with a Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP) say that "conditions and laws had to be such to produce us humans."

Creation stories built on a Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP) say that "observation creates the universe."

It seems interesting to me that, together, the work of Pirsig and Bergson, makes up a creation story that satisfies all three criteria.

Weak Anthropic Principle. Physical conditions and laws happened by chance to produce us. Taken to mean that chance atomic reactions form people, this would be false. But when the action of chance/choice/awareness is seen as the crux of all evolution, it is true. Whatever has evolved, including "us" is the result of chance.

Strong Anthropic Principle. Conditions and laws had to be such to produce us humans. We were ineveitable. Taken in a narrow view that humans were formed in the physical image of God, and therefore everything exists to produce us humans, as we are today, the pinnacle of creation, seems absurd. But if taken to mean that the entire universe, every action, is a movement toward greatest awareness, interaction and choice, and that (right now) humanity is the highest clearly-defined embodiment of the highest defined awareness (intellect), then this is true. They speak of a strong force (elan vital or Dynamic Quality) that is the action of the universe.

Participatory Anthropic Principle. Observation creates the universe. Schrodingerâs cat being dead only after being observed by a human is silly. But the concept that observation equals interaction, and IS the formation of reality, that matter is memory of past observation, becomes the most powerfully true of them all.

Bergson said, "Matter is the deposit of life, the static residues of actions done, choices made in the past." (Bergson, 1911)

Pirsig explained it this way:

• totally invisible to the existing static patterns, and therefore a possible seed of a bubble universe, but not part of this one or
• weak compared to the existing static patterns, therefore unable to maintain its own shape against them

If the intelligence of our universe needs, someday, to penetrate the barrier of the most basic physical laws to tweak them, insert a bit of novelty in order to tap into an entirely different reality, it seems possible that it has the potential to do just that.

It is intellectual awareness that is most powerful awareness of our local universe.

Jonas Salk, (who developed the polio vaccine) thinks that biological evolution is being superceded, and that the next great step, "meta-biological evolution" is not due to bigger brains, but to the mass of information that is being accumulated. (Salk, 1983)

Teilhard de Chardin, (a Catholic priest who spent most of his life "exiled" to China because his ideas were too new) looks the point of highest perception, highest awareness, and to him, this is not a separation from God, but the point in which God exists in His fullest.

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star is a telescope to an image of permanence and value in concepts of the universe. Its partner rhyme, Row, row, row your boat points to exactly the opposite. "Life is but a dream." In this view, the universe exists only in the mind, is created by observation.

Somewhere, somehow, all these telescopes aim toward one center, one reality which being described in so many ways.

So, Bergson and Pirsig leave us two ways to participate in the evolution of the universe:

One is to travel to the high country of the mind, to let yourself be a vessel for ideas to mix and interact and be evaluated. From that point you can touch the new Dynamic Quality, the tiny but powerful spark that can carry evolution forward. If you can help bring that spark to intellect, it immediately effects the entire world, the entire universe, past, present and future.

Or you can be part of the maintenance of relationships. It is good relationships that allow the high evolution to happen. It is the formation and maintenance of new good relationships that allow new evolution to exist and continue. It is the evaluation and reconnecting of the existing world in such a way that all participants, at all levels, can still participate, at their highest awareness, in their own choice of good.

Perhaps, you can do both.

Laura, you wrote, "We are hurting ourselves by compulsive actions that seem immediately beneficial, but are harmful in the long run." Perhaps you are a person who will be able to bring better patterns of choice and creation to people who are trapped in those compulsive behaviors.

Natalie, since you have figured out that the relationships between animals and people are important and powerful, perhaps you can help understanding between them grow and create something new and wonderful.

I think you can.

Love,

Mom

Bergson, H (1911) Creative Evolution, Trans. Mitchell, A., New York: The Modern Library

Carter, Thomas, Director (1997) Swing Kids video. Hollywood Pictures:

Chaisson, E.J. (March 1979) Cosmic Evolution : A Synthesis of Matter and Life, Zygon, Journal of Religion and Science, 14,1

Dillon, J.A. (1998) Systems Theory, Louisville: Spalding University

Leeming, D,A. (1990) The World of Myth Oxford, Oxford University Press

Merton, T. (1979) Love and Living San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

National Geographic Society (1981) National Geographic Atlas of the World, Fifth Edition, Washington, DC .

Pirsig, R.M. (1991) Lila; an Inquiry into Morals. New York: Bantam Books.

Sagan, Carl (1980) Cosmos. New York: Random House

Salk, J. (1983) Anatomy of Reality,

Schrodinger, E. (1935), Die gegenwartige Situation in der Quantenmechanik, Naturwissenschaftern. 23 English translation: John D. Trimmer, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 124, 323-38 (1980), Reprinted in Quantum Theory and Measurement, (1983).

Watson, A. (1997) Clusters Point to Never-Ending Universe Science, 278