The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World By Gary Lachman

Hear it Here – https://adbl.co/2VeLp7r

An important and radical book that asks, “Why are we here?”

Why are we here? Human beings have asked themselves this question for centuries. Modern science largely argues that human beings are chance products of a purposeless universe, but other traditions believe humanity has an essential role and responsibility in creation.

According to Luria, in order to create our world – the universe – God had to ‘withdraw’ or ‘contract’ a part of his infinite being, to create, as it were, a ‘hole’ in himself within which a void or empty space could exist.
Lovecraft called his philosophy ‘cosmicism’, by which he basically meant that if we truly grasped the size, age, and sheer strangeness of the universe – an idea of which I tried to present earlier in this chapter – we would recognize that human life can play no important part in it, and that we are only temporary residents on a planet whose previous occupants are planning to return.27 Possibly the earliest proponent of ‘cosmicism’, although he didn’t use the term, was H.G.
Wells (1866-1946), whose novel The War of the Worlds (1898) tells us that our world was ‘being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s’ – the Martians – ‘and yet as mortal as his own…minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic…’28 When Lovecraft wrote ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, no one had yet thought of a Big Bang – the astronomer Fred Hoyle, an opponent of the idea, coined the phrase in 1949 – although Einstein’s relativity was seeping into popular consciousness and quantum theory was raising its head.
It may seem aberrant to fly in the face of such universal celebration, but as far as I can tell from reading Gray’s books, he is basically a misanthropic pessimist, whose pro-nature and pro-animal remarks express little more than an emotional dislike for human beings.

In Straw Dogs Gray remarks that from ‘Gaia’s’, or the earth’s, point of view ‘human life has no more meaning than the life of a slime mould’.31 When I wrote an article about Gray’s idea some years ago, I pointed out that a similar assessment of human importance was championed by Charles Manson, currently serving a life sentence for the murders of Sharon Tate and Rosemary and Leno LaBianca in 1969.32 Of the many pseudo- philosophical remarks Manson made and which were taken seriously by otherwise intelligent people, one was that a scorpion’s life was more important than a human’s.33 While in prison, Manson had time to reflect on this insight, and to elaborate on its application.

In 1957, Julian Huxley (1887-1975), brother of Aldous Huxley, and one of the most important biologists of the twentieth century, said that the universe was ‘becoming conscious of itself…in a few of us human beings’, and that we had been appointed ‘managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution…’ He made these remarks in an essay entitled ‘Transhumanism’, in which he expressed his belief that ‘the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself.’ For Huxley this meant ‘man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature’, a sentiment with which I, and this book, are in accord – although Huxley’s term ‘transhumanism’ has been adopted by proponents of a ‘man-machine merger’ with which I am not in sympathy.44 Huxley even spoke of ‘the cosmic office’ to which we find ourselves ‘appointed’, a phrase with obvious similarity to the idea of ourselves being cosmic caretakers.

‘Darwin never fully accepted the implications of his own theory’ – an example of Gray being more royal than the king, of his ‘cosmic toughness’, and a reference to Darwin’s concerns about the human consequences of his ‘dangerous idea’.46 Alfred Wallace, who arrived at the theory of evolution independently but at the same time as Darwin – and who was also one of the first proponents of an ‘anthropic cosmological principle’ – was ‘highly credulous’, because he ‘concluded that the human mind could not have developed simply as a result of evolution.’ Wallace believed in a ‘non-human intelligence’ and a ‘spiritual world’ – he was interested in spiritualism and psychic phenomena – and so must of course not have had the nerve to accept the truth.47 (Freud, for his part, could never ‘cure himself of his fascination with telepathy’.

Lachman brings together many strands of esoteric, spiritual, and philosophical thought to form a counter-argument to the nihilism that permeates the twenty-first century. Offering a radical alternative to postmodern apathy, he argues that we humans are the caretakers of the universe, entrusted with a daunting task: that of healing and repairing creation itself.

Keep the words flowing by buying me a coffee.

Categories: Voice over Work