The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity's Future

being in Nature evoked a feeling of belonging to something bigger, opening a pathway to a spiritual connection with the Cosmos that transcended the passage of time.

This is a revolution geared toward the spiritual reawakening of humanity, a denomination-free spirituality centered on the reconnection of each of us to the land and to all forms of life.

You know you are you and not the air you breathe or the food you eat. But you are also enmeshed with both and couldn’t be yourself without them being within you and outside of you.

I have organized this history into ages, which I call the Four Ages of Astrobiology.4 The Physical Age starts with the Big Bang and the synthesis of the first atomic nuclei and goes all the way to the formation of stars and planets. The Chemical Age moves on to the synthesis of heavier chemical elements and simple biomolecules, leading eventually t

The sense of communion with the divine, once horizontal and concrete, anchored to a spiritual connection to the natural world to which we and all living creatures belong, turned vertical and abstract, anchored instead to the supernatural notion of heavens above, the realm of God, detached from the human condition, from the hardships of a flesh-and-

(1) Inorganic chemistry → (2) Simple organic chemistry → (3) Biochemistry → (4) First life (protocells) → (5) Prokaryotic cells → (6) Eukaryotic cells → (7) Multicellular life → (8) Complex multicellular life → (9) Intelligent life.24

The Enlightenment, for all its great discoveries and creations, was also the age that amplified humanity’s moral failings, as it turned reason into a deadly weapon of environmental destruction.

the arms of gravity do extend outward and reach out to everything in the Cosmos, shaping the Universe itself.

But we can transform it morally, by respecting and honoring what we kill, by mindfully replenishing what we harvest.