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

Massive volcanic eruptions, dramatic tectonic plate drift and continent formation, and devastating asteroid and cometary collisions are among the causes of the known five global extinction events that occurred during the past 440 million years. We are now witnessing a sixth wave of extinction, known as the Holocene extinction or, to many people, th

Life is matter with purpose, with an urge to exist.

In a post-Copernican worldview, science embraces meaning to reorient our collective future.

Given the level of our inaction and inability to change, it should be clear that scare tactics are not working. They don’t work because the effects of climate change are gradual and spread out, and they fluctuate because of the complexity of how geophysical systems couple with the biosphere. They don’t work because change requires sacrifice at diff

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

The most accepted view, suggested by biologist Lynn Margulis, is that eukaryotes developed from symbiotic alliances between prokaryotes.

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.

What had up to then been a rigid duality of the known and the unknowable when describing the natural world cracked open to give rise to a third possibility: the unknown, encompassing that which could be probed and understood through rational discourse, expanding the realm of the possible.

MORE: more awareness of the life around us, big and small; more gratitude for the planet that allows us to be alive and flourish; more kindness to all forms of

how a finite and spherical Universe filled with mutually attracting chunks of matter would not collapse into a huge blob at its center. In other words, to what could we attribute the stability of the Universe as a whole? Newton then introduced a revolutionary idea. The Universe, he claimed, must be infinite. Only then, attractions from all directio