THE BIG PICTURE

The concept of a standard cosmological model may seem exceedingly humancentric, but it is consistent with the teachings of the ancients regarding the ideal nature of the human being and his or her unique position in the overall scheme of creation.

If the ultimate purpose of creation is to produce human beings who have the potential to realize their immortal status and become like God, then we might ask why human beings have not evolved on every planet or in every solar system. The answer requires a bigger picture.

The conditions required to realize the ultimate purpose of creation are not local—that is, they are nonlocal. The influences that ultimately govern the behavior of every elementary particle in creation correspond to nonlocal influences which, carried by the modes of transcendental sound, serve to correlate the behavior of one element here and the behavior of other elements there, no matter how far apart these elements might be in space. This means that everything in the universe, whether it displays an ideal or nonideal form, must play some part in the realization of God’s will.

As human beings with limited intelligence and knowledge, it is impossible for us to understand fully the workings of God’s will, because he works in mysterious ways on the basis of nonlocal omniscience. What appears to be a matter of chance and circumstance from our very limited and local perspective is not at all, in the final analysis, a matter of chance and circumstance. It is all part of a divine plan, which is continuously evolving under the guidance of the nonlocal will of God.

Divine will is expressed on different scales of time and space and originating from different locations within the universe through all the celestial gods—in fact, through every individual soul or point value of consciousness in existence. The ultimate purpose of creation may be to make human beings who have the potential to realize their immortal status, but this is not its only purpose.

According to the ancients, everything within the universe—down to the smallest elementary particle—is alive and endowed with soul. To provide conditions favorable for the evolution of all beings, and not just human beings, different types of stars, solar systems, galaxies, and so forth have been created to serve as “worlds” for those beings. The seers held, however, that of all the different types of life within the universe, human life here and now is suited most ideally for the realization of immortality.

Therefore, birth in a human womb was considered the highest blessing of God, and the sages bemoaned the fact that this blessing is often squandered in the pursuit of transient sensory pleasure, rather than the pursuit of immortality. Further, although they realized that their science of immortality, or science of the gods, would eventually become lost over the course of time as humankind became increasingly addicted to the material pursuit of sensory pleasure, they also held out hope that in the end the direction of time would be reversed by the will of God, and their teachings would be rediscovered and understood in their true scientific light.

To demonstrate the scientific validity of the ancient spiritual teachings, we need a standard cosmological model so that the measures of the celestial bodies related directly to the evolution of human life can first be predicted deductively and then evaluated empirically. This is the only way to demonstrate concretely the scientific validity of the ancient teachings. Having discovered what is meant by a standard cosmological model, we are now ready to proceed with an examination of the second wisdom, which pertains to the first of the great celestial gods, whose body shines in the sky as our very own sun: the solar wisdom.