It's been a long time since my last post about the concept behind "The Origins of Matter and Life" but I had some great amount of work to do and we've also been on tour so I hope you could excuse me for this delay :) - Perseo
Last time I analyzed "On Matter and Mind" and "High", this time I will explain "The Cosmic Architect" and "Tree of Life", leaving the last two tracks, "Crossing the Line" and "Albert II" to a next post, the third and last post of this trilogy.
Carl Sagan, astronomer
(Nov 9, 1934 – Dec 20, 1996)
"The Cosmic Architect" starts with Albert flowing through the earth/eye and seeing some very strange things. He sees some light that's actually the light from the Big Bang and some patterns and schemes, on the cosmic landscape surrounding him, from which he seems to recognize an "artist's signature", or the evidence that someone is spontaneously building the place he's in. He does not, at this point, know who is "the artist", yet, for some reason, he knows that he's living the moment of supreme creation, the moment in which someone is creating the Universe. It is a very young universe so there is only energy at the moment, but energy soon starts to crystallize into matter (as the laws of physics tell us) and pale shades of a new reality begin to take place.
Contact (novel)
The patterns Albert is seeing are encoded in the structure of the world: the world is created by a pure mathematical abstraction, a matrix, a transcendental sequence, that gives the world its foundations. The world is a giant fractal where iteration over iteration everything come to reality. A fractal is a pure abstraction or, in the real world, a "thought" or a "nothing". It exists only inside the brain of someone who is thinking that thought and not in the everyday reality. The consequence of this is that if the universe Albert is seeing comes out from a pure abstraction, then it comes out of nothing, then it is real only inside the mind of the "thinker" or, in other words, the Cosmic Architect. Finally, for some reason, Albert comes to know that the entire process of creating a Universe from thought is an inevitable and unconscious process, so the cosmic architect himself is not aware that he's creating: he is just thinking and he does not imagine, in the wildest of his dreams, that he's actually creating a Universe.
Out of curiosity: there are expressions, in the lyrics of this song, that I took inspiration from, again, Carl Sagan, especially from his novel "Contact". "The artist's signature", the fact that maybe, going deep into mathematics, we can find something like a "perfect circle of unities in a field of noughts" that clearly shows us that there is free will behind the creation of our world, are ideas coming from the final chapter of this novel. I suggest to you all to read this book and also to watch the movie that's been made out of it: you will pass some wonderful hours with them.
The tree of life as pictured
in the Celestial Harmonies' booklet
"Tree of Life" represents the next step in creating a Universe: populate the world with life. So, in this song, the theme is "how life is born". Albert finds himself suddenly flying in the sky. He looks all around but he can't see anything. He only feels the wind that's blowing. He tries to explore the world but even if he flies higher in the sky, above the clouds, he finds nothing. Down, just the sea. After so much exploring this empty world where there is only sky and water, he decides to take some rest on the suface of the ocean. He then feels a force pushing everything into the sea, deep into the abyss, and at the same time he sees a sphere, suspended in the sky and slowly cracking. He sees a seed (the seed of life) falling into the abyss from the crack on this sphere, carried by this great force and after the seed has fallen, a great light enlightens the water and the abyss itself. From this light emerges a tree, the tree of life, putting its roots in the earth and giving birth to every specimen on the planet: birds, fishes, reptiles, mammals...even to humans.
