A Function of the Universe

image: Hubble Heritage Team

Einstein noted the deceptive chicanery of human consciousness that makes us experience a separateness from the flow of the universe.

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. "
— Albert Einstein

Einstein felt we must disabuse ourselves of this notion.

"Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
— Albert Einstein

All indications are that humans are dynamic systems within a dynamic system. We are dynamic systems composed of an infinitesimally smaller series of dynamic systems within an infinitely larger series of dynamic systems.

image: Σ64

We find ourselves an integral part of the sum of all ecosystems existing for a limited time on a planetary life raft that surrounds our home planet.

Buckminster Fuller noted that we reside as passengers on a planetary spaceship. Our spaceship is composed of finite life-supporting resources. Our rotating spaceship is speeding around a traveling sun.

Earth is an automated Spaceship speeding rotatively at 66,000 miles per hour around the sun, which in turn, is on its own course at 6.0 kilometers per second within the Galactic Nebula.
― Buckminster Fuller

Fuller considered humans neither fixed, nor stationary. Rather he considered humans a process, rather than a thing.

I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.
― Buckminster Fuller

REFERENCES

• Buckminster Fuller, Wikiquote.
• I Seem to be a Verb, Buckminster Fuller, Bantam, 1970.
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Buckminster Fuller.
• Planetary Life Raft, GrokEarth, 9 June 2012.