The present moment is what happens. Since this changes constantly it seems that life consists of thousands of moments in which different things happen. Time is seen as an endless succession of moments. Yet, if we look more closely we find that there are not many moments at all. Life is always now and unfolds in the constant present. Even past or future moments only exist when they are remembered or anticipated.

Scientists, the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe, often work like detectives. They make a guess, called a hypothesis, about what might be true. They then say to themselves, “If that were really true, we ought to see so and so”. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started.

We use evidence to learn about the world and the way it operates. It is much more clever and complicated than that, however. It is based on cause and effect and the internal processing of this material to convince us of what is true or not. Evidence is a good reason for believing something, but there are three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called tradition, authority, and revelation.

Tradition means beliefs handed down from generation to generation, or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing. Perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they’ve been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over the centuries. That’s tradition.

Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call that feeling revelation. We all have inside feelings from time to time, sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don’t. People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside. Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can’t trust them.

Astronomers have discovered evidence to suggest that the universe came into existence fifteen billion years ago in a gigantic explosion and has been expanding ever since. Not only has it been expanding, but it is also growing in complexity and becoming more and more differentiated. Some scientists also postulate that this movement from unity to multiplicity will eventually become reversed. The universe will then stop expanding and begin to contract again and finally return to the unmanifested, the inconceivable nothingness out of which it came, and perhaps repeat the cycles of birth, expansion, contraction, and death again and again. 

For what purpose? “Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” asks physicist Stephen Hawking, realizing at the same time that no mathematical model could ever supply the answer.

If you look within rather than only without, however, you discover that you have an inner and an outer purpose, and since you are a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm, it follows that the universe too has an inner and outer purpose inseparable from yours. The outer purpose of the universe is to create form and experience the interaction of forms. The play, the dream, the drama, or whatever you choose to call it. Its inner purpose is to awaken to its formless essence.

Then comes the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose, to bring the essence of consciousness into the world of form and thereby transform the world. The ultimate purpose of that transformation goes far beyond anything the human mind can imagine or comprehend. And yet, on this planet at this time, that transformation is the task allotted us. That is the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose, the reconciliation of the world and God.