Seven Secular Sermons 1 to 3

Seven Secular Sermons

Parts 1 to 3 These are the first three parts of a series of poetic meditations.

They are best enjoyed when read aloud among friends.

Each of them will typically take about 15 minutes to read aloud.

As meditations, they benefit greatly from an absence of distractions.

A very relaxed, dreamy mindset is conducive to a deep experience.

The best settings to do this are quiet, safe, undisturbed places.

To the extent possible under law, Daniel Böttger has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Seven Secular Sermons. This work is published from: Germany.

This means you may freely copy, modify and use these Sermons any way you like, even without attribution. You could even set them to music (the melodies of "House of the Rising Sun", "Amazing Grace", "The Rains of Castamere" and various other songs work with it), sell them or sample parts of them and put them to entirely different uses.

Title image CC-BY ESO / B. Tafreshi www.sevensecularsermons.org Sermon One: Adrift in Space and Time

Now this is going to be fun! This place surrounding us here now It truly does feel great where we consider this, to realize we all are one. is just as present, anyhow, So we shall meditate. as our breathing is.

This meditation’s rhyming verse Our breaths connect within the air, describes a paradigm within the atmosphere. of us inside this universe, The envelope of sky we share adrift in space and time. is also part of here.

It’s nice that we can simply start We also share what rests beneath: by recognizing how Our bodies’ place of birth a check of every body part from which came all who now here breathe can help us be here now. as children of the Earth.

We feel our bellies and our heads Of course there’s more than senses show and just become aware around us near and far. how arms and hands and feet and legs The sky above, the Earth below; are feeling everywhere. there’s more to where we are.

Between and through them circulate To North and South, to West and East, our blood-streams to refresh the world goes on and on, the oxygen that activates the planet every plant and beast awareness in our flesh. and we now breathe upon.

And as we slowly breathe we find Of all the Earth, we barely know that doing so can draw the surface we begrime, us into a more present mind upon the spinning rock below, to feel the moment raw. adrift in space and time.

With every breath we take and leave, Our calm and meditating minds we clear our inner eyes can feel this easily. and fully, lucidly perceive Imagination goes behind each second passing by. all things our eyes can see.

Our mindful meditative selves To find, as further out we go, grow out of living meat whichever way we face, and help our bodies stay in health to left, to right, above, below, by finding what we need. the solar system. Space.

So let’s do that now. Let’s explore It’s blacker than the night of course and see what’s to be found. and bigger than the sky Outside our bodies, there is more. and it is hard to see because Let’s take a look around! it was not made for eyes.

Unless we’re blind we’re free to see, It effortlessly overwhelms unless we’re deaf, to hear imagination. Still and realize we’re utterly and everywhere around this realm surrounded by what’s here. extends and always will. Around us all and everyone While outermost, in blackest night, we’ve met or ever can, drift frozen rocks so far, extends the system of the Sun to them our splendid sphere of light that dwarfs all realms of man. looks like another star.

Out there, all human joy and strife We’re lucky Earth is temperate and knowledge matter not. or life could not have spawned. Out there, this fragile ball of life This planet would stay desolate is just a pale blue dot. and all of us unborn.

And there are other, bigger dots As fully as we do depend and countless asteroids. on Earth that we live on, This Earth is one among a lot we also clearly understand around us in the void. we’re children of the Sun.

Yet all of them combined appear And yet the Sun, though all must spin like specks of dust compared around it, merely is to one enormous blazing sphere, a rare domain of light within the center that they share. a yawning black abyss.

A thousand times as ponderous In outer space surrounding us as all that circles it, lie distances too great it radiates splendiferous for us to easily discuss and indiscriminate. or even contemplate.

It weighs three-hundred-thirty-three For space is mostly nothingness times thousand times as much around us everywhere, as Earth, which seems like mere debris, the freezing dark is limitless a tiny circling smudge. in empty space out there.

There’s hydrogen inside the Sun Of course there is some gravity that lets it shine so bright that massive things impart by burning up: Four million tons and maybe some dark energy per second fuse to light. that pushes them apart.

This fusion forges helium But nothing’s there to hear or see and other specks of dust or smell or taste or touch that constitute the medium and trying to imagine, we from which grows life like us. can think of nothing much.

But near the Sun, its gamma rays And still we feel, for what that’s worth, and heat do not allow beyond the seen and near life smart enough to be amazed the vastness outside planet Earth at what is true here now. that’s real now and here.

And further out, it stays too cold In meditation, we somehow for molecules to toy expand our minds to try with games of entropy that mold to feel the system we are now the life that we enjoy. and here surrounded by. The moons and planets we can see, Unmoved by beings such as we as far as we have found, on Earth, our small enclave, are lifeless. Earth now seems to be the stars around us now will be the only game in town. the stars around our graves.

Yet all these places we could go Except for those which have gone through and cultivate and fill, their hydrogen supply are merely specks in what we know and end as all things someday do, remains much bigger still. for even stars must die.

The stars, these many tiny lights, And some, much bigger than our Sun, each are a blazing sun burn brighter still and must and circling them, caught in their might, explode one day, when they are done are planets being spun. with making light and dust.

Yet humans cannot see that far. These supernovas, as we call The pixels of our eyes them, burst stupendously. are just too few, which is why stars Some can outshine the sum of all look like they’re equal-sized. stars in the galaxy.

Through telescopes, we understood. With their magnetic fields unfurled, The stars all shine so bright their yields annihilate that only monstrous distance could or sterilize abundant worlds dilute them into night. that life might populate.

These distances define the space Yet all we breathe and eat and drink that all stars occupy comes from these massive bombs. and make a single, real place We’re supernova-dust that thinks that we’re surrounded by. about where it came from.

The stars that shine all night and day And since the stars have made the clay within or out of sight that led to our birth, are what our home, the Milky Way, we’re children of the Milky Way, appears like from inside. as are the Sun and Earth.

Our Milky Way contains at least But supernovas are quite rare. one hundred billion suns. Three times per century Through gravity, they all are pieced does one of them explode somewhere together into one. within our galaxy.

Around this place, where we now feel Yet many supernovas do what we are breathing in, each second detonate these suns form one tremendous wheel in all the galaxies whereto with one tremendous spin. we now shall escalate!

And all these suns are shining clear, A million times much further out enormous and sublime. than all the Milky Way, They all are real here where we’re more galaxies are shining proud adrift in space and time. around us here today. These galaxies, each huge and wide, For all the time since time began, much like the one we’re in, as entropy made space, outnumber all the stars inside each travelled an enormous span our home and origin. to meet here face to face.

Around where we consider this, Through vacuum and solar flame, whichever way we face, they found their way somehow. drift billions of these galaxies And we as that which they became, right now, right here, in space. thus came to meet here now.

We realize with utter awe Through all we breathe and drink and eat, and know beyond all doubt: they travel and endow Beyond this world are trillions more with nutrients the living meat that we could learn about. in which we meet here now.

And almost all of them must be The atoms that we are traverse absurdly far away all space and time, which means in ultimate reality we’re children of the Universe beyond the Milky Way. and we have always been.

From here where our bodies stay, The atoms in us met before imagination climbs and they will meet again, through further outer Milky Ways compelled by universal law adrift in space and time. out in the there and then.

And through the emptiness between One endless cosmic maelstrom, in almost all of space, age-old and ever new, where not a single star is seen is where we all are coming from in almost every place. and where we’re going to.

And meditation does allow The knowledge we are made of dust our minds to feel it all. compels us to admit To feel the Universe that now the Universe is in us just surrounds us as a whole. as we are within it.

Despite all suns that intersperse From here we may arise to see this dark continuum, and claim as our own most places in this Universe the secrets of reality are total vacuum. just waiting to be known.

And therefore, atoms are quite rare. And so we know the infinite Yet trillions of them have is absolutely real. condensed into the flesh we wear It’s here, it’s now, it’s intimate, that draws this very breath. this vastness that we feel.

Two thirds of atoms in us are Whatever else is true for us, still hydrogen which sprang we’ll always know this rhyme. into existence not in stars We’ll always know we’re made of dust but back in the Big Bang. adrift in space and time. Sermon Two: The Games of Entropy

So, being dust, what lets us live? Within all forms of life we see What raises us above there’s hidden vastly more the countless, mindless, primitive, bewildering complexity raw atoms we’re made of? that must inspire awe.

There is no life within this dust: The stars we see through telescopes Most specks remain unchanged are big and bright and far, from back in ancient stars. It must but we find life, through microscopes, be how they are arranged. yet more spectacular.

Each human we have ever seen, In fact, there’s more complexity each beast, each bird, each tree: in one small butterfly We all are atoms that have been than we see in the galaxy arranged amazingly. out there beyond the sky.

All these arrangements big and small All living things we’ve ever seen might well inspire mirth are built from living cells; in us surrounded by them all, each cell is like a small machine the greatest show on Earth. comprised of chemicals.

There’s more to learn in nature than In all our cells, there’s utterly is found in any book infinitesimal and it appears more alien molecular machinery. the closer that we look. They’re nanotechnical.

Below the surfaces we see, Still zooming closer, we just find the skin and scales and bark, a multiplicity the cycles of biology of ancient atoms that are kind are working in the dark. of bouncing randomly.

Right now our lungs take oxygen The static things we think we know out of the air we share, are maps. The territory our hearts and bloodstreams take it then has constant and chaotic flow and pump it everywhere. beneath the shapes we see.

If we zoom closer we can see It’s here right now, as close to us our lungs to be a place as anything can be. where in a dance of chemistry The movements of the specks of dust our breath and blood embrace. shape our reality.

We’re built from many works of art, The randomness in what they do from organs that combine we call their entropy small tissues, each a special part and its domain is whereinto with intricate design. our lives have come to be.

Now each such tissue then contains It disassembles ordered things innumerable cells unless they can outgrow and here, inside each cell again, its ceaseless, blind disordering are tiny organelles. and spread within its flow. It moves the dust and lets it start So given lots of time, mere chance to join the game or dance must sometimes foreordain of molecules that fall apart that specks of dust will start to dance or last a while, by chance. along reaction chains.

So hydrogen and oxygen Around 4 billion years ago, join water which can gain on Earth, a warm wet sphere, entropic warmth that makes it then reaction chains began to grow play games of cloud and rain. the paths that led us here.

Where entropy is less intense, In chains of random chemistry, these drops will crystallize the molecules that they and dance the longer, slower dance unite can in their unity of snowflakes and of ice. join bigger games to play.

Inside ourselves we feel right now In some, the flow of molecules our living, breathing form could circle and arrive to be and to remain somehow in lasting cycles that grew tools comparatively warm. to multiply and thrive.

Our atoms lost the stellar heat In them, the games that entropy and left behind the cold forever plays have come of empty space. In warmth we meet, to let emerge biology in warmth does life unfold. that all of us grew from.

For heat destroys all forms and flows We’re built from this, from cyclical that chance may introduce, and still ongoing games while cold does not select for those of atoms and of chemicals that work and reproduce. that do not know our names.

In warmth the growing randomness These games take place in everything. of entropy can be In every breath we take just right for the profound finesse are trillions of them happening. of biochemistry. All cells in us partake.

Warmth such as ours makes atoms stay A cell is what we call games far a little restless so too numerous to count they bump into each other’s way, sustaining one shared reservoir react and change and grow. that holds their whole amount.

With carbon in particular, Here games that build each other spin reactions are not rare, a membrane to engulf but the majority by far them all. A greater game begins: do not lead anywhere. A game that builds itself.

Yet chemical reactions need Though molecules can’t learn or feel, mere moments to be done the cells they joined into and let the dust join games that lead have learned to sense and eat and heal to others further on. as in us now they do. The games inside them match and fit With size, forestalling entropy each other. They create becomes much more complex each other’s necessary bits but life invented, brilliantly, and thus self-replicate. a game that does it: sex.

The largest, DNA, has space Sex tests and recombines the genes like memory to hold that parents contribute, stored information – that’s a place makes novel progeny and screens for new games to unfold. resulting attributes.

From codes that cells store in there stem And genes that happen to succeed large hosts of proteins in making progeny that build us here to carry them. will travel in them and proceed We call these codes our genes. through time and entropy.

Cells need to harvest energy In each of us now breathing here to fight their slow decay are genes that long have gone by ever-present entropy through many generations – we’re and thus keep death at bay. built just to pass them on.

Some games can help the cells with this. And entropy remains at play. Hence some cells now include All life that it has bred, microbial photosynthesis however complex, must obey that harvests light as food. its rule that things must spread.

Cells work so well that everywhere To do this, cells must organize we look now, they are found: and function as a whole, On every surface, in the air so they have nerves which harmonize and deep within the ground. their work on common goals.

They are the winners that remain; One common goal is to explore the losers are all dead. new places which is why Life born to entropy’s domain some sea-born creatures left for more, must die if it can’t spread. for land and for the sky.

These cells, competing, growing rife And thus arose the multitude for countless years on end, of Earth’s whole biosphere turned Earth into this ball of life that fills us with this gratitude to which we now attend. we feel for living here.

Once single cells were all there was, Yet now the human species shapes but some of them became this world – and that transpires much bigger forms of life because because a recent bunch of apes they joined still greater games. played cooking food on fires.

In unity they found new ways This gave them much more energy to gain more energy and they could use these gains and grow within the fertile space to breed descendants such as we we humans call the sea. with big and playful brains. With playful brains, we understand The thoughts we share help harmonize the games of entropy our work on common goals that played us into being and and join in ways to organize can play them consciously. the knowledge we control.

With growing knowledge we can trace This knowledge helps us build new games all aspects of our lives that let us dive and fly to games that built the mental space and even let us ride on flames wherein this knowledge thrives. to pierce the waiting sky.

At every scale we see again We humans know there’s so much more so many things that draw surrounding Earth: the stars! upon each other. We might then We’re curious and can’t ignore think that’s design or law. how unexplored they are.

And yet, no law or plan exists. The games of entropy coerce Mere chaos has let on us still. We must diffuse each scale some lucky games persist to roam this playground universe that others built upon. and put it all to use.

Now we join into greater games One day, self-replicating ships that may outlast us all, will from this Earth be hurled including laws and wealth and claims to leave on interstellar trips of states that rise and fall. and spread from world to world.

Great games like science or the arts In but a short few million years or cities or machines such ships can easily we hope will help their human parts spread many daughter biospheres like bodies help their genes. throughout the galaxy.

And in a sense, we all are one And yet, no other life comes here. gigantic global game The sky we watch looks still. of interplaying games begun No life is spreading – maybe we’re without a plan or aim. the only life that will.

That’s true and yet one brain can’t grasp But probably, out there we’ll meet it all: It’s too immense. life stranger than our own, One can but try and fail and gasp life made of something else than meat at life’s magnificence. by games as yet unknown.

So human brains invented speech And all we’ll find and understand and writing to transport can join in what will be what brains would want to share and teach still greater, cosmic, truly grand each other: useful thoughts. new games of entropy.

By sharing thoughts, we operate One day, all worlds our ships can reach like large connected minds shall learn to live and care, that ponder and accumulate for we have many games to teach the knowledge that we find. to all the dust out there. Sermon Three : One of Us

We’re rare among the stars that drift Let’s feel our lives stretch out upon around us, we who live. our lifespans as they stream We hold this strange and special gift past moments we remember on this planet has to give. to future ones we dream.

Let’s now unveil this gift and see As simply as we breathe, we know it unify somehow this life we now here feel the many games of entropy has travelled, some short while ago, and make them one here now. through moments just as real.

The gift of life is incarnate There was a moment we arrived in every one of us at this place here somehow. who now here breathe and meditate Since we were there and we survived, between those worlds of dust. our lives include that now.

The deepening tranquillity The lives we lead have streamed right through of meditative rest this day and so we can lets us behold the mystery now trace along them backwards to with which we all are blessed. the time today began.

In all of us, a unity, Our lives extend beyond today, sustained by games that run beyond what’s now and here. in all their multiplicity, We feel them stretch through yesterday, makes out of many one. last week, last month, last year.

Within us now, the interplay Where have we been five years ago? of games in us gives rise What did we feel and do to one uniting process they in all the moments we still know are part of and comprise. and all the others, too?

It’s present simultaneously Our lives include these moments and in both our hands and feet yet we are not confined and every cell within the three to single moments – we extend dimensions of our meat. and grow through time entwined.

This process keeps proceeding forth Through every moment we have seen, through all the time it thrives, a single process thrusts. in every moment in the fourth The momentary selves we’ve been dimension of our lives. are all just one, just us.

This process, ever-happening Relaxed, with mindfulness and ease, until the day we die, we effortlessly can propels us onward, travelling go past our oldest memories through moments passing by. to where our lives began.

The Now we now experience Still tracing back, our lives escape is one ephemeral through many days and rooms brief point in lives that, in a sense, to when and where we first took shape are four-dimensional. within our mothers’ wombs. Before we could live separately, We all have relatives out there our lives have all begun that we have never known, protected in a pregnancy who breathe and live their lives somewhere, when two lives lived as one. as real as our own.

Now even though these months may seem In four dimensions, we connect like where we came about, through lines of ancestry. they’re only where our mothers’ streams The life within us streams in fact of life were branching out. through branches of a tree.

The life we’re feeling presently, We each have lines of ancestry our mothers felt themselves. that reach back far and they Life flows in continuity. include both slaves and royalty, It’s older than ourselves. both predators and prey.

Now those of us with siblings know Each human ancestry extends them too as branches where through many centuries, the gift of life that lets us grow through long-forgotten, distant lands branched out and grew from there. on strange and ancient seas.

Though siblings must grow separately, In tracing back, each separate course we also understand eventually must they’re branches of a single tree, converge in common ancestors like fingers on a hand. of every one of us.

And here the journey need not end. The ancestors all humans share We might as well bring in are why humanity our mothers’ mothers, cousins and is all related – we are their our somewhat further kin. extended family.

And they in turn had parents too These ancient ties of kinship mean and families, so they that everyone who lives, give us more distant cousins who all humans we have ever seen live out there now today. have been our relatives.

To know someone is family, Descended from the same old apes that someone’s one of us, who learned to cook and sing may stir a sense of loyalty, and worked towards the cityscapes connectedness or trust. we’re now inhabiting.

But families reach deep and wide. The primates we’re descended from The ones we each are in were not so erudite, have branches spreading far outside but they are why we all have come their ancient origin. to live and walk upright.

Like us, they’re branches, other tracks And they had other children, too. life grows across this Earth We’ve grown apart and thus since ancestors of us had sex they’re different apes and primates who and gifted them with birth. are relatives of us. We share with them a lineage Life branched and found a wealth of ways to which we owe our use to spread throughout this world of tools and one shared heritage that now our meditative gaze with monkeys and with shrews. reveals to us unfurled.

All that’s within the family All life is one big family of four-legged creatures who comprised of everyone, despite their huge diversity four billion years of history are all our cousins too. of species come and gone.

That’s still not all: We’re free to go So when we meet, we’re pretty much still deeper if we wish. just parts of one big form, Four hundred million years ago, like branches of a tree that touch our ancestors were fish. each other in a storm.

It truly is astonishing In four dimensions, life is one how one unbroken line forever-branching force, of life links us with everything small parts of which have now begun out there that has a spine. to understand its course.

Still older ancestors, like worms The present seems to separate and squishy things in shells life’s branches like a knife. connect us with life’s oldest forms, Beyond it, we who meditate confined to single cells. here now are all one life.

We breathe, as all of them have breathed This life that breathes in us just since ancient cells back then leads far beyond the small invented, savored and bequeathed lives led by every one of us. the use of oxygen. Let’s try and feel it all.

Our common DNA confirms Life’s countless branches can be found the common ancestries within the boundless seas, of all of life on Earth, from germs upon and deep within the ground to mushrooms, bugs and trees. and flying on the breeze.

Our tree of life finds root in when, What lives in them is life itself. at some primordial spot, All plants, all beasts, all swarms the first thing that did live began of bugs are part of life’s great wealth from something that did not. of evanescent forms.

That’s where reaction chains once curled Whatever living things may do, themselves in cycles so they all need life to lend the root of life could grace this world its ancient, massive strength unto four billion years ago. each talon, claw and hand.

Since then, its offshoots never ceased Whatever mouths and snouts and beaks to spread and branch. They won of living things discuss, this planet every plant and beast it’s all the same old life that speaks and we now breathe upon. through every one of us. From all our eyes, one life looks out In having felt the family at all the games it plays. through which we all connect, On all our feet, life walks about we know that life is certainly on paths through time and space. a thing we must protect.

With all our leaves, life drinks the sun, As each of us is one more face producing nutrients, of life behind us all, with all our mouths, it moves them on its need to travel out through space to their recipients. is truly personal.

So what it means to be alive Life must keep sprouting interlinked is being part of this, new branches and disperse of life itself that will survive from world to world, or go extinct ourselves and live no less. from all this universe.

This meditation may reveal Just like our ancestors who built to us now breathing here the world we know today, a sense of awe in which we feel we’ll have the glory or the guilt we are this biosphere. of what we leave to stay.

Our selves and all the lives we meet, We may destroy ourselves and doom in friendship or in strife, the Earth where we were born are parts of something more complete to merely be a dreadful tomb that’s us as one as life. with no one left to mourn.

Since we are life, all lives we’ve known Or rise to meet infinity, are parts of us and thus as lifeforms that succeed if we are one, we’re all alone. ourselves pervade the galaxy There’s only one of us. with Earth as their first seed.

To ever meet another one, And if we help life spread and last, we’ll need to journey long. its many future forms This planet Earth where we’ve begun will know us as their distant past, is not where we belong. like apes and fish and worms.

Earth gave all life its place of birth, So many future aeons hence, but it’s not built to last. beneath an alien sun, Of all the time life gets on Earth, they might remember Earth as lands most has already passed. of legend long since gone.

In just another billion years, How will they see their ancestry? the sun that rules our sky What shall it mean to stem grows bright, Earth’s water disappears from us and hold the legacy and all life here will die. and gifts we give to them?

And that means us. We’re not distinct Whichever paths they choose to go, from what our growing star if ever they discuss will boil to death and force extinct the gift of life in them, they’ll know unless life spreads out far. they each are one of us. About this project

My name is Daniel Böttger. I’m a young scientist who lives in Leipzig, Germany.

I began the Seven Secular Sermons project in 2012, in an attempt to share the intense gratitude I feel towards this marvelous universe we are happening in.

The sermons are (to be) a series of seven guided meditations on aspects of the universe. In verse and rhyme, they invite us into inner journeys towards a more profoundly satisfying appreciation of reality at large.

Due to the complexities of summarizing numerous complex ideas into meditative poetry, and the restrictions of their form, these meditations are being written very slowly. These first three took 4 years, and it seems sensible to assume the following ones will take about the same amount of time.

If you would like to be notified about new sermons, you can follow @7SecularSermons on Twitter or subscribe to the Seven Secular Sermons YouTube channel.

Each sermon gives a poetic introduction to a field of knowledge that has something to say about what we are, in the following order. 1. Adrift in Space and Time – Astrophysics 2. The Games of Entropy – Molecular Biology 3. One of Us – Evolutionary Biology 4. (no title yet) – Anthropology 5. (no title yet) – Memetics 6. (no title yet) – Brain Sciences 7. United in the Quest for Truth (working title) – Philosophy They are connected in an arrangement loosely inspired by the Open Systems Interaction model of communication systems: 1. Physical layer – The physical atoms that everything runs on. 2. Data link layer – The self-replicating patterns of links between atoms. 3. Network layer – The network of relations between all life on Earth. 4. Transport layer – The relationships and exchanges between us. 5. Session layer – The dialogues between individuals that give rise to culture. 6. Presentation layer – The mental representations that give rise to the mind. 7. Application layer – The relationship of reason and reality. Each follows logically from the previous one and each of them has to be present in order for the whole to come together as it does. www.sevensecularsermons.org These sermons are to celebrate in meditative verse the joy of living in our great resplendent universe.