Our universe started with a Big Breath (not a Big Bang) – so affirms cosmologist, Jude Currivan, author of The Story of Gaia.

And from that breath released over 14 billion years ago, in-formation has guided matter and energy to manifest all life – including this planet and all she has created.

Gaia has ancestors in all the cosmic beings who have birthed the circumstances (life conditions) and elements that have enabled life on our planet to emerge. From the elements of Fire, Water, Earth and Air we enjoy the blessings of microbiota, mycelial webs, plants, insects, animals. Indigenous narratives tell also of the unseen beings who populate the energetic fields of all the elements – beings who have not incarnated but exist in dimensions long available to spiritual adepts and now being glimpsed through the micro and macro technologies of science.

As a child of the Universe, Gaia has learned from the rhythms of breathing in and breathing out, expanding and converging, discovering across eons of time patterns that we admire as Beauty, Truth and Goodness.

How do humans discern and appreciate the grand patterns that have birthed our species? Our natural way of learning as individuals is to start with our immediate life conditions to discover how we must survive, adapt to our environment(s) and regenerate the life birthed in us. As a social species we can do this only in the context of a family (or substitute) who supports us to develop capacities that co-arise through our physical, psychological, cultural and social beings. The importance of the role of our early family experience (noted by Jane Jacobs) is that it enables the unfolding of increasingly greater collective relationships – clans, tribes, organizations, sectors, communities, cities, nations, eco-regions, and global connections.

As science has revealed the intimate details of what indigenous creation stories have described for millennia, we become aware of the pattern of evolution and the evidence that life has left for us to discover in the patterns that seed the inner and outer capacities that support our existence.

We discern from the Big Breath that the dynamics of an operating system that emerges the universe also pulses through human life at every scale. The Nature of the Universe has endowed us with fundamental capacities that enable simultaneous self-organization and structuring. The brain sciences have called it a meshwork. It turns out that it is an endowment in which Gaia has invested so that she could evolve humans as her Reflective Organs (building on the proposition by James Lovelock). This amazing collaboration of capacities enables possibilities that can lead to infinite creation as well as chaos – we call this capacity: self-organization. Moreover this meshwork also holds another capacity that can lead to structures that are elegant flexible or rigid inflexible boundaries.

This pairing is neither a duality or a polarity but a simultaneous design dynamic that underlies the development of an individual life, the emergence of increasingly complex organization (and organisms) and the evolution of whole planets, galaxies and the cosmos.

The relationship between self-organizing elements and structuring patterns is a dance of eternal mystery and fascination deserving respect and admiration. It is an outcome of that first Big Breath and is fundamental to the Loving Consciousness that breathed that first breath.

The relationship of self-organization and structuring systems, reveals the qualities of Love we experience when we consider what has been, what is and what will be. This relationship underlies the rhythms, cycles, seasons, developmental stages, and evolutionary pathways – the very Spiritual trajectories and dimensions that we call Space and Time embedded into all human systems – including the most complex system we have yet created – cities.

Yet, even though we can appreciate the mystery and wonder of humans and our creations – is it time to re-consider what, why and how Gaia is evolving our species as her Reflective Organs? (Click here for other perspectives on Gaia’s evolutionary intentions.)