Right this second, your body is hurtling through space and time at almost 900,000 miles per hour. The Earth spins on its axis while rotating around the Sun which spirals around the center of the galaxy, which itself is participating in the vast expansion of the Universe.
And that body of yours -- about midway between the size of the Earth and that of a living cell -- literally holds within it the entire history of Everything.
Every precious particle that makes you you is billions upon billions of years old.
13.7 billion years ago, everything that has ever existed -- was inconceivably smaller than anything you can possibly imagine.
Where this immeasurably dense and hot Singularity came from -- no one quite knows for sure.
But don't worry about that right now.
In a single, mind-blowing instant, the infinite creativity and potential of time and space exponentially expanded faster than the speed of light.
The quantum world emerged and the basic forces of physics soon followed.
In less than a minute, the fundamental particles that would eventually form you were scattered a million billion miles across in ten billion degree weather, and after several hundred thousand years, your oldest atomic ancestors -- helium and hydrogen -- began to emerge.
These atoms would later become heavier elements, synthesized inside the gigantic thermonuclear reactors known as stars.
Almost all of the atoms in your body come from the enormous explosions of these stars. Explosions that distributed your heavier elements throughout interstellar space enriching the Universe with the chemistry of life.
You and I are quite literally made of star dust, my friend. And star dust, as it turns out, is the very rarest material that exists. So rare, in fact, that it accounts for less than half a percent of everything that is.
And yet, that star dust traveled inconceivable distances, became more and more dense in certain areas of space, and helped to form our solar system in a remote spiral arm of the 200 billion star Milky Way Galaxy.
Our Sun ignited, planets coalesced, and 4.5 billion years ago -- early Earth formed just far enough away from the Sun to later enable it to have the liquid water necessary for life.
Earth was a molten rock for 50 million years, it collided with what would later become the moon, and with the help of water- delivering asteroids and comets, massive thunderstorms for millions of years gave birth to green oceans.
Your oldest relatives on the planet arrived in the form of primitive, single-celled organisms that lived off the heat from sub- sea volcanoes. These creatures were the extent of life on Earth for two billion years and spawned every living thing to come.
Continents emerged, algae lived off of sunlight, photosynthesis produced oxygen, the green oceans turned blue, and continental drift drew all of the land masses together, at roughly the same rate as the growth of your fingernails.
Earth became a giant snowball for 20 million years, almost all of life went extinct, but your ancestors managed to leave the oceans once things warmed up and the continents split apart.
Life thrived, an ozone formed, the continents converged for a second time, and Earth became a giant, steamy, tropical, swamp land inhabited by enormous insects, amphibians, and reptiles.
Life nearly went extinct again from massive volcanic activity, but after 10 million years - oxygen and carbon dioxide reached new peaks as the dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
The continents split one more time and 65 million years ago, a six to nine-mile long meteorite crashed into what's now Chicxulub, Mexico wiping out the dinosaurs and destroying about 75% of all living things on the planet.
But all destruction leads to creation. And all catastrophes have a beautiful, silver lining.
For life recovered and 50 million years ago, the first mammals began to appear including our most recent cousins in the animal kingdom -- the primates.
Seven million years ago, primates began to evolve into protohumans and five million years later, they emerged and expanded out of Africa into Asia and Europe later evolving into our own species, Homo sapiens, about 200,000 years ago.
Now. Consider this. Each of those early ancestors of yours delivered the right genetic code at the right moment to the right partner in order to produce your existence.
You've got two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents and sixteen great- great grandparents.
Go back eight generations and you've got 256 great- great-great-great-great-great grandparents. Go back 20 generations and you've got over a million grandparents. And so does everyone else.
You are fundamentally, intrinsically, and biologically related to every single human being that lives ... in fact, who has ever lived.
Homo sapiens continued to evolve and out across the globe mastering fire, developing language, creating tools, art, discovering spirituality, and developing agriculture.
Knowledge and wisdom prospered, civilizations arose, science and religion grew, wars were fought, empires were built, empires crumbled, art flourished, and society saw globalization through communication, transportation and an exponential growth in technology -- technology that has harnessed the very quantum world in which our Universe first inhabited.
But your chemical, biological, and atomic connection to everyone and everything is only part of who you are and what it means to BE.
For the Universe has engineered your consciousness.
And consciousness, as it turns out, seems to be an essential element of what makes a visible Universe visible in the fist place.
Through your consciousness, the Universe has organized not only its own self awareness, but also its own comprehension.
The Universe explains observers just as observers explain the Universe.
Like a wave on a vast, unbounded and infinite ocean, your individual consciousness is localized Universal consciousness.
Indeed, the wave is the ocean and you are the Universe.
I am that. You are that. This is that. And that's all there is ...
