Cosmic religion

or, a review of the book Star Maker

Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker is a very strange book. Ostensibly it’s a work of science fiction, but to me it’s really a book about spirituality. If the book was written a few thousand years ago, I could imagine it becoming the sacred text of a worldwide religion. In fact, reading it made me more hopeful for the possibility of something I’d call a cosmic religion.

The story in brief: a guy walks up on a hill, and suddenly he experiences himself leaving his body, and zooming out into outer space, and moving faster and faster away from the earth at the speed of light, and he begins a telepathic journey across the entire history of the cosmos. He travels with his mind, and “merges” into the mind of creatures throughout the cosmos, experiencing life as them. He meets other people who are also traveling across the universe, hopping between different minds, and they become a traveling circus, and the group becomes larger and larger over time, and in the end he zooms out to become the entire universe itself.

One theme of the book is the “expansion” of consciousness: he starts as a human mind, and then enters the mind of other human-like creatures on other planets and galaxies, but soon he discovers that there are larger entities that can have a mind of their own. In more advanced societies, individual creatures bind together to form a “collective mind”, and these collective minds can span entire planets, and eventually entire galaxies. Later in the book he also discovers that there are minds in places we don’t expect them: galactic nebulae have primitive minds of their own, and stars have slightly more sophisticated minds.

The exploration of alien civilizations was quite interesting. It’s a kind of David Attenborough documentary on aliens. He talks about these creatures that are a hybrid of plants and animals: they move around at night like animals, and during the day they stand still and absorb the light of the sun, experiencing a kind of religious ecstasy in their communion with the light every day. He discovers flying creatures on another planet which have primitive minds individually, but when flocking together develop higher-level mental faculties like intelligence.

(Unfortunately the book enumerates too many examples of different of alien species, becoming frustratingly repetitive. It definitely could have been cut down to a tenth of its length and made into a great short story.)

But what I found most interesting about the book was a very clear message that the author was making: spiritual transcendence is a common cause across all living beings in the universe, and is baked into the nature of the universe itself. As the narrator was exploring the various civilizations of different degrees of advancement, he kept pointing out the distinction between material progress and spiritual progress, and how ultimately all civilizations were striving to advance both. Material progress is the ability to manipulate the physical world to suit certain ends. Spiritual progress is the ability to see the world more clearly, and to discern which ends are worth pursuing.

Reading all of this gave me a sense of “cosmic religion.” I mean that in two ways: first there’s the simple feeling of awe that you get from appreciating the scale of the cosmos, and Stapledon really pounds that into you throughout the book, by talking for example about planets that dislodge from their star system to engage in a cross-galaxy expedition. The universe is massive, and simply appreciating this brings one into a kind of religious trance. It’s the kind of feeling you get from watching Dune 2.

Scenes from Dune 2 capturing the sense of awe that the film evokes. Taken from here.

But there is a second sense of “cosmic religion” the book made me think about. Reading Star Maker has made me more optimistic that we can actually savor the benefits of organized religion while at the same time maintaining an undogmatic, scientifically-driven worldview.

Why do we need religion?

First let me lay out my cards on how I think about religion as a whole. I’m not religious (except for briefly when I was a child), and for much of my life I was staunchly anti-religion. The word “religion” had a primarily negative connotation as I was growing up: it meant orthodoxy, oppression, zealotry, and ignorance. Today I still think all of those things can be true of religion, but I’m also more sympathetic to its benefits.

Today the word “religion” really just means to me: a shared, meaningful story that puts our existence as individuals into a broader context. Not just any broad context, but the broadest possible context. Religion conceptualizes our existence as individuals into a meaningful story about the entire universe.

We already have lots of meaningful stories that contextualize our lives into more medium-sized contexts. Patriotic Americans find meaning in their citizenship of a liberal, constitutional democracy that espouses individual freedom and pluralism. The employees of OpenAI feel a shared sense of purpose in their quest to build AGI and usher in a new age of prosperity. You might find a sense of meaning as a member of a friend group, a club, or a family.

Some would argue that these “smaller-scale” sources of meaning are enough. They give us a role to play in the world and a community to connect with. But something is missing from this picture, for a few reasons:

• These local meanings are highly contingent. If your life has meaning because you work for OpenAI, what if you get fired? What if your treasured friend group disbands because everyone moves to different cities? Maybe you feel a sense of meaning from being an American, but what happens if your country turns into something unrecognizable, and moves in a direction you believe to be fundamentally un-American?

• These local meanings don’t help us cooperate in larger and larger groups. Like, we’re good at getting a company of five hundred people to work together, and perhaps we can even get a country of three hundred million to work together (just barely), but what about the entire earth? The world is more peaceful today than it has been for most of modern history—which is indicative at least of one globally shared value: we all want peace, more than we want nuclear armageddon—and yet there are still severe conflicts raging, both in terms of actual wars (the Middle East, Ukraine) and also in terms of inter-country tensions that could easily spiral into larger wars (US vs China, Europe vs Russia).

• The local meanings also don’t give us enough of a shared language around the biggest questions in life, specifically for those who aren’t part of an organized religion. What happens when we die, and how should we honor those who die? How should we express our sympathy for those who are doing poorly, and in what way can we wish them well? Traditional religions have answers to these questions: the afterlife, funeral services, prayer, and communion. But for those of us who aren’t part of a religion, we’re kind of left with a patchwork of rituals and sayings (”keeping you in my thoughts”), which are better than nothing, but which are severely lacking compared to the kind of shared rituals we had in religion.

To get a sense of what I mean about “a shared language,” see this video. In it, social media influencer Bryce Crawford runs into a homeless man. The homeless man is at first threatening and asks for money, but Bryce quickly disarms him. Bryce says to the man: “I love you. When was the last time someone told you that?” The man, obviously taken aback and emotional, says, “pray for me.” And they then huddle closely, and Bryce says a prayer for the man. “Father lord, would you fill him with strength; God comfort him right now. Would you bless him, keep him safe, reveal yourself to him in dreams and visions.” It’s a very touching and humanizing moment, even without the prayer. But I think the prayer—and the shared sense of meaning that both Bryce and the man take in the prayer—adds a deeper level of salience to the encounter. I would bet that, as an empirical fact, that moment of prayer left the homeless man psychologically much better off than had it not happened. It will make him just slightly more resilient in future moments of need. Prayer can empower the people who do it even without any magical or metaphysical effects. Prayer can be as simple as a shared intention for a better life, expressed in a shared language, and which connects our individual desires for a better life into a bigger story about goodness and the human quest for happiness.

What would a cosmic religion look like?

Now that I’ve made the case that something like religion could help us today, we have the question of what this “cosmic religion” would actually be. I have fewer answers here, but I think Star Maker gives us an interesting starting point for discussion. All of the following is obviously biased by my own values and worldview.

Just as we can (and have) attained higher and higher levels of material and cognitive attainment over the centuries, we can also attain higher levels of moral and spiritual attainment.

In the material world the signs of progress have been obvious: we have built larger and larger buildings, we’ve edited DNA, we’ve isolated the building blocks of atoms, we’ve built computers that speak and think, we’ve built rockets that fly into space and that even land safely back on the earth. We’ve achieved worldwide declines in poverty, we’ve connected the entire world into a shared web of information flow, and we’ve optimized agriculture to the point that only a small fraction of humans work on farms to feed the entire world’s population.

We’ve also developed cognitively: literacy is near ubiquitous in most countries, we’ve developed sophisticated theories of stars, matter, cells, and brains, we’ve created new fields of mathematics, we’ve dissected human language, we’ve invented countless algorithms and data structures for manipulating information, we’ve created more and more complex fiction, and we’ve become smarter on average with each generation.

What does moral and spiritual progress look like? We’ve also made significant progress here. For example, over the centuries we’ve dramatically expanded the circle of “who has moral worth,” to include women, people of color, sexual and gender minorities, and we’re continuing to increase that circle over time. Unlike the other markers of progress, though, spiritual progress has stagnated and in some ways even reversed in the past few hundred years. An obvious marker of this: depression and suicide are on the rise, we have epidemics of drug addiction, and the fixation on “mental health” seems to be higher than ever.¹

Here are some ways that we could make more spiritual progress:

• Broadening our level of compassion for everyone. This includes people we believe to be “worse off” than us, and also people who we believe are “better off” than us. It includes people we think are “good,” and people we think are “bad.” True spiritual progress looks like an ability to feel compassion for every person and every being, even while we might hold negative judgements about their character or actions.

• Increasing our “lucidity.” Being less consumed by prejudice, less consumed by self-limiting beliefs, less consumed by stories that create suffering rather than alleviating it. Being more aware, in each moment, of what’s actually in front of us, and what we’re imposing onto our experience via our conceptual interpretations.

• Resolving more and more disputes with reason rather than violence. The hallmark of a civilized society is that disputes are settled by willful cooperation between different parties, based on mutual trust, rather than the threat of violence. In the past, if you and someone else disagreed about something you would have a duel to the death; today, you usually resolve your disagreement by talking about it.

• Deeper and deeper understanding of the cosmos. “Understanding” here takes many forms: it includes conceptual understanding (for example, probing into the laws of physics, the origin of life, the nature of cognition and consciousness), but also experiential understanding (a “mastery” of the mind as in meditation, “awakening” in the Buddhist sense), and even aesthetic understanding (a deeper appreciation for beauty in a variety of forms), among others.

These are the basic tenets that cosmic religion could be oriented around. It could be more of a meta-religion, establishing a core set of values but open to being implemented in a number of different concrete rites and rituals by different groups as they see fit.

Cosmic purpose

There was a particular passage in Star Maker that stood out to me. The narrator talks about how at one stage in the history of the universe, many stars began to die out, and this compelled the inhabitants of those star systems to seek out new stars. And so what they would do is launch their entire planet out of the orbit of their home star and begin a long journey to another star in the galaxy. And of course, such a journey, even with advanced space-faring technology, would take many thousands of generations (during which the planet is supported by a temporary “artificial sun”). The point of the story is this: there is a deep sense of shared responsibility between each generation on the planet with all of its past and future generations. To put it to a finer point, imagine that you’re on an intergenerational mission in space, with a well-defined starting point and destination (say, a far away planet that can harbor new life). Your role in that mission is extremely well-defined, and for the modern optionality-obsessed young person, this can be exhilarating. You have a clear duty to continue the mission, and the entire fate of both your ancestors and descendants depends on it.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a situation that all of us want to or should be in. In an ideal world society is resilient and sophisticated enough that the entire fate of all future beings doesn’t rest in a single person’s hand. But at the same time, there’s an important perspective to take away from this story. It’s that in some deep sense, you really are playing a causal role in a vast cosmic history made of billions and billions of small decisions, which ultimately do add up to some sort of bigger picture, which do ripple out into the experiences of billions and perhaps trillions of beings in the deep future. This is something that I think is already true whether we see it or not, but something like a “cosmic religion” can help us see it more clearly, more of the time.

Reading Star Maker has left me with more questions than answers. How will humanity’s religiosity express itself over the next few decades and centuries? Are there truly universal values that we can all agree to cultivate in ourselves and our societies? Will we ever converge on a shared story for our role in the cosmos, and what will the point of that story be? For the sake of our posterity, these are questions worth asking.

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Thanks to Suzanne for discussion and feedback.

1. The fact that so many people talk about this problem in terms of “mental health” is part of the problem. We think of it as a mechanical system in need of optimization—which is certainly a useful way of looking at many things—but this at the cost of completely ignoring higher-level explanations, like “we don’t have enough community, connection, and shared meaning.” Rather than thinking about how to structure society as a whole to solve the rates of depression and suicide, we think more about how to medicate individual people with therapy and drugs.